Papers/Projects

Risqué Business? Humor in the Post-#MeToo Era 

#MeToo has undoubtedly triggered profound, positive effects for employees and organizations by increasing awareness of sexual harassment and empowering employees to speak up about it. However, it might have also created a backlash by making it more difficult for men and women to work with each other. Thus, we tested humor as a proactive, interpersonal intervention. In a series of experiments, results showed that a short, positive pun decreases intergroup anxiety for women, but increases it for men, when sexual harassment concerns are salient. Although this is the first study to our knowledge that reveals negative effects of positive humor for men, it seems that men's humor signals the very behaviors that trigger much of this post-#MeToo anxiety in the first place: flirtatious, promiscuous, and harassing behavior. Forthcoming in Journal of Applied Psychology.

Your Pain is My Gain? Schadenfreude and Workplace Mistreatment

Although we tend to assume that after witnessing workplace mistreatment, observers feel angry towards perpetrators and sadness or empathy with the victims. However, one employee’s pain can also facilitate another employee’s gain. In this theoretical paper, we outline the conditions under which a colleague’s social mistreatment at work can facilitate a person’s professional goals, triggering schadenfreude (i.e., pleasure in another’s pain), and potentially propagating more workplace mistreatment. See here for the published paper.

What Works to Reduce Algorithm Anxiety at Work?

Article here funded by the University of Zurich Digital Society Initiative (in German).