No abstract

People spend a substantial portion of their lives engaged in conversation, and yet, our scientific understanding of conversation is still in its infancy. Here, we introduce a large, novel, and multimodal corpus of 1656 conversations recorded in spoken English. This 7+ million word, 850-hour corpus totals more than 1 terabyte of audio, video, and transcripts, with moment-to-moment measures of vocal, facial, and semantic expression, together with an extensive survey of speakers’ postconversation reflections. By taking advantage of the considerable scope of the corpus, we explore many examples of how this large-scale public dataset may catalyze future research, particularly across disciplinary boundaries, as scholars from a variety of fields appear increasingly interested in the study of conversation.

Conflict of interest: Given the results of this paper do not position BetterUp to profit or gain in any material sense, we do not feel the fact that the authors were paid by the sponsoring institution constitutes a conflict of interest.Data availability: The data necessary to reproduce results presented herein are publicly available at osf.io/ew9cq.We have adhered to the APA guidelines in preparing the manuscript, and complied with the APA ethical standards in the treatment of research participants. This research was IRB approved by Ethical and Independent Review Services (E&I) under protocol #18164-03.

Data & code availability: All data from the present survey (including data not reported or discussed), data dictionary, and code to reproduce the present article are available at osf.io/6huqr/.

We present initial evidence for a novel social psychological phenomenon we call the innovator’s bias: the tendency for innovators to focus mainly on the positive potential impact of their inventions and to neglect, ignore, or downplay any potential negative impact. Three studies simulated innovating by presenting participants with hypothetical new inventions. Feelings of ownership were manipulated by having some participants role-play being marketing manager, including naming the product, devising advertising slogans, and identifying target demographics for potential purchasers. Owners then rated their product, while non-owner controls rated a different product. Study 1 (n = 495) demonstrated the innovator’s bias by showing that owners rated the likely consequences of their product more favorably than non-owners did. Owners also displayed more enthusiastic zeal for their product. Study 2 (N = 553) tested interventions aimed at reducing the bias while preserving the zeal. Of six interventions, the most successful was having owners imagine the worst-case scenario involving the most negative outcome that the invention could cause. Study 3 (N = 560) was a preregistered replication of the main findings from Study 2.