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Purpose: Social rejection is a negative interpersonal experience that leads to emotional, cognitive, and physiological outcomes. We develop a theoretical model arguing that social rejection in workplace settings can alter employees' personal values in either the short- or the long term. Methodology: This is a theoretical essay based on three theories: (1) human values; (2) affective events; and (3) shattered assumptions. Findings: In the proposed model, an employee's emotional reactions to social rejection in the workplace (emotional distress or emotional numbness) partially mediate the relationship between the experience of social rejection and short- or long-term development of self-protective (rather than self-expansive) personal values. Originality: The processes whereby social rejection at work leads to personal value change remain largely unexplored to date. The proposed model represents an initial attempt to understand this process, including the effects of emotional distress (long term) and emotional numbness (short term). Research Implications: The model introduces the mechanisms whereby social rejection in the workplace leads to short-term and long-term changes in individual values and has potential to serve as a launchpad for future research interest in this phenomenon. Practical Implications: The framework proposed in this chapter should help scholars to understand better the dynamics of social rejection in the workplace and how this phenomenon affects employees' values in work settings, both in the short- and long term.

Research in industrial and organizational psychology demonstrates that the regulation of negative emotions in response to both organizational stressors and interpersonal workplace interactions can result in functional and dysfunctional outcomes (Côté, 2005; Diefendorff, Richard, & Yang, 2008). Research on the regulation of negative emotions has additionally been conducted in social psychology, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, health psychology, and clinical psychology. A close reading of this broader literature, however, reveals that the conceptualization and use of the term “emotion regulation” varies within each research field as well as across these fields. The main focus of our chapter is to make sense of the term “emotion regulation” in the workplace by considering its use across a broad range of psychology disciplines. We then develop an overarching theoretical framework using disambiguating terminology to highlight what we argue are the important constructs involved in the process of intrapersonal emotion generation, emotional experience regulation, and emotional expression regulation in the workplace (e.g., emotional intelligence, emotion regulation strategies, emotion expression displays). We anticipate this chapter will enable researchers and industrial and organizational psychologists to identify the conditions under which functional regulation outcomes are more likely to occur and then build interventions around these findings.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the literature on information elicitation. The authors investigated the impact of social influence strategies on eyewitness recall performance. Specifically, the authors examined the effect of social influence techniques (Cialdini, 2007) on recall performance (Experiment 1) and conducted a follow-up experiment to examine the incremental effect of social proof on the report everything cognitive interview mnemonic (Experiment 2).

Participants watched a video depicting vandalism (Experiment 1: N = 174) or a verbal altercation (Experiment 2: N = 128) and were asked to recall the witnessed event. Experiment 1: Participants were assigned randomly to one of six conditions: control (open-ended prompt), engage and explain (interview ground rules), consistency (signing an agreement to work diligently), reciprocity (given water and food), authority (told of interviewer’s training) and social proof (shown transcript from an exemplar participant). Experiment 2: The authors used a 2 (social proof: present, absent) × 2 (report everything: present, absent) between-participants design.

Across both experiments, participants exposed to the social proof tactic (i.e. compared to a model exemplar) spoke longer and recalled more correct details than participants not exposed to the social proof tactic. In Experiment 2, participants interviewed with the report everything mnemonic also spoke longer, recalled more correct details, more incorrect details and provided slightly more confabulations than those not interviewed with the report everything mnemonic.

The findings have practical value for police investigators and other professionals who conduct interviews (e.g. military personnel, doctors obtaining information from patients). Interviewers can incorporate social proof in their interviewing practices to help increase the amount and accuracy of information obtained.

We review the interventions that promote motivation in academic contexts, with a focus on two primary questions: How can we motivate students to take more STEM courses? Once in those STEM courses, how can we keep students motivated and promote their academic achievement?

We have approached these two motivational questions from several perspectives, examining the theoretical issues with basic laboratory research, conducting longitudinal questionnaire studies in classrooms, and developing interventions implemented in different STEM contexts. Our research is grounded in three theories that we believe are complementary: expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002), interest theory (Hidi & Renninger, 2006), and self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988). As social psychologists, we have focused on motivational theory and used experimental methods, with an emphasis on values – students’ perceptions of the value of academic tasks and students’ personal values that shape their experiences in academic contexts.

We review the experimental field studies in high-school science and college psychology classes, in which utility-value interventions promoted interest and performance for high-school students in science classes and for undergraduate students in psychology courses. We also review a randomized intervention in which parents received information about the utility value of math and science for their teens in high school; this intervention led students to take nearly one semester more of science and mathematics, compared with the control group. Finally, we review an experimental study of values affirmation in a college biology course and found that the intervention improved performance and retention for first-generation college students, closing the social-class achievement gap by 50%. We conclude by discussing the mechanisms through which these interventions work.

These interventions are exciting for their broad applicability in improving students’ academic choices and performance, they are also exciting regarding their potential for contributions to basic science. The combination of laboratory experiments and field experiments is advancing our understanding of the motivational principles and almost certainly will continue to do so. At the same time, interventions may benefit from becoming increasingly targeted at specific motivational processes that are effective with particular groups or in particular contexts.

Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Ludwig Lachmann and George Shackle upheld that investigations of the causes of purposes, preferences, beliefs or behaviors by the social scientist were unwarranted. Shackle proposed that human agency is an “uncaused cause.” Others admitted that human volitions and actions are caused, but ruled out explanations of these causes from social science. By considering Darwinian insights from modern evolutionary psychology, this essay criticizes the view that causal investigations of human volitions and actions are beyond social science. These insights also point to the role of habit and instinct in human behavior.

Muzafer and Carolyn Wood Sherif are among the founders of social psychology. Their theoretical and empirical findings made important contributions to the management literature. This paper aims to attempt to underline these contributions and highlights the Sherifs’ interdisciplinary work and their impact on management research specifically.

Using a citation content analysis, the influence of the Sherifs on management research is detailed by examining how their work has contributed to research published in top management journals.

The Sherifs’ work has influenced numerous research streams related to organisational groups, social norms, assimilation contrast theory and a combination of various other topics. Additionally, these works helped originate team and workgroup research in organisation theory.

This is the first manuscript of its type to examine the influence of the Sherifs on management research. Their story is a testament to the impact that social psychology researchers have had in developing modern thought about organisational issues. This work also addresses potential areas for future research building on the Sherifs’ work.

Feminist research acknowledges the centrality of female knowledge and experience. Within this two further strands can be identified: that many feminist researchers place an emphasis on the social construction of meaning, with particular emphasis on the role of language as the primary vehicle of such constructions; and that within the centrality of female knowledge and experience is a feminist analysis of the role of power in determining the form and representation of social knowledge. The latter is an acknowledgement that feminist research is not just an extension of traditional research in non‐sexist ways and areas of relevance to women but that it must entail a critical evaluation of the research process in terms of its ability to illuminate women's experiences. This should comprise three strands — a critique of traditional theories and methods, the development of more appropriate theories and methods for studying the experience of women and the analysis of the role of the researcher within his/her research.

This paper aims to reply to Dequech's comment in the International Journal of Social Economics on the analysis of the formation of conventional expectations under strong uncertainty, which was proposed in the present author's 2004 article in the International Journal of Social Economics.

The scope of this reply is to evaluate through a theoretical examination the validity of Dequech's claim contained in his comment that his initial analytical scheme of the state of expectations presented in his 1999 article was general enough to accommodate the psychological considerations, which were raised in the present author's 2004 article and which were associated with Keynes's analysis as well as with developments in the field of social psychology.

The paper demonstrates that both Dequech's initial article of the state of expectations and his subsequent comment on the present author's contribution on the conventional formation of expectations under strong uncertainty in the International Journal of Social Economics overlooked the psychological nature of the process of inferences, a fundamental factor in Keynes's discussion of the formation of conventional expectations. However, when social psychology considerations are introduced in the analysis (as it was the case with the present author's approach) and when the remarkable theoretical and empirical progress in the field of social psychology is taken into account, Dequech's claim of the generality of his framework is not justifiable because both the specific nature and the substantive impact of the social psychology issues associated with the role of inferences are overlooked across his analysis. It is proposed that a theoretical scheme that uses the wealth of evidence of contemporary social psychology is more promising for a rigorous development of a theory of expectations under strong uncertainty.

The paper sheds further light on expectancy theory.