Sally Blount

Northwestern University | NU · Kellogg School of Management

Temporal perspective refers to a specific point of view or attitude that an actor holds about time.

As work in organizations becomes more fluid and fast-paced, the effective execution of tasks often requires people to be temporally adaptable in working with others. This paper brings to light the importance of understanding how people relate to time in the context of social interactions. By integrating the research on time and social motives, we d...

Most research on time at the individual level has focused on how people differ in their response to non-relational cues about time. Yet, as work becomes more fluid and fast-paced, the effective execution of tasks often requires people to be temporally adaptable in their interactions with others. This paper brings to light the importance of understa...

This article examines how performance in intercultural workplace interactions can be compromised even in the absence of overt prejudice. The authors show that individuals respond differently to nonverbal behavioral mirroring cues exhibited in workplace interactions, depending on their cultural group membership. In a field study with experienced man...

George Loewenstein is one of the pioneers of the rapidly growing field of behavioral economics. For over twenty years he has been working at the intersection of economics and psychology and is one of the few people of whom it can be said that their work is equally respected and well known within both disciplines. This book brings together a selecti...

This chapter draws from psychological and organizational research to develop a conceptual model of individual temporality in the workplace. We begin by outlining several general cognitive and motivational aspects of human temporal processing, emphasizing its reliance on (a) contextual cues for temporal perception and (b) cognitive reference points...

This article examines the perceptual and behavioral dynamics underlying intercultural interactions at work. Specifically, this paper studies how culture-based differences in relational attunement differentially affect how U.S. Anglos and U.S. Latinos perceive workplace interactions. In a field experiment conducted at a Fortune 500 headquarters, Ang...

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically d...

Conference presentations covered a broad range of topics. For example, Brett, Weingart and Olekans presented work that examines patterns in how group negotiations unfold over time; while Chen, Blount and Sanchez-Burks explored how group status structures influence how members align the pace of their tasks within a group. Zellmer-Bruhn, Waller and A...

Drawing from findings in sociology and anthropology on time as a symbol of status, this paper examines the role that status differentials affect how group members internally align the pace of their activities over time (group synchronization). We examine the psychological process of group synchronization from the perspective of the individual, the...

How do managers value the knowledge that they encounter in organizations? A rational perspective assumes that managers carefully and accurately cull the best knowledge from their environments, while a random model situates managers in a chaotic organization, filled with preferences and solutions that are temporally matched. This paper develops a th...

Public opinion research shows that most people espouse egalitarian ideals and acknowledge substantial income inequality in society, but they consistently perceive the economic system to be highly fair and legitimate. In an attempt to better understand this paradox by considering the cognitive and motivational bases of ideological support for the fr...

This paper draws from research on the phenomenology of how people experience time to examine how groups internally synchronize their work. We begin by reviewing the current paradigm on group temporal alignment, derived from biological and physical principles of entrainment. We argue that despite its many strengths, the greatest weakness of entrainm...

We examine the dynamics of temporal responsiveness - the ability of organizational actors to adapt the timing of their activities to unanticipated events. We review a broad body of psychological, economic, sociological, anthropological, and organizational research to introduce a reference point model of how people perceive and evaluate time in orga...

There are two schools of thought on how network structures create the competitive advantage known as social capital. One school focuses on the advantages of closure. A network is closed to the extent that people in it are connected by strong relationships. Typical forms of closure are dense networks in which everyone is connected to everyone else,...

This paper studies negotiation slowdowns and the role of impatience. Specifically, it predicts and finds that when negotiators with explicit pacing preferences encounter unwanted delays, they often experience negative emotional responses and over-react behaviorally. Study 1 finds that fast-paced negotiators, who experience unwanted delays, systemat...

The popular notion that markets are “fair” is wrong. Working from theory and behavioral research, the author examines the foundations of markets and their relationship to negotiations. In the process, she demonstrates that there is nothing inherently fair about supply and demand curves or market clearing prices. Although market price information ma...

This article introduces the study of frame choice in negotiation. Here, the selection of a procedural frame is treated as a dependent variable-a choice that bargainers make in addition to determining their offers. The empirical focus of the article is on whether, when given a choice between two alternative versions of the ultimatum bargaining game,...

Arguably, all judgments and decisions are made in 1 (or some combination) of 2 basic evaluation modes-joint evaluation mode (JE), in which multiple options are presented simultaneously and evaluated comparatively, or separate evaluation mode (SE), in which options are presented in isolation and evaluated separately. This article reviews recent lite...

This paper explores the consequences of cognitive dissonance, coupled with time-inconsistent preferences, in an intertemporal decision problem with two distinct goals: acting decisively on early information (vision) and adjusting flexibly to late information (flexibility). The decision maker considered here is capable of manipulating information to...

The term procedural frames is introduced and defined as different representations of structurally equivalent allocation processes. Study 1 compared 2 well-known games, sequential social dilemmas and ultimatum bargaining, that share the same structure: Player 1 creates an allocation of a resource and Player 2 decides whether to allow it or deny it....

This paper explores the consequences of cognitive dissonance, coupled with time-inconsistent preferences, in an intertemporal decision problem with two distinct goals: acting decisively on early information (vision) and adjusting flexibly to late information (flexibility). The decision maker considered here is capable of manipulating information to...

This paper develops a social cognitive, reference point model of two-party price negotiations. The theoretical focus is on the role that reference points play as a means of calibration in the individual negotiator's decision processes and as a means of social influence in bargaining. Three studies are presented which examine how reference points ba...

Building upon recent models of social utility theory, this paper outlines a theoretical framework for examining the effect of causal attributions on choice in social decision making. The results of three empirical studies are reported, which identify two dimensions of external attribution that affect how individuals weight absolute versus comparati...

briefly [review] 3 prominent social psychological theories of relationships as we develop a model of how social context affects negotiation behavior / in this model, we assert that a critical mediating variable between social context and cooperative behavior is the degree to which a party perceives him- or herself to have an affinity with another i...

The following paper offers both a framework and empirical test of the importance of negotiators′ aspiration levels and settlement expectancies on negotiated outcomes. In particular, we demonstrate that, in the presence of a stable bargaining zone, negotiators′ aspirations significantly affect negotiated outcomes. Further, we find that asymmetries i...

Three competing predictors of price are manipulated in a two-party distributive negotiation. These include prevailing market prices, negotiator reservation prices, and negotiator aspirations. We offer a cognitive interpretation of how each type of information is incorporated into the negotiator′s thought processes as an alternative cognitive refere...

This article applies a market mechanism derived from principles of welfare economics to a social dilemma simulation in the laboratory. In Study 1, half of the five-person groups were offered the opportunity to voluntarily "buy-out" one or more group members in an effort to conserve a shared, scarce resource. Most groups offered the intervention ach...

This article introduces network analysis as a supplement to current research on the process of negotiations. We briefly review the literature on negotiations involving third parties, and argue that to understand fully the dynamics of dispute resolution, it is important to examine processes in addition to outcomes. We propose social network methods...

This paper identifies a systematic instability in the weight that people place on interpersonal comparisons of outcomes. When evaluating the desirability of a single outcome consisting of a payoff for oneself and another person, people display great concern for relative payoffs. However, when they choose between two or more outcomes, their choices...

This paper considers agents assisting a negotiation as self-interested third parties. The information principals share with agents is argued to affect the outcomes of negotiations. In a laboratory study simulating a real estate transaction, the agent's knowledge of the buyer's and seller's reservation prices is manipulated. Communication between th...

This paper examines the tendency of group members to form coalitions when the effects of such behavior are harmful to the larger group. The groups under study must distribute a limited pool of resources among members in a social dilemma situation. If coalitions are formed, the resource is replenished at lower rate than if coalitions are not formed....

Recent studies have shown that many mathematical models have failed to meet their design specifications when used for policy decisions. In response, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) has proposed an approach for evaluating large-scale models. The authors of this article argue that the GAO recommendations avoid several critical issues. Specia...

Ph.D. (Organization Behavior)--Northwestern University, 1992.