Stéphane P. Francioli

Stéphane P. Francioli
  • Lecturer / Visiting Scholar

Contact Information

  • office Address:

    3109 SH-DH
    3620 Locust Walk
    Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: age diversity & intergenerational inequalities; gender diversity & gender inequalities; social hierarchies; interventions

Links: Personal Website, CV

Overview

Stéphane Francioli is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Visiting Lecturer in the Organizational Behavior subgroup of the Management Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research combines lab studies, archival data, quasi-experiments, text analyses, and field interventions to tackle issues of diversity, equality, and inclusion, particularly issues of age and gender inequalities. His work has been published in Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and the Handbook of the Psychology of Aging.

In one research stream, Stéphane investigates attitudes toward younger generations. In an aging world where young people are becoming a minority, his work sheds light on young-targeted ageism and its detrimental effects on the life experience and economic prospects of today’s younger generations.

In a second stream of work, Stéphane examines whether and how addressing gender inequalities at home helps reduce gender disparities at work. Reframing unfair division of domestic labor among dual earner couples as a socially tolerated form of free riding, he investigates how establishing more information transparency regarding each partner’s contribution at home helps attenuate gender inequalities in household and childcare duties and improve the work-life balance and productivity of female professionals.

Stéphane completed his doctoral training in the Management & Organizations department of the Leonard N. Stern, School of Business, at New York University. Before NYU, he was a Research Assistant at MIT Sloan and Harvard School of Education. He received a dual bachelor degree in International Trade and Finance (Honors), a master’s degree in Management from the London Business School, and a masters degree in Management Science from MIT Sloan. Prior to his academic career, Stéphane also worked as a Business Analyst for the consumer goods industry.

Stéphane is a French native and he lives in the United States for close to 10 years. When he is not teaching or working on academic projects, he likes to play music, watch indie movies, read American classics, cook nice vegetarian meals for friends, and spend time with his wife and three year-old son.

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Research

  • Stéphane P. Francioli and Michael S. North (2021), Youngism: the content, causes, and consequences of prejudices toward younger adults, Journal of Experimental Psychology General.

    Abstract: Research on ageism has focused largely on perceptions of and biases targeting older adults, implicitly assuming that age-based stigma increases throughout the life span and that young adults benefit from favorable views relative to their older counterparts. In a series of eight studies (N = 2,323), we provide evidence to the contrary. We theorize that, in sharp contrast with ageism toward older adults, which revolves around fear and discomfort with the target’s later life stage, youngism (i.e., ageism toward young adults) is primarily generationally focused, aiming at contemporaneous generations of young adults rather than young adults in general. Consistent with this theorizing, we find that today’s young adults are ascribed a mixed stereotype content (Study 1a–1c), subject to harsher social judgments than both older age groups (Study 2) and recollections of former generations at the same age (Study 3a and 3b), and victim of discriminatory behaviors (Study 4 and 5). By comprehensively documenting cognitive, emotional, and behavioral evidence of youngism, the present work challenges the idea that ageism only reflects a plight of later-life aging. Instead, we show not only that ageism can target other age groups but also that the nature and content of ageism vary across the life span.

  • Stéphane P. Francioli and Michael S. North (2021), The older worker: gender and age discrimination in the workplace, Handbook of the Psychology of Aging.

  • Jonathan Lane, Samuel Ronfard, Stéphane P. Francioli, Paul Harris (2016), Children’s imagination and belief: prone to flights of fancy or grounded in reality?, Cognition, 152, pp. 127-140.

    Abstract: Children ranging from 4 to 8 years (n = 39) reported whether they could imagine various improbable phenomena (e.g., a person making onion juice) as well as various impossible phenomena (e.g., a person turning an onion into a banana) and then described what they imagined. In their descriptions, children mentioned ordinary causes much more often than extraordinary causes. Descriptions of such ordinary causes were provided more often in relation to improbable (rather than impossible) phenomena. Following these imaginative efforts, children judged if each phenomenon could really happen. To check whether these reality judgments were affected by children’s attempts to imagine, a control group (n = 39) made identical reality judgments but were not first prompted to imagine each phenomenon. Children across the age range judged that impossible phenomena cannot really happen but, with increasing age, judged that improbable phenomena can happen. This pattern emerged in both the imagination and control groups; thus simply prompting children to imagine did not alter their reality judgments. However, within the imagination group, judgments that phenomena can really happen were associated with children’s claims to have successfully imagined the phenomena and with certain characteristics of their descriptions: imagining ordinary causes and imagining phenomena obtain. Results highlight close links between imagination and reality judgments in childhood. Contrary to the notion that young children have a rich imagination that readily defies reality, results indicate that their imagination is grounded in reality, as are their beliefs.

  • Stéphane P. Francioli, Felix Danbold, Michael S. North (Under Review), Intergroup Threat and Intergenerational conflict.

  • Stéphane P. Francioli, Jon M. Jachimowicz, Michael S. North (Working), Precocity threat: exposure to younger, more successful colleagues undermines job performance and career engagement.

  • Jean-Nicolas Reyt, Batia M. Wiesenfeld, Stéphane P. Francioli (Working), Seeing the forest and the trees: signals of construal level ambidexterity and venture funding success.

Teaching

Activity

Latest Research

Stéphane P. Francioli and Michael S. North (2021), Youngism: the content, causes, and consequences of prejudices toward younger adults, Journal of Experimental Psychology General.
All Research