These papers are working drafts of research which often appear in final form in academic journals. The published versions may differ from the working versions provided here.
SSRN Research Paper Series
The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.
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A Simple Threshold Captures the Social Learning of Conventions
A persistent puzzle throughout the cognitive and social sciences is how people manage to learn social conventions from the sparse and noisy behavioral data of diverse actors, without explicit instruction. Here, we show that the dominant theories…
Emergent Directedness in Social Contagion
An enduring challenge in contagion theory is that the pathways contagions follow through social networks exhibit emergent complexities that are difficult to predict using network structure. Here, we address this challenge by developing a causal…
Beyond Recognition: Evaluating Visual Perspective Taking in Vision Language Models
We investigate the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to perform visual perspective taking using a novel set of visual tasks inspired by established human tests. Our approach leverages carefully controlled scenes, in which a single humanoid…
Predicting Expert Evaluations in Software Code Reviews
Manual code reviews are an essential but time-consuming part of software development, often leading reviewers to prioritize technical issues while skipping valuable assessments. This paper presents an algorithmic model that automates aspects of…
Generative AI Meets Open-Ended Survey Responses: Participant Use of AI and Homogenization
The growing popularity of generative AI tools presents new challenges for data quality in online surveys and experiments. This study examines participants’ use of large language models to answer open-ended survey questions and describes empirical…
Politicians’ Use of National Identity Rhetoric on Social Media Predicts Engagement and Electoral Success
Politicians invest heavily in social media to amplify narratives about their nations, but the effectiveness of such approaches remains unclear. Analyzing 758,222 posts from US and UK politicians on X (formerly Twitter), we found that right-wing…
Autonomous Strategic Behavior, Organizational Learning and Top Management Support: Re-Examining Field Research with Computational Modeling
Re-examining field research findings about three critical episodes in Intel Corporation’s evolution we find that when autonomous strategic behavior significantly increased relevant organizational knowledge Intel top management provided sustained…
Evaluating Language Model Agency through Negotiations
We introduce an approach to evaluate language model (LM) agency using negotiation games. This approach better reflects real-world use cases and addresses some of the shortcomings of alternative LM benchmarks. Negotiation games enable us to study…
Fading Corporate Survival Prospects: Impact of Co-selection Bias in Resource Allocation on Strategic Intent
Research Summary: Our field study of new business development in a German-based global pharmaceutical company reveals that the emergence of co-selection bias in project-level state-gate resource allocation engendered a corporate-…
The Sociology of Interpretation
Recent years have seen a growing sociological interest in meaning. In fact, some argue that sociology cannot confront its foundational questions without addressing meaning. Yet sociologists mean many things when they talk about meaning. We…
Exposure to the Views of Opposing Others with Latent Cognitive Differences Results in Social Influence — But Only When Those Differences Remain Obscured
Cognitive differences can catalyze social learning through the process of one-to-one social influence. Yet the learning benefits of exposure to the ideas of cognitively dissimilar others often fail to materialize. Why do cognitive differences…
Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We tested several language models using 40 classic false-…
Culture in Large and Small Organizations: Perceptions, Beliefs and Experiences
We attempt here to make some progress on developing a fuller understanding of the relationship between organizational size and culture. In doing so, we report on a survey we administered to a sample of full-time workers (men and women) in the US…
Imagined Otherness: Perceived Schematic Difference Can Fuel Dehumanization
Why do people withdraw the dignity of humanity from others? Sociologists have focused on the roles of institutional processes through which blatantly dehumanizing norms and narratives diffuse through a population, whereas social psychologists…
Locally Ensconced and Globally Integrated: How Positions in Network Structure Relate to a Language-Based Model of Group Identification
Shifting attachments to social groups are a constant in the modern era. What accounts for variation in the strength of group identification? Whereas prior work has emphasized group-level properties and individual differences, this article instead…
Strategic Behavior with Tight, Loose and Polarized Norms
Descriptive norms — the behavior of other individuals in one’s reference group — play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on average behavior.…
The Power of Public Confession: Mobilization and Reputation Effects of Disclosing Socially Irresponsible Performance
A core assumption in the impression management literature is that organizations voluntarily disclose information about their positive social and environmental activities, policies, and performance in order to improve or maintain their reputation…
Gender and Culture in Organizations: Perceptions, Beliefs and Experiences
Our efforts here represent an exploratory attempt to make some progress on developing a fuller understanding of gender and organizational culture. In doing so, we report on a wide-ranging survey we administered to a sample of full-time workers (…
Where the Blame Lies: Unpacking Groups Shifts Judgments of Blame in Intergroup Conflict
Whom do individuals blame for intergroup conflict? Do people attribute responsibility for intergroup conflict to the in-group or the out-group? Theoretically integrating the literatures on intergroup relations, moral psychology, and judgment and…
Designs for Corporate Venture Capital: Emergence of a Hybrid Structural Orientation
Combining qualitative survey and in-depth field research, we present a new typology of corporate venture capital (CVC) designs that highlights a hybrid CVC structural orientation to advance understanding of the process of integrating externally…