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Role-taking is a basic social process underpinning much of the structural social psychology paradigm – a paradigm built on empirical studies of human interaction. Yet today, our social worlds are occupied by bots, voice assistants, decision aids, and other machinic entities collectively referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). The integration of AI into daily life presents both challenges and opportunities for social psychologists. Through a vignette study, the authors investigate role-taking and gender in human-AI relations.

Participants read a first-person narrative attributed to either a human or AI, with varied gender presentation based on a feminine or masculine first name. Participants then infer the narrator's thoughts and feelings and report on their own emotions, producing indicators of cognitive and affective role-taking. The authors supplement results with qualitative analysis from two open-ended survey questions.

Participants score higher on role-taking measures when the narrator is human versus AI. However, gender dynamics differ between human and AI conditions. When the text is attributed to a human, masculinized narrators elicit stronger role-taking responses than their feminized counterparts, and women participants score higher on role-taking measures than men. This aligns with prior research on gender, status, and role-taking variation. When the text is attributed to an AI, results deviate from established findings and in some cases, reverse.

This first study of human-AI role-taking tests the scope of key theoretical tenets and sets a foundation for addressing group processes in a newly emergent form.

Over the past decades, scholars advanced foundational insights about paradox in organization theory. In this double volume, we seek to expand upon these insights through interdisciplinary theorizing. We do so for two reasons. First, we think that now is a moment to build on those foundations toward richer, more complex insights by learning from disciplines outside of organization theory. Second, as our world increasingly faces grand challenges, scholars turn to paradox theory. Yet as the challenges become more complex, authors turn to other disciplines to ensure the requisite complexity of our own theories. To advance these goals, we invited scholars with knowledge in paradox theory to explore how these ideas could be expanded by outside disciplines. This provides a both/and opportunity for paradox theory: both learning from outside disciplines beyond existing boundaries and enriching our insights in organization scholarship. The result is an impressive collection of papers about paradox theory that draws from four outside realms – the realm of belief, the realm of physical systems, the realm of social structures, and the realm of expression. In this introduction, we expand on why paradox theory is ripe for interdisciplinary theorizing, explore the benefits of doing so, and introduce the papers in this double volume.

All values are really paradoxes since they are contrasts, like courage–caution, diversity–inclusion and define one another. Values are differences at the end of continua. All metaphors are paradoxical being both like and unlike that to which they refer. Emergency management is a paradox. How can you manage something suddenly emerging like Australian bush fires? It is, however, possible to prepare for a range of events, all infections require masks, social distancing, gowns, disinfectant etc. Many East Asians countries have navigated the current COVID-19 pandemic better than many Western countries by such readiness. The key to resolving paradoxes is dynamic equilibrium, wherein opposed values harmonize and grow ever more salient. All innovation is an exercise in resolving paradox, by creating new wholes out of old and existing parts. These ideas are explored via a commentary of three pieces on paradox in relation to logic, Luhman and emergency management.

In this chapter, we consider music as a tool for emotional regulation in relation to disability, which can be employed to counter the dehumanisation of disabled people that arises from unregulated emotional responses to disability. Responding to Julia Kristeva's presentation of non-disabled encounters with disability as causing a physical or psychical death, Alison Duncan Kerr's arguments on the rationality of regulating emotions in encounters where unregulated emotions have negative effects on the self and others are brought together through Rebecca Jiggens' cultural model of understanding the significance of disability to illustrate the irrationality and moral paucity of ableism. We argue that music can play a role in regulating the emotions typically felt towards the disabled. Kristeva's idea that disability wounds or even kills the abled is insightful, but if we are right, then the tight connection between death and emotional reactions to disability could be overcome through the process of emotion regulation.