The double-edged impact of future expectations in groups: Minority influence depends on minorities’ and majorities’ expectations to interact again

The Cocksure Conundrum: How Evolution Created a Gendered Currency of Corporate Overconfidence

Biological differences between men and women mandate that women’s obligatory investment in reproduction is significantly greater than that of men. As a result, women have evolved to be the “choosier” of the two sexes and men have evolved to compete for female choice. To the degree that overconfidence is an effective tool for attracting mates and driving away competitors, greater competition among men suggests that they should express more overconfidence than women. Thus, sexual selection may be the primary reason why overconfidence is typically more pronounced in men than it is in women. Sexual selection may also be a distal, causal factor in what we describe as a cult of overconfidence pervading modern organizations and institutions. Whereas overconfidence was once regulated and constrained by features of ancestral life, levels of social mobility and accountability in contemporary society and modern organizations make it increasingly difficult to keep this gendered bias in check.

The effect of waiting on aggressive tendencies toward emergency department staff: Providing information can help but may also backfire

Introduction

Waiting is inevitable for customers of service organizations, yet having to wait can trigger aggression by care receivers toward hospital staff. We explore the effect of waiting times on care receivers’ sense of procedural justice and aggressive tendencies, and show the attenuating effects of providing explanatory information.

Methods

Data were collected using survey responses in two studies, both conducted in the waiting area of a large hospital emergency department. Study 1 (n = 328) was a quasi-experiment involving an intervention in which care receivers were provided with information about wait times. Study 1 included three phases: (1) pre-test (week 1, n = 98), in which no information was provided; (2) information condition (weeks 2 & 3, n = 155), in which information was provided through large signs and pamphlets; and (3) post-test (week 4, n = 75), in which no information was provided. Study 2 (n = 99) was conducted a year later and involved the same information provision as the intervention stage of Study 1.

Results

The longer the wait duration, the lower care receivers’ procedural justice perceptions and the greater their aggressive tendencies. Information provision moderated the association, such that receiving information reduced aggressive tendencies during shorter waits but increased aggressive tendencies during longer waits. We show these effects in two separate data collections, conducted one year apart.

Conclusion

Competing theories predict that explanatory information should variously reduce and increase aggressive tendencies among people waiting in a queue. Our findings resolve this contradiction by identifying boundaries for the effectiveness of providing information in reducing aggression. We show that providing information is likely to reduce aggression until such point as the wait duration becomes longer than expected based on the information provided.