Advancing Primed Goal Research in Organizational Behavior

In an era when humility and connection are vital for peace and sustainability, many leaders in business and government fall short by prioritizing their self-interest over ethics. Business schools, as key institutions shaping future leaders, may inadvertently reinforce this imbalance. To shift this lean toward self-interest, we propose a listening-focused pedagogy to cultivate humility and character in business school students. High-quality listening fosters interpersonal connection and promotes complex reasoning. Complex reasoning about oneself and others is a cornerstone of humility, which is central to morality and business ethics. We hypothesized that acquiring listening skills would enhance both high-quality listening and humility. To test this, we conducted a longitudinal quasi-experiment over four academic years (2018–2021) with data from 260 MBA students. Our findings show that the listening-focused course significantly increased students' listening skills and humility compared to control courses. These results demonstrate the course’s potential to have a meaningful influence on the character development of business students. We conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications for business ethics education, offering our materials to support replication and the broader application of this pedagogy

Purchasing decisions are increasingly based on reviews by fellow consumers which often consist of positive and negative evaluations about the product (i.e. valence- inconsistency). We tested how the vividness of these reviews affects individuals' attitude ambivalence towards the product and their strategies to cope with this ambivalence. We hypothesized that reading vivid and valence-inconsistent reviews would lead to increased awareness of opposing features of attitudes towards the product (i.e. increased simultaneous accessibility) as compared to reading less vivid valence-inconsistent reviews. If this is indeed the case, individuals should feel more conflicted towards the attitude object (i.e. increased subjective ambivalence) and should be motivated to reduce it by using ambivalence-coping strategies, specifically (a) processing additional information that is congruent with their initial attitude and (b) delaying their decision. These hypotheses were mostly supported across five experiments. The experiments included manipulations of valence-inconsistent information between reviews and within a review including three pre- registered studies (Ns = 247, 396, 701, 433, 313, respectively).