Scholars@Duke
Richard P. Larrick

Richard P. Larrick

Hanes Corporation Foundation Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Fuqua School of Business
rick.larrick@duke.edu
Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708-0120
A315 Fuqua Sch of Bus, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

The inclusion of anchors when seeking advice: Causes and consequences

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · November 1, 2024 Scholars have devoted considerable research attention to examining how people use advice from others. However, there is much less research exploring the preceding step of how people solicit advice from others. Sometimes advice seekers include their own thi ... Full text Cite

The Social Psychology of the Wisdom of Crowds (with a New Section on Recent Advances)

Chapter · January 1, 2024 This chapter reviews the “wisdom of crowds” through the lens of social psychology. Early research on social influence cast a pessimistic light on whether collectives can be wise. The famous Asch (1955) studies left the impression that collective judgment i ... Full text Cite

Encouraging self-blinding in hiring

Journal Article Behavioral Science and Policy · January 1, 2023 One strategy for minimizing bias in hiring is blinding—purposefully limiting the information used when screening applicants to that which is directly relevant to the job and does not elicit bias based on race, gender, age, or other irrelevant characteristi ... Full text Cite

When and why people perform mindless math

Journal Article Judgment and Decision Making · November 1, 2022 In this paper, we show that the presence of numbers in a problem tempts people to perform mathematical operations even when the correct answer requires no math, which we term “mindless math”. In three pre-registered studies across two survey platforms (tot ... Cite

The power of rank information.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · June 2022 People, organizations, and products are continuously ranked. The explosion of data has made it easy to rank everything, and, increasingly, outlets for information try to reduce information loads by providing rankings. In the present research, we find that ... Full text Cite

"They're Everywhere!": Symbolically Threatening Groups Seem More Pervasive Than Nonthreatening Groups.

Journal Article Psychological science · June 2022 The meaning of places is socially constructed, often informed by the groups that seem pervasive there. For instance, the University of Pennsylvania is sometimes pejoratively called "Jew-niversity of Pennsylvania," and the city of Decatur, Georgia, is dispa ... Full text Cite

Blinding curiosity: Exploring preferences for “blinding” one's own judgment

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · May 1, 2022 We perform the first tests of individual-level preferences for “blinding” in decision making: purposefully restricting the information one sees in order to form a more objective evaluation. For example, when grading her students’ papers, a professor might ... Full text Cite

Why Putting On Blinders Can Help Us See More Clearly

Journal Article MIT Sloan Management Review · June 1, 2021 Cite

editors’ note

Journal Article Behavioral Science and Policy · January 1, 2021 Full text Cite

The morality of organization versus organized members: Organizations are attributed more control and responsibility for negative outcomes than are equivalent members.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · October 2020 Seven experiments demonstrate that framing an organizational entity (the target) as an organization ("an organization comprised of its constituent members") versus its members ("constituent members comprising an organization") increases attribution of resp ... Full text Cite

Comparing fast thinking and slow thinking: The relative benefits of interventions, individual differences, and inferential rules

Journal Article Judgment and Decision Making · September 1, 2020 Research on judgment and decision making has suggested that the System 2 process of slow thinking can help people to improve their decision making by reducing well-established statistical decision biases (including base rate neglect, probability matching, ... Cite

The collective aggregation effect: Aggregating potential collective action increases prosocial behavior.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · March 2019 The authors investigated the effectiveness of aggregating over potential noncontingent collective action ("If X people all do Y action, then Z outcomes will be achieved") to increase prosocial behavior. They carried out 6 experiments encouraging 4 differen ... Full text Cite

Consumers underestimate the emissions associated with food but are aided by labels

Journal Article Nature Climate Change · January 1, 2019 Food production is a major cause of energy use and GHG emissions, and therefore diet change is an important behavioural strategy for reducing associated environmental impacts. However, a severe obstacle to diet change may be consumers’ underestimation of t ... Full text Cite

The contingent wisdom of dyads: When discussion enhances vs. undermines the accuracy of collaborative judgments

Journal Article Management Science · September 1, 2018 We evaluate the effect of discussion on the accuracy of collaborative judgments. In contrast to prior research, we show that discussion can either aid or impede accuracy relative to the averaging of collaborators' independent judgments, as a systematic fun ... Full text Cite

Translated attributes as choice architecture: Aligning objectives and choices through decision signposts

Journal Article Management Science · May 1, 2018 Every attribute can be expressed in multiple ways. For example, car fuel economy can be expressed as fuel efficiency ("miles per gallon"), fuel cost in dollars, or tons of greenhouse gases emitted. Each expression, or "translation," highlights a different ... Full text Cite

Advice Giving: A Subtle Pathway to Power.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · May 2018 We propose that interpersonal behaviors can activate feelings of power, and we examine this idea in the context of advice giving. Specifically, we show (a) that advice giving is an interpersonal behavior that enhances individuals' sense of power and (b) th ... Full text Cite

A Behavioral Remedy for the Censorship Bias

Journal Article Production and Operations Management · April 1, 2018 Existing evidence suggests that managers exhibit a censorship bias: demand beliefs tend to be biased low when lost sales from stockouts are unobservable (censored demand) compared to when they are observable (uncensored demand). We develop a non-constraini ... Full text Cite

There's no team in I: How observers perceive individual creativity in a team setting.

Journal Article The Journal of applied psychology · April 2018 Creativity is highly valued in organizations as an important source of innovation. As most creative projects require the efforts of groups of individuals working together, it is important to understand how creativity is perceived for team products, includi ... Full text Cite

Betting your favorite to win: Costly reluctance to hedge desired outcomes

Journal Article Management Science · March 1, 2018 We examined whether people reduce the impact of negative outcomes through emotional hedging-betting against the occurrence of desired outcomes. We found substantial reluctance to bet against the success of preferred U.S. Presidential candidates and Major L ... Full text Cite

Advice as a form of social influence: Informational motives and the consequences for accuracy

Journal Article Social and Personality Psychology Compass · August 1, 2017 In this article, we ask how well people fulfill informational motives by using the judgments of others. We build on advice-taking research from the judgment and decision making literature, which has developed a distinct paradigm to test how accurately peop ... Full text Cite

Linear thinking in a nonlinear world: The obvious choice is often wrong

Journal Article Harvard Business Review · July 1, 2017 Cite

Disloyalty aversion: Greater reluctance to bet against close others than the self

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · May 1, 2017 We examine the mechanisms by which loyalty can induce risk seeking. In seven studies, participants exhibited disloyalty aversion—they were more reluctant to bet on the failure of a close other than on their own failure. In contrast, participants were just ... Full text Cite

LINEAR THINKING IN A NONLINEAR WORLD

Journal Article HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW · May 1, 2017 Link to item Cite

Tipping the scale: The role of discriminability in conjoint analysis

Journal Article Journal of Marketing Research · April 1, 2017 Conjoint analysis is a widely used method for determining how much certain attributes matter to consumers by observing a series of their choices. However, how those attributes are expressed has important consequences for their choices and thus for conclusi ... Full text Cite

Acting for the Greater Good: Identification with Group Determines Choices in Sequential Contribution Dilemmas

Journal Article Journal of Behavioral Decision Making · December 1, 2016 In mixed-motive interactions, defection is the rational and common response to the defection of others. In some cases, however, group members not only cooperate in the face of defection but also compensate for the shortfalls caused by others' defection. In ... Full text Cite

Expertise in Decision Making

Chapter · February 15, 2016 This two-volume reference is a comprehensive, up-to-date examination of the most important theory, concepts, methodological approaches, and applications in the burgeoning field of judgment and decision making (JDM). ... Cite

The Social Context of Decisions

Journal Article Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior · January 1, 2016 The past 40 years of psychological research on decision making has identified a number of important cognitive biases. However, the psychological study of decision making tends to focus on individuals making decisions in isolation. This article explores the ... Full text Cite

Pushing away from representative advice: Advice taking, anchoring, and adjustment

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · January 1, 2015 Five studies compare the effects of forming an independent judgment prior to receiving advice with the effects of receiving advice before forming one's own opinion. We call these the independent-then-revise sequence and the dependent sequence, respectively ... Full text Cite

Designing better energy metrics for consumers

Journal Article Behavioral Science & Policy · 2015 Full text Cite

The wisdom of select crowds.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · August 2014 Social psychologists have long recognized the power of statisticized groups. When individual judgments about some fact (e.g., the unemployment rate for next quarter) are averaged together, the average opinion is typically more accurate than most of the ind ... Full text Cite

Metric and scale design as choice architecture tools

Journal Article Journal of Public Policy and Marketing · January 1, 2014 Interest is increasing in using behavioral decision insights to design better product labels. A specific policy target is the fuel economy label, which policy makers can use to encourage reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from transport-related fossil-f ... Full text Cite

When power makes others speechless: The negative impact of leader power on team performance

Scholarly Edition · October 1, 2013 We examine the impact of the subjective experience of power on leadership dynamics and team performance and find that the psychological effect of power on formal leaders spills over to affect team performance. We argue that a formal leader's experience of ... Full text Cite

Political ideology affects energy-efficiency attitudes and choices.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · June 2013 This research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarization surrounding environmental issues. Study 1 demonstrated that more politically conservativ ... Full text Cite

Biased judgment in censored environments

Journal Article Management Science · March 1, 2013 Some environments constrain the information that managers and decision makers can observe. We examine judgment in censored environments where a constraint, the censorship point, systematically distorts the observed sample. Random instances beyond the censo ... Full text Cite

Consumer misunderstanding of credit card use

Journal Article Journal of Public Policy and Marketing · January 1, 2013 The authors identify several judgmental biases related to paying off credit card debt. Participants with stronger numerical skills made fewer errors, as did those who used the new statement format mandated by Congress in the CARD Act of 2009. Study 1 shows ... Full text Cite

It's only a matter of time: death, legacies, and intergenerational decisions.

Journal Article Psychological science · July 2012 Intergenerational decisions affect other people in the future. The combination of intertemporal and interpersonal distance between decision makers in the present and other people in the future may lead one to expect little intergenerational generosity. In ... Full text Cite

Beyond nudges: Tools of a choice architecture

Journal Article Marketing Letters · June 1, 2012 The way a choice is presented influences what a decision-maker chooses. This paper outlines the tools available to choice architects, that is anyone who present people with choices. We divide these tools into two categories: those used in structuring the c ... Full text Cite

When consumers care about being treated fairly: The interaction of relationship norms and fairness norms

Journal Article Journal of Consumer Psychology · January 1, 2012 Prior research suggests that people assess overall fairness of an event by focusing on the distribution of the final outcome (distributive fairness) and on how they are treated by others during the conflict resolution process (interactional fairness). The ... Full text Cite

Power, competitiveness, and advice taking: Why the powerful don't listen

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · January 1, 2012 Four experiments test the prediction that feelings of power lead individuals to discount advice received from both experts and novices. Experiment 1 documents a negative relationship between subjective feelings of power and use of advice. Experiments 2 and ... Full text Cite

Back to the grind: How attention affects satisfaction during goal pursuit

Journal Article Academy of Management 2011 Annual Meeting - West Meets East: Enlightening. Balancing. Transcending, AOM 2011 · December 1, 2011 A recent trend in job satisfaction research involves focusing not on overall satisfaction or satisfaction at any given moment, but instead on how satisfaction changes over time. One well-known but understudied example of how job satisfaction changes over t ... Cite

Consumption-based metrics: From autos to IT

Journal Article Computer · July 1, 2011 In comparing computing systems, IT professionals need the ability to both gauge energy efficiency and understand the magnitude of improvements in power consumption. © 2011 IEEE. ... Full text Cite

Temper, temperature, and temptation: heat-related retaliation in baseball.

Journal Article Psychological science · April 2011 In this study, we analyzed data from 57,293 Major League Baseball games to test whether high temperatures interact with provocation to increase the likelihood that batters will be hit by a pitch. Controlling for a number of other variables, we conducted an ... Full text Cite

Goal attainment as a resource: The cushion effect in risky choice above a goal

Journal Article Journal of Behavioral Decision Making · January 1, 2010 Goals are a ubiquitous part of life and have been shown to change behavior in many domains. This research studied the influence of goal attainment on risky choice behavior. Previous research has shown that goals tend to increase risk-seeking behavior when ... Full text Cite

Six of one, half dozen of the other: expanding and contracting numerical dimensions produces preference reversals.

Journal Article Psychological science · September 2009 The scales used to describe the attributes of different choice options are usually open to alternative expressions, such as inches versus feet or minutes versus hours. More generally, a ratio scale can be multiplied by an arbitrary factor (e.g., 12) while ... Full text Cite

Goal-induced risktaking in negotiation and decision making

Journal Article Social Cognition · June 1, 2009 Three experiments test whether specific, challenging goals increase risk taking. We propose that goals serve as reference points, creating a region of perceived losses for outcomes below a goal (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Tversky & Kahneman, 1992). Accordin ... Full text Cite

Strategies for revising judgment: how (and how well) people use others' opinions.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · May 2009 A basic issue in social influence is how best to change one's judgment in response to learning the opinions of others. This article examines the strategies that people use to revise their quantitative estimates on the basis of the estimates of another pers ... Full text Cite

Economics. The MPG illusion.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · June 2008 Full text Cite

Debiasing

Journal Article · January 14, 2008 Full text Cite

Claiming a large slice of a small pie: asymmetric disconfirmation in negotiation.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · August 2007 Three studies show that negotiators consistently underestimate the size of the bargaining zone in distributive negotiations (the small-pie bias) and, by implication, overestimate the share of the surplus they claim (the large-slice bias). The authors expla ... Full text Cite

If you can't draw it, you don't understand it

Journal Article Paper360 · January 1, 2007 Cite

Beginnings are important

Journal Article Paper360 · January 1, 2007 Proper beginnings in business plans play a vital role in identifying and quantifying an organization's future improvement or innovation efforts. Business managers should start it with the setting of direction, and once the direction is clear, it is easy to ... Cite

Social comparison and confidence: When thinking you're better than average predicts overconfidence (and when it does not)

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · January 1, 2007 A common social comparison bias-the better-than-average-effect-is frequently described as psychologically equivalent to the individual-level judgment bias known as overconfidence. However, research has found "Hard-easy" effects for each bias that yield a s ... Full text Cite

You can't control what you don't understand

Journal Article Paper360 · January 1, 2006 Rick Larrick, retired mill manager from Georgia-Pacific Corp., offers his views on the importance of understanding business processes in the paper industry for a successful business management. Larrick suggests that mill managers should adopt lean manufact ... Cite

A universal diagnostic process can lead to focused improvement

Journal Article Paper360 · January 1, 2006 A universal diagnostic process can help in creating a focused improvement effort in a business process of an organization. A company should focus on effective measures such as metric, map, gap, ideation, opportunity, selection, team launch, and quantificat ... Cite

Intuitions about combining opinions: Misappreciation of the averaging principle

Journal Article Management Science · January 1, 2006 Averaging estimates is an effective way to improve accuracy when combining expert judgments, integrating group members' judgments, or using advice to modify personal judgments. If the estimates of two judges ever fall on different sides of the truth, which ... Full text Cite

Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: how perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · January 2006 People are inaccurate judges of how their abilities compare to others'. J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999, 2002) argued that unskilled performers in particular lack metacognitive insight about their relative performance and disproportionately account for bett ... Full text Cite

Social network schemas and the learning of incomplete networks.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · February 2005 Social networks that are missing relations among some of their members--termed incomplete networks--have been of critical theoretical and empirical interest in sociological research on weak ties and structural holes but typically have been overlooked in so ... Full text Cite

Debiasing

Chapter · 2004 Cite

Framing the Game: Examining Frame Choice in Bargaining.

Journal Article Organizational behavior and human decision processes · January 2000 This article introduces the study of frame choice in negotiation. Here, the selection of a procedural frame is treated as a dependent variable-a choice that bargainers make in addition to determining their offers. The empirical focus of the article is on w ... Full text Cite

Misperceiving negotiation counterparts: When situationally determined bargaining behaviors are attributed to personality traits

Journal Article Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · July 1, 1999 Several experiments provided evidence that negotiators make systematic errors in personality-trait attributions for the bargaining behaviors of their counterparts. Although basic negotiation behavior is highly determined by bargaining positions, negotiator ... Full text Cite

Goals as reference points.

Journal Article Cognitive psychology · February 1999 We argue that goals serve as reference points and alter outcomes in a manner consistent with the value function of Prospect Theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Tversky & Kahneman, 1992). We present new evidence that goals inherit the properties of the value ... Full text Cite

Conflict management style: Accounting for cross-national differences

Journal Article Journal of International Business Studies · January 1, 1998 A problem in joint ventures between U.S. and Asian firms is that cultural differences impede the smooth resolution of conflicts between managers. In a survey of young managers in the U.S., China, Philippines, and India we find support for two hypotheses ab ... Full text Cite

Thinking of others: How perspective taking changes negotiators' aspirations and fairness perceptions as a function of negotiator relationships

Journal Article Basic and Applied Social Psychology · January 1, 1998 The current research investigates two factors that might moderate the effects of competitive demands and biased fairness perceptions on conflict resolution: the relationship between the negotiators and perspective taking. In an experiment, we found that ne ... Full text Cite

Cognitive repairs: How organizational practices can compensate for individual shortcomings

Journal Article RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, VOL 20, 1998 · January 1, 1998 Link to item Cite

The claiming effect: Why players are more generous in social dilemmas than in ultimatum games

Journal Article Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · January 1, 1997 The term procedural frames is introduced and defined as different representations of structurally equivalent allocation processes. Study 1 compared 2 well-known games, sequential social dilemmas and ultimatum bargaining, that share the same structure: Play ... Full text Cite

Avoiding regret in decisions with feedback: A negotiation example

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · January 1, 1995 Regret theory (Bell, 1983) posits that learning about the outcome of a foregone alternative creates the possibility of experiencing regret. In a choice between a certain outcome and a gamble with a similar expected value, regret theory predicts the followi ... Full text Cite

When one cause casts doubt on another: A normative analysis of discounting in causal attribution

Journal Article Psychological Review · January 1, 1995 The question of whether lay attributors are biased in their discounting of 1 cause given an alternative cause has not been resolved by decades of research, largely due to the lack of a clear standard for the rational amount of discounting. The authors prop ... Cite

ATTENTION K-MORT SHOPPERS

Journal Article NEW REPUBLIC · April 19, 1993 Link to item Cite

Motivational factors in decision theories: The role of self-protection

Journal Article Psychological Bulletin · January 1, 1993 This article reviews the standard economic and cognitive models of decision making under risk and describes the psychological assumptions that underlie these models. It then reviews important motivational factors that are typically underemphasized by the s ... Cite

Who uses the cost-benefit rules of choice? implications for the normative status of microeconomic theory

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · January 1, 1993 We find three factors to be associated with use of cost-benefit rules in everyday decisions. These are effectiveness in achieving desirable life outcomes, intelligence, and training in economics. We argue that these empirical findings support the claim tha ... Full text Cite

Protecting the self from the negative consequences of risky decisions.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · January 1992 Three experiments tested the idea that a motive to protect self-esteem (SE) from the threat of regret can influence decision making. Threat to SE was manipulated by varying whether people expected to know the outcome of their decisions. Study 1 showed that ... Full text Cite

Temper and Temperature on the Diamond: The Heat-Aggression Relationship in Major League Baseball

Journal Article Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · October 1991 Archival data from major league baseball games played during the 1986, 1987, and 1988 seasons (total N = 826 games) were used to assess the association between the temperatures at the games and the number of batters hit by a pitch during them. A p ... Full text Cite

Teaching the Use of Cost-Benefit Reasoning in Everyday Life

Journal Article Psychological Science · January 1, 1990 Our research shows that people can apply the cost-benefit rules of microeconomic theory to their everyday decisions. Two populations were examined: (a) people who had previously received extensive formal training in the rules and (b) naive subjects who wer ... Full text Cite