Risk-taking can fuel innovation and growth, but it can also have devastating consequences for individuals and organizations. Here we examine whether risk-taking affords social-hierarchical benefits to risk-takers. Specifically, we investigate how risk-taking influences perceived dominance, prestige, and the willingness to endorse risk-takers' leadership. Integrating insights from costly signaling theory and the dominance/ prestige framework of social rank, we theorized that risk-taking increases leadership endorsement to the degree that it fuels perceptions of prestige, but decreases leadership endorsement to the degree that it fuels perceptions of dominance. However, we also hypothesized that risk-induced perceptions of dominance do translate into leadership endorsement in competitive (rather than cooperative) intergroup settings. We tested these hypotheses in four studies involving different samples, methods, and operationalizations. In Study 1, participants performed an implicit association test (IAT) that revealed that people associate risk with leader positions, and safety with follower positions. Study 2 was a longitudinal field survey conducted during the September 2019 Israeli elections, which showed that voters' perceptions of politicians' risk-taking propensities prior to the elections positively predicted perceived dominance and prestige as well as voting behavior during the elections. Finally, Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that people are willing to support risktakers as leaders in the context of competitive (as opposed to cooperative) intergroup situations, because perceived dominance positively predicts leadership endorsement in competitive (but not cooperative) intergroup settings. We discuss implications for understanding the social dynamics of organizational rank and the perpetuation of risky behavior in organizations, politics, and society at large.

This review argues that implicit theories of malleability are essential constructs for the study of intergroup dynamics. As one of people's core meaning-making tools, mindsets about malleability shed light on the mechanisms behind perceivers' tendency to stereotype and feel prejudiced towards targets, as well as on the mechanisms underlying targets' ability to shield against, and potentially confront, perceivers' social bias. In addition to illuminating crossgroup interaction dynamics between individuals, mindsets contribute to explaining the harmful processes at play in real-world protracted conflicts, and suggest interventions that may help lay the ground for peace processes. This review also aims to highlight areas of research that remain open for further investigation, or that have been overlooked to date. We argue that research integrating mindsets and intergroup relations will advance to our understanding of intergroup dynamics, as well as possibly offering insights on how to improving them, and that this approach will also further the study of lay theories of malleability.3

Many organizations offer justifications for why diversity matters, that is, organizational diversity cases. We investigated their content, prevalence, and consequences for underrepresented groups. We identified the business case, an instrumental rhetoric claiming that diversity is valuable for organizational performance, and the fairness case, a noninstrumental rhetoric justifying diversity as the right thing to do. Using an algorithmic classification, Study 1 (N = 410) found that the business case is far more prevalent than the fairness case among the Fortune 500. Extending theories of social identity threat, we next predicted that the business case (vs. fairness case, or control) undermines underrepresented groups' anticipated sense of belonging to, and thus interest in joining organizations-an effect driven by social identity threat. Study 2 (N = 151) found that LGBTQ+ professionals randomly assigned to read an organization's business (vs. fairness) case anticipated lower belonging, and in turn, less attraction to said organization. Study 3 (N = 371) conceptually replicated this experiment among female (but not male) Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) job seekers. Study 4 (N = 509) replicated these findings among STEM women, and documented the hypothesized process of social identity threat. Study 5 (N = 480) found that the business (vs. fairness and control) case similarly undermines African American students' belonging. Study 6 (N = 1,019) replicated Study 5 using a minimal manipulation, and tested these effects' generalizability to Whites. Together, these findings suggest that despite its seeming positivity, the most prevalent organizational diversity case functions as a cue of social identity threat that paradoxically undermines belonging across LGBTQ+ individuals, STEM women, and African Americans, thus hindering organizations' diversity goals.

Conventional wisdom suggests that progress for women in the domain of top leadership representation will naturally spread to other domains of gender inequality, whether in organizations or beyond. Extending social-cognitive theories of exemplar-based information processing to the study of social progress perceptions for stigmatized groups, we theorized that perceiving substantial female representation in top leadership may instead reduce people's concern with ongoing gender inequality in other domains. Study 1 (N ϭ 331) finds that perceiving greater female representation in top corporate echelons decreases people's disturbance with the gender pay gap, but not with wealth inequality generally. Study 2a (N ϭ 350) and its replication Study 2b (N ϭ 1,098) present correlational evidence of the proposed psychological mechanism: an overgeneralization of women's access to equal opportunities. Study 3 (N ϭ 454) provides experimental evidence for this psychological process, tests attributions of the gender pay gap to women's personal career choices as an alternative mechanism, and introduces a control condition to determine the directionality of the effect. Study 4 (N ϭ 326) replicates and extends the basic effect across various domains of gender inequality within and outside of the workplace. Taken together, these studies highlight the importance of acknowledging the fragmented nature of social progress across domains of inequality, and highlight the psychological underpinnings of a previously overlooked potential barrier for progress toward gender equality.

An exploratory investigation of Americans' expression of gender bias before and after the 2016 presidential election.