Erika Kirgios

• Linda W. Chang, Erika Kirgios, Sendhil Mullainathan, Katherine L. Milkman (2024), Does Counting Change What Counts? Quantification Fixation Biases Decision Making, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2400215121 Abstract

  People often rely on numeric metrics to make decisions and form judgments. Numbers can be difficult to process, leading to their underutilization, but they are also uniquely suited to making comparisons. Do people decide differently when some dimensions of a choice are quantified and others are not? We explore this question across 21 preregistered experiments (8 in the main text, N = 9,303; 13 in supplement, N = 13,936) involving managerial, policy, and consumer decisions. Participants face choices that involve tradeoffs (e.g., choosing between employees, one of whom has a higher likelihood of advancement but lower likelihood of retention), and we randomize which dimension of each tradeoff is presented numerically and which is presented qualitatively (using verbal estimates, discrete visualizations, or continuous visualizations). We show that people systematically shift their preferences toward options that dominate on tradeoff dimensions conveyed numerically—a pattern we dub “quantification fixation.” Further, we show that quantification fixation has financial consequences—it emerges in incentive-compatible hiring tasks and in charitable donation decisions. We identify one key mechanism that underlies quantification fixation and moderates its strength: When making comparative judgments, which are essential to tradeoff decisions, numeric information is more fluent than non-numeric information. Our findings suggest that when we count, we change what counts.

• Aneesh Rai, Edward Chang, Erika Kirgios, Katherine L. Milkman (2024), Group Size and Its Impact on Diversity-Related Perceptions and Hiring Decisions in Homogeneous Groups, Organizational Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.14705 Abstract

  Why do some homogeneous groups face backlash for lacking diversity, whereas others escape censure? We show that a homogeneous group’s size changes how it is perceived and whether decision makers pursue greater diversity in its ranks. We theorize that people make different inferences about larger groups than smaller ones—with consequences for diversity management—due to Bayesian reasoning. This can produce sensitivity to a lack of diversity in large groups and limited sensitivity to a lack of diversity in small groups. Because each group member represents the outcome of a hiring decision, larger homogeneous groups signal a diversity problem more strongly than smaller homogeneous groups. Across three preregistered experiments (n = 4,283), we show that decision makers are more likely to diversify larger homogeneous groups than smaller ones and view larger homogeneous groups as (i) more likely to have resulted from an unfair selection process; (ii) less diverse; (iii) more likely to face diversity-related impression management concerns; and (iv) less open to the influence of newly added underrepresented members. Further, (i)–(iii) mediate the relationship between homogeneous group size and decisions to diversify. We extend our findings to S&P 1500 corporate boards, showing that larger homogeneous boards are more likely to add women or racial minorities as directors. Larger homogeneous boards are also rarer than expected, whereas smaller homogeneous boards are surprisingly abundant. This suggests that decision makers neglect homogeneity in smaller groups, while investing extra effort toward diversifying larger homogeneous groups. Our findings highlight how group size shapes diversity-related perceptions and decisions and identify mechanisms that kickstart diversification efforts.

• Erika Kirgios, Aneesh Rai, Edward Chang, Katy Milkman (2022), When Seeking Help, Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities Benefit From Explicitly Stating Their Identity, Nature Human Behaviour, 6 (), pp. 383-391. Abstract

  Receiving help can make or break a career, but women and racial/ethnic minorities do not always receive the support they seek. Across two audit experiments—one with politicians and another with students—as well as an online experiment (total n= 5,145), we test whether women and racial/ethnic minorities benefit from explicitly mentioning their demographic identity in requests for help, for example, by including statements like “As a Black woman…” in their communications. We propose that when a help seeker highlights their marginalized identity, it may activate prospective helpers’ motivations to avoid prejudiced reactions and increase their willingness to provide support. Here we show that when women and racial/ethnic minorities explicitly mentioned their demographic identity in help-seeking emails, politicians and students responded 24.4% (7.42 percentage points) and 79.6% (2.73 percentage points) more often, respectively. These findings suggest that deliberately mentioning identity in requests for help can improve outcomes for women and racial/ethnic minorities.

• Katherine L. Milkman, Dena Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Predrag Pandiloski, Yeji Park, Aneesh Rai, Max Bazerman, John Beshears, Lauri Bonacorsi, Colin Camerer, Edward Chang, Gretchen B. Chapman, Robert Cialdini, Hengchen Dai, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach, James J. Gross, Samantha Horn, Alexa Hubbard, Steven J. Jones, Dean Karlan, Tim Kautz, Erika Kirgios, Joowon Klusowski, Ariella Kristal, Rahul Ladhania, George Loewenstein, Jens Ludwig, Barbara Mellers, Sendhil Mullainathan, Silvia Saccardo, Jann Spiess, Gaurav Suri, Joachim H. Talloen, Jamie Taxer, Yaacov Trope, Lyle Ungar, Kevin Volpp, Ashley Whillans, Jonathan Zinman, Angela Duckworth (2021), Megastudies Improve the Impact of Applied Behavioural Science, , 600 (), pp. 478-483. Abstract

  Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy. Here, to address this limitation and accelerate the pace of discovery, we introduce the megastudy—a massive field experiment in which the effects of many different interventions are compared in the same population on the same objectively measured outcome for the same duration. In a megastudy targeting physical exercise among 61,293 members of an American fitness chain, 30 scientists from 15 different US universities worked in small independent teams to design a total of 54 different four-week digital programmes (or interventions) encouraging exercise. We show that 45% of these interventions significantly increased weekly gym visits by 9% to 27%; the top-performing intervention offered microrewards for returning to the gym after a missed workout. Only 8% of interventions induced behaviour change that was significant and measurable after the four-week intervention. Conditioning on the 45% of interventions that increased exercise during the intervention, we detected carry-over effects that were proportionally similar to those measured in previous research. Forecasts by impartial judges failed to predict which interventions would be most effective, underscoring the value of testing many ideas at once and, therefore, the potential for megastudies to improve the evidentiary value of behavioural science.

• Edward Chang, Erika Kirgios, Rosanna Smith (2021), Large-scale field experiment shows null effects of team demographic diversity on outsiders’ willingness to support the team, . Abstract

  Demographic diversity in the United States is rising, and increasingly, work is conducted in teams. These co-occurring phenomena suggest that it might be increasingly common for work to be conducted by demographically diverse teams. But to date, in spite of copious field experimental evidence documenting that individuals are treated differently based on their demographic identity, we have little evidence from field experiments to establish how and whether teams are treated differently based on their levels of demographic diversity. To answer this question, we present the results of a preregistered, large-scale (n=9496) field experiment testing whether team demographic diversity affects outsiders’ responses to the team. Participants were asked via email to donate money to support the work of a team that was described and depicted as demographically diverse, or not. Even though the study was well-powered to detect even small effects (i.e., differences of less than 1.5 percentage points in donation rates), we found no significant differences in people’s willingness to donate to a more diverse versus a less diverse team. We also did not find moderation by participant gender, racial diversity of the participant’s zip code, or political leaning of the participant’s zip code, suggesting that the lack of a main effect is not due to competing mechanisms cancelling out a main effect. These results suggest past research on the effects of demographic diversity on team support may not generalize to the field, highlighting the need for additional field experimental research on people’s responses to demographically diverse teams.

• Erika Kirgios, Graelin Mandel, Yeji Park, Katherine L. Milkman, Dena Gromet, Joseph S. Kay, Angela Duckworth (2020), Teaching temptation bundling to boost exercise: A field experiment, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161 (), pp. 20-35. Abstract

  Temptation bundling—pairing a pleasurable indulgence with a behavior that provides delayed rewards—combats present bias by making behaviors with delayed benefits more instantly-gratifying. If people are sophisticated and capable of following self-set rules to overcome present bias, they could benefit from learning about temptation bundling. Participants in a four-week exercise-boosting program (N = 6792) received either an audiobook with encouragement to temptation bundle, only an audiobook, or neither an audiobook nor encouragement to temptation bundle. Giving participants audiobooks and encouraging temptation bundling boosted their likelihood of a weekly workout by 10–14% and average weekly workouts by 10–12% during and up to seventeen weeks post-intervention. Relative to giving audiobooks alone, encouraging temptation bundling had a modest positive effect on exercise on the extensive margin. The marginal benefit of encouraging temptation bundling may be small because free audiobooks leak information: Simply providing an audiobook to exercise program participants suggests they should temptation bundle.

• Erika Kirgios, Edward Chang, Emma E. Levine, Katherine L. Milkman, Judd B. Kessler (2020), Forgoing Earned Incentives to Signal Pure Motives, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (29), pp. 16891-16897. Abstract

  Financial incentives can spark behavior change but often damage recipients’ self-image. We designed and tested an intervention that allows organizations and individuals to resolve this tension. We motivated actors with financial rewards and then gave them the opportunity to forgo those rewards to signal their past actions were intrinsically motivated. We propose that actors who forgo financial rewards engage in “motivation laundering,” passing up payments earned for an incentivized action to retroactively signal that their motivations were intrinsic. Our intervention has the potential to leave organizations and incentivized individuals better off: Financial rewards help actors build better habits, and motivation laundering allows them to boost their self-image, while giving organizations opportunities to lower incentive program costs.

• Erika Kirgios, Edward Chang, Katherine L. Milkman (2020), Going It Alone: Competition Increases the Attractiveness of Minority Status, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161 (), pp. 20-33. Abstract

  Past research demonstrates that people prefer to affiliate with others who resemble them demographically. However, we posit that the strength of this tendency toward homophily may be moderated by strategic considerations when competing for scarce opportunities. Across six experiments, we find that anticipated competition weakens people’s desire to join groups that include similar others. When expecting to compete against fellow group members, women are more willing to join all-male groups and Black participants are more willing to join all-White groups than in the absence of competition. We show that this effect is mediated both by a belief that being distinct will lead your performance to stand out and by a desire to compete against demographically dissimilar others. Our findings offer a new perspective to enrich past research on homophily, shedding light on the instances when minorities are more likely to join groups in which they will be underrepresented.

• Edward Chang, Erika Kirgios, Aneesh Rai, Katherine L. Milkman (2020), The Isolated Choice Effect and Its Implications for Gender Diversity in Organizations, Management Science, 66 (6), pp. 2752-2761. Abstract

  We highlight a feature of personnel selection decisions that can influence the gender diversity of groups and teams. Specifically, we show that people are less likely to choose candidates whose gender would increase group diversity when making personnel selections in isolation (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting a single group member) than when making collections of choices (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting multiple group members). We call this the isolated choice effect. Across 6 preregistered experiments (n=3,509), we demonstrate that the isolated choice effect has important consequences for group diversity. When making sets of hiring and selection decisions (as opposed to making a single hire), people construct more gender-diverse groups. Mediation and moderation studies suggest that people do not attend as much to diversity when making isolated selection choices, which drives this effect.

Knowledge @ Wharton

• Overwhelmed by Too Many Choices When Shopping? Wharton Retail Expert Weighs In, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/19/2024
• Michael Lee, Oatly North America’s EVP & Executive Creative Director, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/19/2024
• Why Anchor Institutions Are Vital to Local Economies, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/17/2024
• Is the American Dream of Homeownership Still Within Reach?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/17/2024
• Even Under Trump, AI Governance Is Here to Stay, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/17/2024
• 2024 Ripple Rewind (Part 2), Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/17/2024
• What Are the Best Countries of 2024?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/16/2024
• Your Pride Could Affect Your Workplace Reputation, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/12/2024
• Samantha Baker, VP of Commerce at theSkimm, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/12/2024
• NFL Stats & Analysis with Ben Solak, Knowledge @ Wharton - 12/11/2024