Eric VanEpps
Eric VanEpps
Publications
Speed is a Signal: When Faster Replies Increase Hiring Likelihood
(2026) Management Science
ABSTRACT: When determining whom to hire, employers care about how quickly they receive replies from the job seekers and service providers they contact. Across transaction data from a large real-world marketplace (N = ∼11.66 million) and experiments (three main studies (total n = 3,603) and five supplemental studies (total n = 5,039)), we show that providers benefit from responding to employers’ messages quickly. First, we document substantial real-world consequences of reply speed in Fiverr marketplace transaction data (Study 1), finding a strong negative relationship between the length of delay in replying to a service request and the likelihood of securing a contract. Even delays of just 5–10 minutes dramatically reduce providers’ likelihood of being hired. In our experimental studies, providers who take less (versus more) time to reply are seen as more likely to be responsive in the future (Studies 2–4), make more positive impressions than slower responders (Study 3), and in turn, are more likely to be hired (Studies 2–4). Fast replies signal a provider’s future responsiveness and increase hiring likelihood independently from other signals of future responsiveness, such as a worker’s quality (Study 2) or the content of the message sent (Study 4). Together, our studies identify a distinct signal that employees can control to increase their hireability: replying to messages quickly. Empirically, every minute counts.
Choice Set Size Neglect in Predicting Others’ Preferences
(2026) Psychological Science
ABSTRACT: An inherent feature of any choice is the set size from which that choice is made (i.e., the number of available options in a choice set). Choice set size impacts the likelihood of landing on a more preferred option: Larger sets are more likely to contain an option matching one's preferences. Nevertheless, in six preregistered experiments with 10,092 U.S. adults, we demonstrated that people consistently underestimated the effect of set size when predicting others' liking for a chosen option. We propose this effect arises because, although people recognize that set size predicts liking of a chosen option, they typically fail to attend to it when considering others' choices. Accordingly, this effect was attenuated when attention was drawn to set size, specifically (a) when participants considered multiple set sizes simultaneously, (b) when the decision process was framed as ranking rather than choosing, or (c) when participants were prompted to recall set size before predicting others' preferences.
Jargon in Consumer Information: The Case of Mutual Fund Fees
(2025) Journal of Public Policy and Marketing
ABSTRACT: Complicated language impedes decision-making in many contexts. The authors examine jargon in a highly technical setting: the $25 trillion mutual fund industry used by millions of consumers. Regulations require mutual funds to disclose information about fees as part of their marketing materials and correspondence with investors, yet consumers may find this information difficult to understand. The authors demonstrate difficulties with current fee terminology (e.g., “12b-1 fees”) and identify plain language that increases comprehension, decreases subjective difficulty of investment decision-making tasks, leads to greater investment intentions, and improves the quality of choices between funds. In Study 1 (N = 1,575), they test plain language terms and find that consumers understand them better than existing jargon. In Study 2 (N = 500), plain language shifts choices between funds, increasing participants’ tendency to choose the less costly mutual fund in several investment scenarios. In Study 3 (N = 493), plain language terms reduce perceived difficulty and improve comprehension in a financial decision-making task, ultimately leading to increased intentions to invest. The results suggest that modified language could improve investment comprehension, choices, and participation, yielding meaningful benefits for potential and existing investors.
How Should I Know? Lack of Confidence Biases Stock Market Expectations Toward Zero
(2025) Journal for Economic Behavior and Organization
ABSTRACT: Consumers’ expectations of stock market movements are important for understanding individual decisions about consequential financial outcomes and forming economic policy. Across three studies, we posit a new relationship underlying reported stock market expectations: that respondents lack confidence about their ability to forecast stock market movements and this lack of confidence biases reported probabilities toward 0 %. In Study 1, using 10 years of nationally representative survey data, we show that stock market expectations are more pessimistic than warranted when compared to actual stock market movements. In Study 2, we measure stock market expectations in several nationally representative survey experiments over 12 monthly waves (n = 4,613 participants providing 21,670 survey responses) where participants are randomly assigned to report the chances that the stock market will be “lower” or “higher” over the next month and year. Reported probabilities are biased toward 0 % in each question frame, yielding a “framing effect” gap of >10 percentage points each wave. In Study 3, we find that confidence moderates this framing effect: when we manipulate confidence regarding one's ability to forecast the stock market, there is a smaller gap between “lower” and “higher” frames for those participants who have greater confidence. To our knowledge, this is the first research showing that a lack of confidence biases reported stock market probabilities toward 0 %. It also uncovers a framing effect that is counter to psychological theory on “valence framing” and helps explain prior research showing that people are pessimistic about the stock market.
Refining and Expanding Applications of Moral Foundations Theory in Consumer Psychology
(2024) Journal of Consumer Psychology
ABSTRACT: We set forth an agenda for Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) research in consumer psychology, focusing in particular on four pathways: (1) factoring in multiple identities, including moral identities, to account for contextual elevation or suppression of moral foundations in predicting which decisions consumers moralize and when; (2) broadening the methodological usage of MFT to include more targeted causal research as well as expanding the utility of correlational research; (3) increasing discriminant validity between MFT and other constructs by studying moral foundations as individually manipulable and focusing on their incremental predictive validity over and above demographics and related constructs; and (4) recognizing that researcher biases regarding morality can leak into the publication process, necessitating clear distinctions between prescriptive versus descriptive research. These pathways facilitate more precise and stronger predictive validity for applying MFT in consumer psychology, yielding greater theoretical and practical utility across researcher perspectives.
Getting Information to Consumers: How to Inform Their Choices Effectively
(2024) Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences
ABSTRACT: Information disclosure policies influence nearly every consumer domain. Disclosure research across various sectors, particularly finance and nutrition, demonstrates how policymakers can enhance consumer decision-making and promote a fair marketplace. In particular, five key considerations make policies more effective: understanding existing consumer preferences, capturing and maintaining consumer attention, providing actionable knowledge, anticipating firm responses, and recognizing potential perverse effects of information provision. An overarching “theory of change” organizes these considerations and other steps to reveal how disclosure policy can promote consumer well-being. Implementing disclosure policies using these psychological and behavioral insights will maximize their effectiveness.
When Consumer Decisions are Moral Decisions: Moral Foundations Theory and its Implications for Consumer Psychology
(2024) Journal of Consumer Psychology
ABSTRACT: Although researchers have considered the role of morality in consumer psychology over the years, such investigations often fail to (a) recognize the different values that consumers might hold, and (b) provide proper context for why different moral considerations emerge. Moral Foundations Theory (MFT; Graham et al., Advances in experimental social psychology, 2013, Academic Press; Haidt & Joseph, Daedalus, 2004, 133, 55) provides just such a conceptual framework for understanding the diversity of moral thought that exists across cultures and demographic groups. MFT describes morality not as a monolithic entity, but as a pluralistic set of intuitive values that were shaped by evolutionary pressures and edited by distinct cultures. We review the central claims of MFT and describe how the theory can offer new insights when applied to consumer psychology, providing examples from existing research on persuasion, emotion, and prosocial behavior.
The Interpersonal Costs of Revealing Others’ Secrets
(2024) Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
ABSTRACT: People often keep relevant information secret from others. For example, an employee might keep a coworker's plan to quit without giving notice secret from their manager, or someone might keep a friend's affair secret from their friend's spouse. In this article, we identify a critical but overlooked factor that determines whether an actor will disclose secret information they know about another person: Impression management concerns about how other people will judge their decision to disclose or keep the secret. We conceptualize secret-keeping as social decisions that involve the focal actor (who could keep or disclose a secret), the partner (the focus of the secret), the audience (interested in learning the secret information), and external observers (who may observe if the focal actor disclosed the secret). Across four pre-registered studies, including real-world judgments of secret-keeping dilemmas (field data from a Reddit community; N = 332), a recall study (N = 200), and controlled experiments (N = 624), we describe how impression management concerns influence secret-keeping decisions. We find that focal actors are often judged harshly for disclosing others' secrets, even when the audience could derive substantial benefits from learning the information and even when observers judge disclosure to be more moral than keeping a secret. Focal actors are heavily influenced by impression management concerns and routinely keep partners' secrets from an audience who could benefit from the information. Taken together, impression management concerns act as significant impediments to the flow of information, advancing our understanding of both information flows within groups and secret-keeping dilemmas.
Dual-Promotion: Bragging Better by Promoting Peers
(2024) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
ABSTRACT: To create favorable impressions and receive credit, individuals need to share information about their past accomplishments. Broadcasting one's past accomplishments or claiming credit to demonstrate competence, however, can harm perceptions of warmth and likability. In fact, prior work has conceptualized self-promotion as a hydraulic challenge: tactics that boost perceptions along one dimension (e.g., competence) harm perceptions along other dimensions (e.g., warmth). In this work, we identify a novel approach to self-promotion: We show that by combining self-promotion with other-promotion (complimenting or giving credit to others), which we term "dual-promotion," individuals can project both warmth and competence to make better impressions on observers than they do by only self-promoting. In seven preregistered studies, including analyses of annual reports from members of Congress and experiments using social network, workplace, and political contexts (total N = 1,448), we show that individuals who engage in dual-promotion create more favorable impressions of warmth and competence than those who only engage in self-promotion. The beneficial effects of dual-promotion are robust to both competitive and noncompetitive contexts and extend to behavioral intentions.
That One Time When…: Reframing Negative Experiences with Storytelling
(2023) Current Opinion in Psychology
ABSTRACT: Many experiences in life are physically or emotionally negative in the moment, but worthwhile after the fact, yielding such instrumental benefits as self-improvement or lessons learned. One relatively unexplored benefit of negative experiences, however, is the ability to derive humor and other storytelling benefits from the experiences later on. We review literatures on emotional (re)appraisal, affective forecasting, storytelling, and humor to discuss how individuals can apply the skill of mining comedy out of tragedy to finding the stories in their own experiences. By leveraging a storytelling mindset, such individuals may find themselves even eagerly anticipating future negative experiences because of the meaningful personal and social benefits those experiences stand to yield them in both memories to come and stories to share.
Choosing More Aggressive Commitment Contracts for Others than for the Self
(2023) Judgment and Decision Making
ABSTRACT: Commitment contracts are a strategy for binding self-control failures, such as skipping a gym visit or breaking a dieting regime, to monetary penalties. Despite evidence that commitment contracts with stronger penalties improve self-control, they are relatively underused. Across 5 experiments, we find that decision makers are less likely to select commitment contracts with more severe penalties (i.e., anti-charity contracts) for themselves than they are for others. This self-other difference in contract choice arises because decision makers believe anti-charity contracts will be more effective for others than for themselves. Our results suggest that people recognize the potential effectiveness of using more aggressive commitment contracts to overcome self-control problems, but view themselves as an exception to that general rule.
Giving Suggestions: Using Quantity Requests to Increase Donations
(2023) Journal of Consumer Research
ABSTRACT: Across seven studies (N = 9,028), we provide evidence that quantity requests, wherein people consider multiple choice options of how much to donate (e.g., $5, $10, or $15), increase contributions compared to open-ended requests. Specifically, quantity requests encourage greater donations (study 1), even when respondents can passively choose not to donate (study 2) and even when the donation is directed toward a less popular cause (study 3). This increase in donations holds for quantity requests that start with both lower (e.g., $1) or higher (e.g., $10) donation amount options (study 4). Quantity requests also outperform other requests with multiple nonquantity donation options (e.g., multiple options of when to donate or to which charity branch to direct a donation; study 5). We offer evidence that quantity requests are effective because they simplify donation decisions by communicating normative donation magnitudes (studies 6 and 7). This clarified norm of donation magnitude boosts donation rates, which in turn leads to greater total donations. Our findings offer new conceptual insights into how quantity requests increase contributions as well as practical implications for charitable organizations to optimize contributions by leveraging the use of quantity requests.
Questions and Deception: How to Ask Better Questions and Elicit the Truth
(2022) Current Opinion in Psychology
ABSTRACT: Questions are important tools for uncovering information, but to avoid deception, question askers must be strategic in what and how they ask-and consider the social implications of their questions. Askers should consider that in addition to soliciting information, questions also signal information about expected answers, askers' own knowledge, and the parties' relationship. We review literature on deception, conversations, and impression management to discuss signals embedded in question phrasing, and how these signals affect the truthfulness of respondents' disclosures. Askers can increase truthful disclosure by remaining neutral about the desirability of possible responses, conveying knowledge of the topic, and signaling trust. We identify how asking better questions requires being more cognizant of the informational and relational signals that questions send.
Time Will Fly During Future Fun (But Drag Until Then)
(2022) Journal of Consumer Psychology
ABSTRACT: Consumers’ lives are filled with scheduled events—both positive and negative. The current research examines how the valence of future scheduled events colors consumers’ temporal judgments in relation to such events: the time until their onset, the time during the events, and the time until their offset. We propose that the lay theory espousing “time flies when you’re having fun” leads consumers to judge that positive (vs. negative) future events of equivalent objective distance and duration are farther away and shorter. Operating in tandem, these elements produce two novel phenomena: (a) The end of positive and negative events can feel similarly far from the present, and (b) The beginning and end of positive events can feel similarly far from the present, whereby, in some circumstances, the event’s duration is effectively eliminated in the mind’s eye. Four studies provide evidence for these predictions, informing future directions regarding prospective time perception.
Choosing the Light Meal: Real-Time Aggregation of Calorie Information Reduces Meal Calories
(2021) Journal of Marketing Research
ABSTRACT: Numeric labeling of calories on restaurant menus has been implemented widely, but scientific studies have generally not found substantial effects on calories ordered. The present research tests the impact of a feedback format that is more targeted at how consumers select and revise their meals: real-time aggregation of calorie content to provide dynamic feedback about meal calories via a traffic light label. Because these labels intuitively signal when a meal shifts from healthy to unhealthy (via the change from green to a yellow or red light), they prompt decision makers to course-correct in real time, before they finalize their choice. Results from five preregistered experiments (N = 11,900) show that providing real-time traffic light feedback about the total caloric content of a meal reduces calories in orders, even compared with similar aggregated feedback in numeric format. Patterns of ordering reveal this effect to be driven by people revising high-calorie orders more frequently, leading them to choose fewer and lower-calorie items. Consumers also like traffic light aggregation, indicating greater satisfaction with their order and greater intentions to return to restaurants that use them. The authors discuss how dynamic feedback using intuitive signals could yield benefits in contexts beyond food choice.
The (Better than Expected) Consequences of Asking Sensitive Questions
(2021) Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
ABSTRACT: Within a conversation, individuals balance competing objectives, such as the motive to gather information and the motive to create a favorable impression. Across five experimental studies (N = 1427), we show that individuals avoid asking sensitive questions because they believe that asking sensitive questions will make their conversational partners uncomfortable and cause them to form negative perceptions. We introduce the Communication Motives and Expectations Model and we demonstrate that the aversion to asking sensitive questions is often misguided. Question askers systematically overestimate the impression management and interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions. In conversations with friends and with strangers and in both face-to-face and computer-mediated conversations, respondents formed similarly favorable impressions of conversational partners who asked sensitive questions (e.g., “How much is your salary?”) as they did of conversational partners who asked non-sensitive questions (e.g., “How do you get to work?”). We assert that individuals make a potentially costly mistake when they avoid asking sensitive questions, as they overestimate the interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions.
Eliciting the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth: The Effect of Question Type on Deception
(2018) Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
ABSTRACT: In strategic information exchanges (such as negotiations and job interviews), different question formulations communicate information about the question asker, and systematically influence the veracity of responses. We demonstrate this function of questions by contrasting Negative Assumption questions that presuppose a problem, Positive Assumption questions that presuppose the absence of a problem, and General questions that do not reference a problem. In Study 1, Negative Assumption questions promoted greater disclosure of undesirable work-related behaviors than Positive Assumption or General questions did. In Study 2, Negative Assumption questions increased disclosure of undesirable information in face-to-face job recruitment meetings, relative to Positive Assumption questions and General questions. Study 3 demonstrated that the relationship we identify between question type and the veracity of responses is driven by inferences of assertiveness and knowledgeability about the question asker. Finally, in Study 4, asking assertive questions with regard to uncommon behaviors led the question asker to be evaluated more negatively.
A Systematic Review of Calorie Labeling and Modified Calorie Labeling Interventions: Impact on Consumer and Restaurant Behavior
(2017) Obesity
ABSTRACT: Objective: Evidence on the effects of restaurant calorie labeling on consumer and restaurant behavior is mixed. This paper examined: (1) consumer responses to calorie information alone or compared to modified calorie information and (2) changes in restaurant offerings following or in advance of menu labeling implementation. Methods: Searches were conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, Policy File, and PAIS International to identify restaurant calorie labeling studies through October 1, 2016, that measured calories ordered, consumed, or available for purchase on restaurant menus. The reference lists of calorie labeling articles were also searched. Results: Fifty-three studies were included: 18 in real-world restaurants, 9 in cafeterias, and 21 in laboratory or simulation settings. Five examined restaurant offerings. Conclusions: Because of a lack of well-powered studies with strong designs, the degree to which menu labeling encourages lower-calorie purchases and whether that translates to a healthier population are unclear. Although there is limited evidence that menu labeling affects calories purchased at fast-food restaurants, some evidence demonstrates that it lowers calories purchased at certain types of restaurants and in cafeteria settings. The limited data on modified calorie labels find that such labels can encourage lower-calorie purchases but may not differ in effects relative to calorie labels alone.
Advance Ordering for Healthier Eating? Field Experiments on the Relationship between the Meal Order-Consumption Time Delay and Meal Content
(2016) Journal of Marketing Research
ABSTRACT: Encouraging consumers to select meals in advance rather than at mealtime has been proposed as a strategy to promote healthier eating decisions, taking advantage of the improved self-control that is thought to accompany decisions about the future. In two field studies at an employee cafeteria and a third in a university setting, we examine how time delays between placing a lunch order and picking it up affect the healthfulness of that lunch. The first study, a secondary data analysis, finds that longer delays between placing an order and picking up the meal are associated with reductions in calorie content. The second study tests the causality of this relationship by exogenously restricting some lunch orders to be substantially delayed, leading to a marginally significant (approximately 5%) reduction in calories among delayed orders. The third study compares orders for truly immediate consumption versus orders placed in advance and demonstrates a significant (100 calorie, or approximately 10%) reduction in lunch calories. We discuss evidence regarding possible theoretical mechanisms underlying this effect, as well as practical implications of our findings.
Calorie Label Formats: Using Numeric and Traffic Light Calorie Labels to Reduce Lunch Calories
(2016) Journal of Public Policy and Marketing
ABSTRACT: In a field experiment involving online workplace lunch orders, this study examines the impact of numeric and traffic light calorie labels on calorie intake. Employees of a large corporation ordered lunches through a website of the authors’ design, on which they were presented menus with numeric calorie labels, traffic light labels, or both together, and the authors compared the calorie content of the ordered lunches with that of diners randomized to receive no calorie information. Each label type reduced lunch calories by approximately 10%. Nutrition knowledge was not improved by any menu format. Traffic light labels achieved meaningful reductions in calories ordered even in the absence of numeric information, and the authors found no apparent benefit or detriment of combining label types. These findings suggest that consumers may benefit most from help in identifying relatively healthier choices but rely little on information about the exact caloric content of items.
A Nudge toward Participation: Behavioral Economics Interventions for Improving Clinical Trial Enrollment
(2016) Science Translational Medicine
ABSTRACT: Participant recruitment represents one of the largest costs of conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) (1), and barriers to recruitment can generate problems of selective enrollment and under-enrollment (2). These problems have long plagued efforts to evaluate medical interventions by limiting generalizability and reducing statistical power. In recent decades, behavioral economics has provided considerable insights into how people make decisions, blending findings from economics and psychology to generate better descriptive and normative models of behavior. Systematic efforts to apply this approach to problems such as patient enrollment in RCTs have not been attempted. In this article, we provide a taxonomy of proposed interventions (Table 1) informed by behavioral economic theory to address low enrollment in clinical trials by addressing the patient barriers of imperfect information, desire for autonomy in making enrollment decisions, and resource constraints. This taxonomy is not exhaustive, but it provides a range of behaviorally-informed interventions, or”nudges,” that might feasibly be tested and, if successful, implemented.
The Influence of Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Warnings: A Randomized Trial of Adolescents’ Choices and Beliefs
(2016) American Journal of Preventive Medicine
ABSTRACT: Introduction: California, New York, and the cities of San Francisco and Baltimore have introduced bills requiring health-related warning labels for sugar-sweetened beverages. This study measures the extent to which these warning labels influence adolescents' beliefs and hypothetical choices. Design: Participants completed an online survey in which they chose a beverage in a hypothetical vending machine task, rated perceptions of different beverages, and indicated interest in coupons for beverages. Data were collected and analyzed in 2015. Setting/participants: A total of 2,202 demographically diverse adolescents aged 12-18 years completed the online survey. Intervention: Participants were randomly assigned to one of six conditions: (1) no warning label; (2) calorie label; (3-6) one of four text versions of a warning label (e.g. , safety warning: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay). Main outcome measures: Hypothetical choices, perceptions of beverages, interest in coupons, and endorsement of warning label policies were assessed. Results: Controlling for frequency of beverage purchases, significantly fewer adolescents chose a sugar-sweetened beverage in three of the four warning label conditions (65%, 63%, and 61%) than in the no label (77%) condition. Adolescents in the four warning label conditions chose fewer sugar-sweetened beverage coupons and believed that sugar-sweetened beverages were less likely to help them lead a healthy life and had more added sugar compared with the no label condition. Conclusions: Health-related warning labels on sugar-sweetened beverages improved adolescents' recognition of the sugar content of such beverages and reduced hypothetical choices to buy sugar-sweetened beverages.
Restaurant Menu Labeling Policy: Review of Evidence and Controversies
(2016) Current Obesity Reports
ABSTRACT: In response to high rates of obesity in the USA, several American cities, counties, and states have passed laws requiring restaurant chains to post labels identifying the energy content of items on menus, and nationwide implementation of menu labeling is expected in late 2016. In this review, we identify and summarize the results of 16 studies that have assessed the impact of real-world numeric calorie posting. We also discuss several controversies surrounding the US Food and Drug Administration's implementation of federally mandated menu labeling. Overall, the evidence regarding menu labeling is mixed, showing that labels may reduce the energy content of food purchased in some contexts, but have little effect in other contexts. However, more data on a range of ong-term consumption habits and restaurant responses is needed to fully understand the impact menu labeling laws will have on the US population's diet.
Identifying a Task that Reliably Induces Boredom
(2014) Perceptual and Motor Skills
ABSTRACT: None of the tasks used to induce boredom have undergone rigorous psychometric validation, which creates potential problems for operational equivalence, comparisons across studies, statistical power, and confounding results. This methodological concern was addressed by testing and comparing the effectiveness of six 5-min. computerized boredom inductions (peg turning, audio, video, signature matching, one-back, and an air traffic control task). The tasks were evaluated using standard criteria for emotion inductions: intensity and discreteness. Intensity, the amount of boredom elicited, was measured using a subset of the Multidimensional State Boredom Scale. Discreteness, the extent to which the task elicited boredom and did not elicit other emotions, was measured using a modification of the Differential Emotion Scale. In both a laboratory setting (Study 1; N = 241) and an online setting with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (Study 2; N = 416), participants were randomly assigned to one of seven tasks (six boredom tasks or a comparison task, a clip from Planet Earth) before rating their boredom using the MSBS and other emotions using the modified DES. In both studies, each task had significantly higher intensity and discreteness than the comparison task, with moderate to large effect sizes. The peg-turning task outperformed the other tasks in both intensity and discreteness, making it the recommended induction. Identification of reliable and valid boredom inductions and systematic comparison of their relative results should help advance state boredom research.
Mind-Sets Matter: A Meta-Analytic Review of Implicit Theories and Self-Regulation
(2013) Psychological Bulletin
ABSTRACT: This review builds on self-control theory (Carver & Scheier, 1998) to develop a theoretical framework for investigating associations of implicit theories with self-regulation. This framework conceptualizes self-regulation in terms of 3 crucial processes: goal setting, goal operating, and goal monitoring. In this meta-analysis, we included articles that reported a quantifiable assessment of implicit theories and at least 1 self-regulatory process or outcome. With a random effects approach used, meta-analytic results (total unique N = 28,217; k = 113) across diverse achievement domains (68% academic) and populations (age range = 5-42; 10 different nationalities; 58% from United States; 44% female) demonstrated that implicit theories predict distinct self-regulatory processes, which, in turn, predict goal achievement. Incremental theories, which, in contrast to entity theories, are characterized by the belief that human attributes are malleable rather than fixed, significantly predicted goal setting (performance goals, r = -.151; learning goals, r = .187), goal operating (helpless-oriented strategies, r = -.238; mastery-oriented strategies, r = .227), and goal monitoring (negative emotions, r = -.233; expectations, r = .157). The effects for goal setting and goal operating were stronger in the presence (vs. absence) of ego threats such as failure feedback. Discussion emphasizes how the present theoretical analysis merges an implicit theory perspective with self-control theory to advance scholarship and unlock major new directions for basic and applied research.
The Moderating Role of Social Ties on Entrepreneurs’ Depressed Affect and Withdrawal Intentions in Response to Economic Stress
(2012) Journal of Organizational Behavior
ABSTRACT: We explored whether contact with business-related social ties would buffer entrepreneurs against the potentially deleterious effects of economic stress. Our proposed stress-buffering model builds on the premise that social ties with similar others can serve as both a source of valuable information and a source of empathic support. Findings from a sample of 262 entrepreneurs revealed that the relation between economic stress and intentions to withdraw from entrepreneurial opportunities was stronger among individuals reporting less contact with social ties and weaker among those who reported more contact with social ties. We further examined the indirect effects of economic stress and contact with business-related social ties on entrepre-neurs' future intentions through depressed affect. Results showed that among those reporting less contact with social ties, the indirect effect is positive, meaning greater economic stress leads to higher depressed affect, which in turn results in greater intentions to withdraw from entrepreneurship. Among those with more contact with social ties, there is no evidence of this process at work. We interpret this to mean that social ties serve to buffer the impact of economic stress on depressed affect, which in turn reduces an entrepreneur's intention to withdraw from entrepreneurship. Those who seem most susceptible to the impact of economic stress are those with relatively limited contact with business-related social ties. We discuss implications and directions for future research.