Associate Professor, Management of Organizations, Harold Furst Chair in Management Philosophy and Values
Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley
Bluvstein, S., Zhao, X., Barasch, A., & Schroeder, J. (2024). Imperfectly human: The humanizing potential of (corrected) errors in text-based communication. Automation in Marketing and Consumption, 9(3). [Article Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that online communicators (e.g., customer service agents) who make and then correct typos are seen as more likely to be human (vs. AI) than communicators who don't make any typos or make but don't correct their typos (7 experiments).
Schroeder, J. (2024). The ordinary and extraordinary struggle of social life: Perceiving, understanding, and connecting with other minds. In Carlston, D., Johnson, K., & Hugenberg, K. (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition. [The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition Link]
Short Summary: This chapter highlights challenges and opportunities for mind perception (how people attribute mental capacity to others) and mind reading (how people assess others’ mental states) through the lens of six different types of “minds.” Three minds illustrate forms of mind perception—invisible minds, those we cannot directly experience, dehumanized minds, those that seem weaker than our own, and anthropomorphized minds, those that we perceive but may not actually exist. The other three illustrate mind reading—misread and misunderstood minds, those that are apparent but not accurately inferred, and unlocked minds, those that can be accurately read using effective communication.
Epley, N., Kardas, M., Zhao, X., Atir, S., & Schroeder, J. (2022). Undersociality: Miscalibrated social cognition can inhibit social connection. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26, 406-418. [Article link]
Short Summary: This paper proposes that people are less social than is optimal for their own and others’ well-being (i.e., “undersocial”). It reviews the empirical literature demonstrating that people are undersocial and suggests 3 reasons for why people are undersocial.
Lieberman, A., Schroeder, J., & Amir, O. (2022). A voice inside my head: The psychological and behavioral consequences of auditory technologies. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 170, 104133. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that listening to a message using headphones, compared to using speakers, increases a listener's felt closeness to the communicator(s) of the message because headphones localize sound inside a listener’s head (5 experiments).
Abi-Esber, N., Abel, J. E., Schroeder, J., & Gino, F. (2022). “Just letting you know...” Underestimating others’ desire for constructive feedback. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123, 1362–1385. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that people tend to underestimate how much others want to receive constructive feedback (5 studies). This helps to provide one possible reason why people sometimes avoid giving feedback to others even when the feedback would help fix a problem immediately.
Martin, S. R., Harrison, S. H., Hoopes, C., Schroeder, J., & Belmi, P. R. (2022). Talking shop: An exploration of how talking about work affects our initial interactions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 168. [Science Direct Link]
Short Summary: This paper explores the linguistic cues that distinguish conversations about work topics from conversations about non-work topics and how those differences affect conversation partners (1 field experiment and 1 lab experiment).
Kardas, M., Schroeder, J., & O'Brien, E. (2022). Keep talking: (Mis)understanding the hedonic trajectory of conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123, 717–740. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that people misunderstand the hedonic trajectory of conversation. They expect their enjoyment to decline as a conversation continues but instead experience stable or increasing enjoyment in reality (5 experiments).
Schroeder, J., Lyons, D., & Epley, N. (2021). Hello, stranger? Pleasant conversations are preceded by concerns about starting one. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(5), 1141–1153. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper suggests a reason for why people may avoid even potentially pleasant conversations with strangers: they expect starting the conversation to be relatively unpleasant (2 field experiments).
Schroeder, J. (2021). Ending conversation is a fraught endeavor. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(7), 552-553. [Cell Press Link]
Short Summary: This is a commentary discussing the provocative conclusion from Mastroianni et al. (2021) that “conversations rarely end when people want them to end.”
Rosenblum, M., Schroeder, J., & Gino, F. (2020). Tell is like it is: When politically incorrect language promotes authenticity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119, 75-103. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper tests how political language influences impressions of a communicator. Using more politically incorrect (vs. correct) language made a communicator appear more authentic but less warm, and these impressions were moderated by both the political ideology of the perceiver and of the target group to whom the language was applied. (9 experiments).
Outstanding Research Award, Society for Personality and Social Psychology
Dellaert, B., Shu, S., Arentze, T., Baker, T., Diehl, K., Donkers, B., Haeubl, G., Johnson, H., Karmarkar, U., Oppewal, H., Schmitt, B., Schroeder, J., Spiller, S., & Steffel, M. (2020). Consumer decisions with artificially intelligent voice assistants. Marketing Letters, 31(4), 335-347. [Springer Link]
Short Summary: Consumers are widely adopting Artificially Intelligent Voice Assistants. This paper (1) provides an overview of how consumer decision-making may change in the presence of AI voice assistants and (2) discusses how marketing managers and policymakers could effectively respond to these effects of AI voice assistants on consumer decisions.
Based on an Invitational Choice Symposium on Automated Decision Dialogues (2019)
Schroeder, J., Kardas, M., & Epley, N. (2017). The humanizing voice: Speech reveals, and text conceals, a more thoughtful mind in the midst of disagreement. Psychological Science, 28, 1745-1762. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: Disagreement on important political issues can incite dehumanization. This paper shows that hearing opposing opinions (vs. reading them) can reduce dehumanizing judgments of the opposition (4 experiments).
Schroeder, J., & Epley, N. (2016). Mistaking minds and machines: How speech affects dehumanization and anthropomorphism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145, 1427-1437. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper shows that hearing a human speech (compared with reading the same words in text or watching a human communicator with subtitles) makes evaluators more likely to believe a script was created by a human (vs. computer) regardless of whether it actually was created by a human (4 experiments).
Schroeder, J., & Epley, N. (2015). The sound of intellect: Speech reveals a thoughtful mind, increasing a job candidate’s appeal. Psychological Science, 26, 877-891. [SAGE Journals Link]
Short Summary: This paper finds that people evaluate job candidates’ mental capacities more highly when they hear their “elevator pitches” than when they read them, and are more interested in hiring them (4 experiments).
Featured as Editor’s Choice in Science, 348, p. 877.
Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 1980-1999. [APA PsycNet Link]
Short Summary: This paper finds that people prefer to sit in solitude in public settings (on buses, trains, cabs, and in waiting rooms) than to talk to a stranger, but when randomly assigned to talk to a stranger in these same settings, report greater happiness and no less productivity compared with sitting in silence or doing what they want (10 experiments).