Maurice Schweitzer

Maurice Schweitzer
  • Cecilia Yen Koo Professor
  • Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions
  • Professor of Management
  • Academic Director of Executive Education Program: Effective Decision Making

Contact Information

  • office Address:

    3730 Walnut Street
    544 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
    Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: behavioral decision research, deception and trust, emotions, negotiations

Links: CV, Personal Website, Effective Decision Making Program, @ME_Schweitzer, Friend&Foe, OPEQ Exercise, Friend&Foe_Amazon, Maurice Schweitzer, Freakonomics Podcast - Episode 451: Can I Ask You A Ridiculously Personal Question?

Overview

Maurice Schweitzer is the Cecilia Yen Koo Professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on emotions and the negotiation process. He has published over 100 articles in Management, Psychology, and Economics journals and co-authored the book Friend & Foe. Maurice is the academic director of Wharton’s Executive Education program on Effective Decision Making and he teaches Advanced Negotiations in Wharton’s executive education, MBA, and undergraduate programs. Maurice has won several teaching and research awards, and he is a past president of the International Association for Conflict Management.

Google Talk

Using Humor in the Office

Is Every Lie a Sin?

CBC News – Rise in Corporate Activism

CNN – CEO Activism is on the Rise

Periscope: VW Scandal

Knowledge@Wharton: Friend & Foe

Knowledge@Wharton: Anger and Deception

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Research

  • Maurice Schweitzer, Krueger, K. Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney (Forthcoming), Negotiation.

  • Cooper, C. and Maurice Schweitzer (Forthcoming), Organizational Humor: A Foundation for Future Scholarship, A Review, and a Call to Action.

  • Maurice Schweitzer (2023), Humor Intelligence: Production, Perception, Prediction, and Measurement, Current Opinion in Psychology, 101722 ().

    Abstract: We introduce Humor Intelligence (HI) as a distinct form of intelligence. We distinguish HI from both General Intelligence (IQ) and Emotional Intelligence (EI), and we identify three key components of HI: Production, Perception, and Prediction. Production represents the ability to generate and deliver humor; perception represents the ability to recognize humor; and prediction represents the ability to forecast what others will find funny. We introduce a measure to assess Humor Production.

  • Hart, E. VanEpps, E. Yudkin, D. Maurice Schweitzer (2023), The interpersonal costs of revealing others’ secrets, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 110: 104541 ().

    Abstract: People often keep relevant information secret from others. For example, an employee might keep a coworker's plan to quit without giving notice secret from their manager, or someone might keep a friend's affair secret from their friend's spouse. In this article, we identify a critical but overlooked factor that determines whether an actor will disclose secret information they know about another person: Impression management concerns about how other people will judge their decision to disclose or keep the secret. We conceptualize secret-keeping as social decisions that involve the focal actor (who could keep or disclose a secret), the partner (the focus of the secret), the audience (interested in learning the secret information), and external observers (who may observe if the focal actor disclosed the secret). Across four pre-registered studies, including real-world judgments of secret-keeping dilemmas (field data from a Reddit community; N = 332), a recall study (N = 200), and controlled experiments (N = 624), we describe how impression management concerns influence secret-keeping decisions. We find that focal actors are often judged harshly for disclosing others' secrets, even when the audience could derive substantial benefits from learning the information and even when observers judge disclosure to be more moral than keeping a secret. Focal actors are heavily influenced by impression management concerns and routinely keep partners' secrets from an audience who could benefit from the information. Taken together, impression management concerns act as significant impediments to the flow of information, advancing our understanding of both information flows within groups and secret-keeping dilemmas.

  • VanEpps, E. Hart, E. Maurice Schweitzer (2023), Dual-promotion: Bragging better by promoting peers, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

    Abstract: To create favorable impressions and receive credit, individuals need to share information about their past accomplishments. Broadcasting one's past accomplishments or claiming credit to demonstrate competence, however, can harm perceptions of warmth and likability. In fact, prior work has conceptualized self-promotion as a hydraulic challenge: tactics that boost perceptions along one dimension (e.g., competence) harm perceptions along other dimensions (e.g., warmth). In this work, we identify a novel approach to self-promotion: We show that by combining self-promotion with other-promotion (complimenting or giving credit to others), which we term "dual-promotion," individuals can project both warmth and competence to make better impressions on observers than they do by only self-promoting. In seven preregistered studies, including analyses of annual reports from members of Congress and experiments using social network, workplace, and political contexts (total N = 1,448), we show that individuals who engage in dual-promotion create more favorable impressions of warmth and competence than those who only engage in self-promotion. The beneficial effects of dual-promotion are robust to both competitive and noncompetitive contexts and extend to behavioral intentions.

  • Moore, A. Levine, E. Lewis, J. Maurice Schweitzer (2023), Benevolent Friends and High Integrity Leaders: How Preferences for Benevolence and Integrity Change Across Relationships, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 177: 104252 ().

    Abstract: Individuals value benevolence and integrity in their partners. However, in many workplace dilemmas benevolence and integrity conflict. Across 5 experiments (and 8 supplemental studies), we demonstrate that the relative importance individuals attach to having partners that prioritize either benevolence or integrity systematically shifts across relationships. We introduce the Size-Closeness-Hierarchy (SCH) Model, a theoretical framework to characterize preferences individuals have for benevolent versus high-integrity partners across workplace relationships that vary in group size, emotional closeness, and hierarchy. According to our model, as relationships involve more people, become more emotionally distant, and become more hierarchical (relational features common in leaders), individuals become more likely to prefer high-integrity partners. However, as relationships involve fewer people, become more emotionally close, and become more equal (relational features common in friends), individuals become more likely prefer benevolent partners. Our findings advance our understanding of the interplay between moral values, leadership, and interpersonal perceptions.

  • Schilke, O. Powell, A. Maurice Schweitzer (2023), A Review of Experimental Research on Organizational Trust, Journal of Trust Research, 13(2): 102-139 ().

    Abstract: Trust profoundly shapes organisational, group, and dyadic outcomes. Reflecting its importance, a substantial and growing body of scholarship has investigated the topic of trust. Much of this work has used experiments to identify clear, causal relationships. However, in contrast to theoretical work that conceptualises trust as a multi-faceted (e.g. ability, benevolence, integrity), multi-level (e.g. interpersonal, intergroup), and dynamic construct, experimental scholarship investigating trust has largely investigated benevolence-based trust in dyadic relationships. As a result of the relatively limited set of paradigms experimental scholars have used to investigate trust, many questions related to different forms and types of trust remain un- and under-explored in experimental work. In this review, we take stock of the existing experimental trust scholarship and identify key gaps in our current understanding of trust. We call for future experimental work to investigate ability-based and integrity-based trust, to advance our understanding of the interplay between relationship history and trust, to study trust as a multi-level construct, to focus on the consequences of trust including the hazards of misplaced trust, and to study trust maintenance. To support these lines of inquiry, we introduce an ideal-typical process model to develop or adapt appropriate trust experiments.

  • Maurice Schweitzer (2023), Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(23) e2215572120 ().

    Abstract: Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.

  • Maurice Schweitzer, Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney (2023), Embracing Complexity: A Review of Negotiation Research, Annual Review of Psychology, 74: 12.1-12.34 ().

    Abstract: We negotiate daily with employers, coworkers, merchants, friends, romantic partners, children, and more. The outcomes of these negotiations affect the prices we pay, the salaries we earn, where our next vacation will be, and whether our children will finish their vegetables. In a review of the literature, we identify emerging trends in negotiation scholarship that embrace complexity, such as research that finds moderators of effects that were initially described as monolithic, examines the nuances of social interaction, and approaches negotiation as it occurs in the real world. All told the negotiation literature has produced many important and practical insights, and the existing research highlights negotiation as an exciting context for examining human behavior, characterized by features such as strong emotions, an intriguing blend of cooperation and competition, the presence of fundamental issues such as power and group identity, and outcomes that deeply affect the trajectory of people’s personal and professional lives. Finally, of particular interest is the potential crosstalk between negotiation research and emerging research on conversation, which is something that I am actively pursuing.

  • Zhiying Ren, Eugen Dimant, Maurice Schweitzer (2023), Beyond belief: How social engagement motives influence the spread of conspiracy theories, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 104 ().

    Abstract: Across a pilot study and three preregistered experiments (N = 4128), we demonstrated that people knowingly shared conspiracy theories to advance social motives (e.g., to receive “likes”). In addition to accuracy, people seemed to value social engagement (e.g., “likes” and reactions). Importantly, people not only expected most conspiracy theories to generate greater social engagement than factual news, but they were also more willing to share conspiracy theories when they expected such theories, compared to factual news, to generate sufficiently greater levels of social engagement. In an interactive, multi-round, content-sharing paradigm, we found that people were very sensitive to the social feedback they received. When they received greater social feedback for sharing conspiracy theories than factual news, participants were significantly more likely to share conspiracy theories, even when they knew these theories to be false. Our findings advance our understanding of why and when individuals are likely to share conspiracy theories and identify important prescriptions for curbing the spread of conspiracy theories.

Teaching

Maurice Schweitzer teaches both Negotiations and Advanced Negotiations, a course he designed and introduced at Wharton.

An Interview with Wharton Management Professor Maurice Schweitzer (Wharton Interactive)

All Courses

  • LAW5180 - Negotiations

    This course examines the art and science of negotiation, with additional emphasis on conflict resolution. Students will engage in a number of simulated negotiations ranging from simple one-issue transactions to multi-party joint ventures. Through these exercises and associated readings, students explore the basic theoretical models of bargaining and have an opportunity to test and improve their negotiation skills. Cross-listed with MGMT 691/OIDD 691/LGST 806. Format: Lecture, class discussion, simulation/role play, and video demonstrations. Materials: Textbook and course pack.

  • LGST2920 - Advanced Negotiation

    This course is designed to teach negotiation principles and to enable students to develop their negotiation skills. This course assumes familiarity with the basic negotiation concepts covered in the prerequisite for this course: Negotiations. In this course, we extend the study and practice of negotiations and we develop a deeper understanding for how specific aspects of the negotiation process (e.g., emotions, deadlines, trust violations) impact outcomes. Through course lectures, readings, and case exercises, students will develop a rich framework for thinking about the negotiation process and acquire tools for guiding the negotiation process.

  • LGST6920 - Advanced Negotiation

    This is a course the builds on the basic Negotiation course. In this course, we explore a wide range of negotiation topics from crisis and hostage negotiations, to the role of emotions including anxiety, envy and anger in negotiations, to backlash effects for women in negotiations, and the role of alcohol in negotiations. We will survey many aspects of current negotiation research, discuss historic negotiation cases, and students will participate in role-play exercises. Many of the role play exercises will involve multi-party negotiations and afford opportunities to hone skills in team-based negotiations.

  • LGST8060 - Negotiations

    This course examines the art and science of negotiation, with additional emphasis on conflict resolution. Students will engage in a number of simulated negotiations ranging from simple one-issue transactions to multi-party joint ventures. Through these exercises and associated readings, students explore the basic theoretical models of bargaining and have an opportunity to test and improve their negotiation skills. Cross-listed with MGMT 6910/OIDD 6910/LGST 8060. Format: Lecture, class discussion, simulation/role play, and video demonstrations. Materials: Textbook and course pack.

  • MGMT2920 - Advanced Negotiation

    This course is designed to teach negotiation principles and to enable students to develop their negotiation skills. This course assumes familiarity with the basic negotiation concepts covered in the prerequisite for this course: Negotiations. In this course, we extend the study and practice of negotiations and we develop a deeper understanding for how specific aspects of the negotiation process (e.g., emotions, deadlines, trust violations) impact outcomes. Through course lectures, readings, and case exercises, students will develop a rich framework for thinking about the negotiation process and acquire tools for guiding the negotiation process.

  • MGMT6910 - Negotiations

    This course examines the art and science of negotiation, with additional emphasis on conflict resolution. Students will engage in a number of simulated negotiations ranging from simple one-issue transactions to multi-party joint ventures. Through these exercises and associated readings, students explore the basic theoretical models of bargaining and have an opportunity to test and improve their negotiation skills. Cross-listed with MGMT 6910/OIDD 6910/LGST 8060. Format: Lecture, class discussion, simulation/role play, and video demonstrations. Materials: Textbook and course pack.

  • MGMT6920 - Advanced Negotiation

    This is a course the builds on the basic Negotiation course. In this course, we explore a wide range of negotiation topics from crisis and hostage negotiations, to the role of emotions including anxiety, envy and anger in negotiations, to backlash effects for women in negotiations, and the role of alcohol in negotiations. We will survey many aspects of current negotiation research, discuss historic negotiation cases, and students will participate in role-play exercises. Many of the role play exercises will involve multi-party negotiations and afford opportunities to hone skills in team-based negotiations.

  • OIDD2920 - Advanced Negotiation

    This course is designed to teach negotiation principles and to enable students to develop their negotiation skills. This course assumes familiarity with the basic negotiation concepts covered in the prerequisite for this course: Negotiations. In this course, we extend the study and practice of negotiations and we develop a deeper understanding for how specific aspects of the negotiation process (e.g., emotions, deadlines, trust violations) impact outcomes. Through course lectures, readings, and case exercises, students will develop a rich framework for thinking about the negotiation process and acquire tools for guiding the negotiation process.

  • OIDD2990 - Judg & Dec Making Res Im

    This class provides a high-level introduction to the field of judgment and decision making (JDM) and in-depth exposure to the process of doing research in this area. Throughout the semester you will gain hands-on experience with several different JDM research projects. You will be paired with a PhD student or faculty mentor who is working on a variety of different research studies. Each week you will be given assignments that are central to one or more of these studies, and you will be given detailed descriptions of the research projects you are contributing to and how your assignments relate to the successful completion of these projects. To complement your hands-on research experience, throughout the semester you will be assigned readings from the book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, which summarizes key recent ideas in the JDM literature. You will also meet as a group for an hour once every three weeks with the class's faculty supervisor and all of his or her PhD students to discuss the projects you are working on, to discuss the class readings, and to discuss your own research ideas stimulated by getting involved in various projects. Date and time to be mutually agreed upon by supervising faculty and students. the 1CU version of this course will involve approx. 10 hours of research immersion per week and a 10-page paper. The 0.5 CU version of this course will involve approx 5 hours of research immersion per week and a 5-page final paper. Please contact Professor Joseph Simmons if you are interested in enrolling in the course: jsimmo@wharton.upenn.edu

  • OIDD3990 - Supervised Study

    This course number is currently used for several course types including independent studies, experimental courses and Management & Technology Freshman Seminar. Instructor permission required to enroll in any independent study. Wharton Undergraduate students must also receive approval from the Undergraduate Division to register for independent studies. Section 002 is the Management and Technology Freshman Seminar; instruction permission is not required for this section and is only open to M&T students. For Fall 2020, Section 004 is a new course titled AI, Business, and Society. The course provides a overview of AI and its role in business transformation. The purpose of this course is to improve understanding of AI, discuss the many ways in which AI is being used in the industry, and provide a strategic framework for how to bring AI to the center of digital transformation efforts. In terms of AI overview, we will go over a brief technical overview for students who are not actively immersed in AI (topic covered include Big Data, data warehousing, data-mining, different forms of machine learning, etc). In terms of business applications, we will consider applications of AI in media, Finance, retail, and other industries. Finally, we will consider how AI can be used as a source of competitive advantage. We will conclude with a discussion of ethical challenges and a governance framework for AI. No prior technical background is assumed but some interest in (and exposure to) technology is helpful. Every effort is made to build most of the lectures from the basics.

  • OIDD6910 - Negotiations

    This course examines the art and science of negotiation, with additional emphasis on conflict resolution. Students will engage in a number of simulated negotiations ranging from simple one-issue transactions to multi-party joint ventures. Through these exercises and associated readings, students explore the basic theoretical models of bargaining and have an opportunity to test and improve their negotiation skills. Cross-listed with MGMT 6910/OIDD 6910/LGST 8060. Format: Lecture, class discussion, simulation/role play, and video demonstrations. Materials: Textbook and course pack.

  • OIDD6920 - Advanced Negotiation

    This is a course the builds on the basic Negotiation course. In this course, we explore a wide range of negotiation topics from crisis and hostage negotiations, to the role of emotions including anxiety, envy and anger in negotiations, to backlash effects for women in negotiations, and the role of alcohol in negotiations. We will survey many aspects of current negotiation research, discuss historic negotiation cases, and students will participate in role-play exercises. Many of the role play exercises will involve multi-party negotiations and afford opportunities to hone skills in team-based negotiations.

  • OIDD9000 - Foundations of Dec Proc

    The course is an introduction to research on normative, descriptive and prescriptive models of judgement and choice under uncertainty. We will be studying the underlying theory of decision processes as well as applications in individual group and organizational choice. Guest speakers will relate the concepts of decision processes and behavioral economics to applied problems in their area of expertise. As part of the course there will be a theoretical or empirical term paper on the application of decision processes to each student's particular area of interest.

  • OIDD9920 - Conflict Mgmt Seminar

    This seminar exposes students to the central issues in conflict management research. This course covers both analytic and behavioral perspectives of conflict management, and describes how the field has developed. Through discussions of theory and empirical research, the course aims to develop a foundation for understanding the extant literature and how common methodological tools have shaped the types of questions conflict management scholars have investigated - and neglected.

Awards and Honors

  • Fellow, Academy of Management, (Elected, 2024)
  • Best Paper with Practical Implications in Managerial and Organizational Cognition, Academy of Management, 2022
  • Most Influential Paper Award in Conflict Management, Academy of Management, for articles published 2014-2017., 2022
  • Fellow, International Association for Conflict Management, (Elected 2022)
  • Cialdini Prize, Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference, 2019
  • Best Paper Award, Frank Prize for Research in Public Interest Communications, University of Florida, 2019
  • Academy of Management, Organizational Behavior Division, Mentoring Award, 2018
  • Best Paper Award, IACM Conference, 2018
  • Bright Idea Award, Sponsored by the Stillman School of Business, Seton Hall University, 2017
  • Best Empirical Paper Award, IACM Conference, 2015
  • Best Conference Empirical Paper, International Association for Conflict Management, 2015
  • Finalist for the Exeter Prize in Experimetnal Economics, 2012 Description

    Pope, D. & Schweitzer, M. Is Tiger Woods loss averse? Persistent bias in the face of experience, competition, and high stakes. American Economic Review

    This paper was one of five finalists for the 2012 Exeter Prize for the best paper published in the previous year in Experimental Economics, Behavioral Economics, and Decision Theory.

  • IACM, Best Conference Paper with a Student as First Author, 2010 Description

    Brooks, A. & Schweitzer, M. (2011). Can Nervous Nelly negotiate? How anxiety causes negotiators to make low first offers, exit early, and earn less profit. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 115(1), 43-54.

    This paper won the Best Conference Paper with a Student as First Author Award at the International Association for Conflict Management Conference, 2010.

  • Excellence in Teaching Award for MBA Teaching, Wharton School, 2010
  • Best Paper Award for the Conflict Management Division at the Academy of Management Conference, 2008 Description

    The paper (co-authored with Francesca Gino) is “In the Mood for Advice: The Influence of Emotions on Advice Taking.”

  • Best Empirical Paper Award in Conflict Management, AoM, 2003 Description

    Dunn, J. & Schweitzer, M. (2005). Feeling and believing: The influence of emotion on trust. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88

    This paper won the Best Empirical Paper Award in the Conflict Management Division at the Academy of Management, August 2003. A short version of this paper was published in the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, August 2003.

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Maurice Schweitzer, Krueger, K. Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney (Forthcoming), Negotiation.
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