Managing Change in Our Ever-Changing Lives: A New Series of Programs for UVA Faculty Workshop Why do we resist change? Why do we so often fight changes that we know are in our best interest? More importantly, how can we manage change anxiety and effectively facilitate change in ourselves and in others? This set of eight experiential programs, custom made for UVA faculty, will focus on understanding and leading change individually, personally, professionally and organizationally.
Photos: Daily Academic Life at UVA in the COVID-19 Era News University photographers take a look at in-person learning on Grounds, including Batten students and professors in the classroom, during a fall semester shaped by the ongoing pandemic.
The Goldilocks Contract: The Synergistic Benefits of Combining Structure and Autonomy for Persistence, Creativity, and Cooperation Research Contracts are commonly used to regulate a wide range of interactions and relationships. Yet relying on contracts as a mechanism of control often comes at a cost to motivation.
Safety in Numbers: Why the Mere Physical Presence of Others Affects Risk‐taking Behaviors Research As social mammals, being in a group signals a state of relative security. Risk‐taking behavior in other social mammals formed the basis for our prediction that the mere physical presence of others, absent any social interaction, would create a psychological state of security that, in turn, would promote greater risk‐taking behavior.
Economic Insecurity Increases Physical Pain Research The past decade has seen a rise in both economic insecurity and frequency of physical pain. The current research reveals a causal connection between these two growing and consequential social trends.
What's in a name? The toll e-signatures take on individual honesty Research People cherish and embrace the symbolic value that their unique handwritten signature holds. Technological advances, however, have led organizations to reject traditional handwritten signatures in favor of the efficiency and convenience of e-signatures.
Professor Chou Studies the Psychological Power of the Signature News “We asked, ‘How do people perceive electronic signatures, how do people feel when they sign electronic signatures, and how would that impact their subsequent behaviors?’”
Not so lonely at the top: The relationship between power and loneliness Research Eight studies found a robust negative relationship between the experience of power and the experience of loneliness. Dispositional power and loneliness were negatively correlated (Study 1). Experimental inductions established causality: we manipulated high versus low power through autobiographical essays, assignment to positions, or control over resources, and found that each manipulation showed that high versus low power decreased loneliness (Studies 2a–2c).
Paperless and soulless. E-signatures diminish the signer’s presence and decrease acceptance Research E-signatures are one of the fastest growing global practices because of their convenience. Much less is known, however, about whether people perceive e-signatures to be symbolically equivalent to traditional hand signatures.
Mental models at work: Cognitive causes and consequences of conflict in organizations Research This research investigated the reciprocal relationship between mental models of conflict and various forms of dysfunctional social relations in organizations, including experiences of task and relationship conflicts, interpersonal hostility, workplace ostracism, and abusive supervision.
How Decisions Happen: Focal Points and Blind Spots in Interdependent Decision Making Research Decision makers often simplify decision problems by ignoring readily available information. The current multimethod research investigated which types of information about interdependence situations are psychologically prominent to decision makers and which tend to go unnoticed.