Applications granted in 2022
- Predicting organizational culture and attractiveness from recruitment advertisement text
Bo Wang, Sina Ghassemi, Wendy Andrews, & Reinout de Vries, 800 participants
Review
Organizations often communicate their commitment to various organizational cultures through recruitment portals (e.g., professional recruitment websites). Integrity or ethical culture is one of the most frequently communicated organizational cultures. There may be several reasons for organizations’ passion for this culture, including attracting people with high ethical standards who are more likely to support and help maintain an integrity or ethical culture. However, there is still limited research on the effectiveness of this common management practice. To fill this gap, the current research aims to investigate whether integrity or ethical culture is positively related to organizational attractiveness, and which group of people, in terms of personality traits, is more attracted to an integrity or ethical culture. We sampled 401 company overviews from a professional recruitment website, where employers advertise their committed organizational cultures. We recruited 800 participants to read 6 randomly selected overviews. Participants were asked to rate the described organizations on six organizational cultures—adaptability, integrity, collaboration, results-oriented, customer-oriented, detail-oriented—from the Organizational Culture Profile and organizational attractiveness. They also completed the HEXACO personality inventory. Linear mixed effects regression analysis revealed positive relations between adaptability, integrity, collaboration, customer-oriented, detail-oriented cultures, and organizational attractiveness. In addition, we found a positive interactive effect of HEXACO honesty-humility and integrity culture on organizational attractiveness. Specifically, the positive relation between integrity culture and organizational attractiveness is stronger for people high on HEXACO honesty-humility. The current research adds to the literature by showing that communicating commitment to an integrity or ethical culture can make an organization more attractive, particularly to people high on honesty-humility, who have high ethical standards.
- What happens when nobody “likes” you?: An investigation into the effects of digital social ostracism on mood, self-esteem, need-threat, and socially aggressive behavior
Imke Jansen & Brooke Slawinski, 460 participants
Review
We investigated whether the social media-based ostracism paradigm (receiving less likes compared to other profiles) evokes negative emotional reactions, and whether these effects are stronger for socially aggressive individuals. As hypothesized, participants in the ostracism condition reported significantly lower self-esteem, belongingness, meaningful existence, control, positive mood, and greater negative mood than participants in the inclusion conditions following the social media task (η2=.055–.130), and the effects on self-esteem and negative mood were stronger for individuals with higher trait social aggression (η2=.133–.142). Interestingly, the effects of ostracism on negative mood persisted in individuals with higher trait social aggression, even after they played an inclusive ball-tossing game with their social media peers (η2=.135).
- Automatic personality assessment from asynchronous video interviews
Antonis Koutsoumpis, Sina Ghassemi, Janneke Oostrom, Djurre Holtrop, Ward van Breda, & Reinout de Vries, 262 participants
Review
In my project, I collect online job video interviews and then apply machine learning techniques to predict peoples' personality from the automatically extracted audio, visual, and verbal features of the videos.
I used the iBBA budget to invite a sub-sample of participants to take the same online interview (seven months later), in order to explore the test-retest reliability of our algorithm.
We found that automatic personality assessment is reliable over time, but the reliability coefficients are relatively low. This is a very valuable information for researchers and practitioners who use online interviews to select candidates.
- Emergence of human social learning from reinforcement learning
Björn Lindström, 400 participants
- Investigation of Reduced Performance on a Visual Search Task in Followers of Charismatic Leaders
Lara Engelbert, Michiel van Elk, Mark van Vugt, & Jan Theeuwes, 450 participants
Review
People around the world are facing the consequences of climate change. Communicating about the causes of global warming and educating the public on mitigation actions is imperative to counteract disastrous effects on an international scale. Public leaders in this debate often use charismatic leadership tactics to draw people’s attention and convey their messages convincingly. Charisma is a costly signal that guides people’s attention and may substantially influence how they process information from a leader. Especially, people are frequently confronted with inconsistent messages from leaders in the media, but how they process such information remains unknown. In two online studies (Study 1 N = 278; Study 2 N = 390), we collected data on the research platform Prolific to examine how exactly people process consistent and inconsistent information from a charismatic leader. In both studies, we used a novel reading paradigm and videos of a leader behaving in a charismatic or neutral way. Participants watched videos of a fictional environmental leader. Subsequently, they read text messages originating from the leader and containing consistent or inconsistent statements about climate change actions. In line with previous literature, inconsistencies increased reading times and decreased the convincingness of text messages. Yet, we did not find support for an interaction effect of leader charisma and inconsistencies on reading times. A set of exploratory analyses demonstrated that higher subjective perceptions of the leader’s charisma were associated with higher convincingness ratings, and vice versa for lower charisma perceptions. Further research is needed to investigate the underlying cognitive processes of charismatic leadership in more detail.
- The influence of action on working memory capacity part 2.0
Caterina Trentin, Heleen Slagter, & Christian Olivers, 250 participants
- Academic motivation-achievement cycle and the behavioural pathways: a short-timeframe experiment Nienke van Atteveldt & TuongVan Vu, 350 participants
- How do children evaluate and behave toward (in)considerate peers?
Christel Klootwijk, Jellie Sierksma, Nikki Lee, & Nienke van Atteveldt, 250 participants