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Continued from previous page
Feeling and Believing
Schweitzer's research also shows that emotions can have a
great deal of impact on trust judgment. In another recent
paper, "Feeling and Believing: The Influence of Emotion
on Trust," coauthored with Wharton PhD student Jennifer
Dunn, they found that when a person experiences bad traffic
or recently received great personal news, those feelings will be
carried with them into a morning meeting at work, influencing
the way that person will trust colleagues.
"Most research has looked at trust as a cognitive decision,
where people are making cool, rational judgments. However,
a lot of our trust judgment—particularly for people we
don't know well—is influenced by emotions. I'm asking
myself, 'Should I trust this person?' And I'm answering that
question by checking to see how I feel. Well, if I feel pretty
good then that feeling will influence my trust judgment."
To test this, Schweitzer and Dunn ran five experiments in
which test subjects would do things like watch video clips,
engage in writing tasks, or fill out surveys to make them focus
on particular emotions like happiness or anger.
How can you make a perfect stranger feel angry or happy?
According to Schweitzer, inducing emotion is "shockingly
easy." He points to an experiment they conducted at the train
station as an example. "We asked people to list three things
that made them really happy or angry and then to write about
it in great detail. Sometimes people were actually ripping the
page with their pen they would become so mad." After inducing
a particular emotion through these tasks, the subject would
rate their trust in a co-worker across various things.
"We found that there is clearly an affective component between
emotions and how much you trust people you don't
know that well," he says, noting that this doesn't work for
people you know well. "For example, I know how much I
trust my mother because it's a recall judgment and not a matter
of how I am feeling at that moment."
He says that in business, you can see how it's important for
teams to bond because when colleagues become friends then
judgments are made based on recall as opposed to recent emotion.
"Why do business people go out together to sing at karaoke
bars? Why do business people go out drinking heavily? It's
doing very important work that is extremely hard to do otherwise.
It's also why sales people tell you funny anecdotes and
ask you about your kids to bring you to a happy place before
asking you to purchase a product. I think we sort of know that
this chit chat (called nontask communication) is important,
but this research gives us a sense of why that is the case and
what they should be doing while they chit chat."
Schweitzer adds that bonding through alcohol consumption
is perhaps even more important in business than many
people might think. In earlier research, he studied the effect
of alcohol in negotiations and found that while it leads to inefficient
negotiations, the consuming of alcohol can actually
cement one's place in a work group.
"There has been no other work on alcohol in negotiations,
but it's an important part of a lot of business transactions and it's
worth thinking about its functional role," he says. "Introducing
alcohol transforms one kind of meeting into another kind of
meeting. It lowers inhibitions and in some cultures, like in
Japan, people think they can't truly know you unless they've
been drinking with you. It's a critical form of bonding."
Feeling Green
Another important part of the trust process is the emotion of
envy, a "delicious" research topic according to Schweitzer,
who is currently studying with Jennifer Dunn and Simone
Moran, a professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel, how
social interactions can produce envy and how envy impacts
subsequent interactions.
"Imagine the following—you are in a work group that
works collaboratively together selling books and someone in
your group is selected as the employee of the month. She gets
her picture on the wall, a bonus, and a special parking spot.
And then she goes back to her work group. The question is:
how do the coworkers feel that didn't win? What are they
likely to do to that returning coworker, and having won the
award, will the coworker trust her colleagues any differently?"
Schweitzer says that he's finding that "people feel envy
when they are outperformed in a self-relevant domain (an
area you care about) by a similar other (a peer)." He explains,
"It's the guy in the cubicle next to me who I compare myself
to, but when it's somebody much higher or lower in status
then it doesn't really matter."
He notes that there are three approaches people might
take: you might try to avoid the outperformer, you might try
to level up, or you might try to drag him down. "In leveling
up, you see a coworker has gotten an award and you work
even harder to get the award yourself. In leveling down, you
see the coworker win the award and you want them to suffer
and to bring them back to your level."
Under what conditions people will level up or down and
how people perceive a path to success is important. "If they
see that they can achieve success then they will exert more
effort. The employee of the month should motivate other
employees. But what is interesting about envy is that it is
a socially sanctioned emotion so that when you win, people
will always tell you congratulations and that they are happy
for you even if they then go home and kick their cat. In reality,
most people who feel envy will not say, 'It's great that
you won that award, but I'm envious and will avoid you for a
while until I get over it.'"
Schweitzer points out that most coworkers who experience
envy are much more likely to lie to the person who wins the
award and engage in actions to undermine that person, such as
sharing less information. He notes that he has evidence so far
to suggest that the award winner doesn't expect this. The award
winner will feel great and continue trusting congratulatory coworkers
just as much if not more than before the award.
So what should companies do to reward good employees
without creating such a dynamic? Schweitzer says that in
some cases, companies should give awards in private rather
than in public as well as think about structuring workgroups
that are heterogeneous so that social comparisons won't be as
grating. Also, they should think about reassigning workers if
there will be negative competition and make it clear for employees
what the path is for success.
"Another option is to think about several smaller awards
rather than very few large awards," he says. "One key problem
with envy is that we have a hard time anticipating envy.
When we enjoy success, we have to work at trying to imagine
how others might feel. My own view is that we're not
very good at that because we are busy enjoying our success."
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