Deborah Small Faculty Profile

Deborah Small
Assistant Professor of Marketing and Psychology

PhD, Carnegie Mellon University , 2004; BA, University of Pennsylvania, 1999

Research Areas
Judgment and decision making; emotion; sympathy biases and charitable giving; consumer behavior; gender

Current Projects
Friends of Victims: Sympathy Transference and Prosocial Behavior” (with Uri Simonsohn); “The Face of Need: Emotion Expression on Charity Advertisements” (with Nicole Verrochi); “Reference-Dependent Sympathy.”

Academic Positions Held
Wharton: 2004-present. University of Pennsylvania: 2007-present (Psychology Department)

Other Positions
Associate Analyst, Abt Associates, 1999-2000

Career and Recent Professional Awards; Teaching Awards
APA Science Directorate Dissertation Award, 2003; Russell Sage Foundation, small research grant for “Identifiability”, 2003

Representative Publications
(with M. Gelfand, L. Babcock and H. Gettman)
"Who goes to the bargaining table? Understanding gender variation in the initiation of negotiation." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (in press).

(with D.A. Moore)
"Error and bias in comparative social judgment: On being both better and worse than we think we are." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(6), 972 (2007).

(with G. Loewenstein)
“The scarecrow and the tin man: The vicissitudes of human sympathy and caring” The Review of General Psychology 11(2), 112-126 (2007).

(with G. Loewenstein and P. Slovic)
"Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102(2), 143-153 (2007).

(with J.S. Lerner and G. Loewenstein)
"Heart strings and purse strings: Effects of specific emotions on economic transactions." Psychological Science 15(5), 337-341 (2004).

(with G. Loewenstein)
"Helping 'A' victim or helping 'THE' victim: Altruism and Identifiability." Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 26(1), 5-16 (2003).

(with J.S. Lerner, R.M. Gonzalez, and B. Fischhoff)
"Emotion and perceived risks of terrorism: A national field experiment." Psychological Science 14(2), 144-150 (2003).