Image of a desk with various office supplies.

Research

My main scholarly interests include social judgments, diversity, and discrimination, with a central focus on how decisions can be improved to reduce workplace inequality. More broadly, these lines of research are motivated by three objectives:
  • To identify how individuals deviate from making accurate social judgments in various areas of organizational life.
  • To determine the various factors that contribute to the emergence of discriminatory behavior in the workplace.
  • To uncover tools and techniques that allow for greater accuracy in judgment and fairness in decision-making.
To examine the complexities of discrimination and social judgments, I draw from theory and techniques from organizational behavior, psychology, economics, and judgment and decision-making. In my view, taking a multidisciplinary approach deepens and extends the cumulative knowledge on these subjects, helping inform solutions to organizational practices in the process. I am also interested in examining practices that improve the quality and transparency of research methods. Below is a brief overview of my primary areas of research and related publications:

Image of 2 business men sitting together commenting on a woman sitting alone.
 

Discrimination

 

How can workplace interventions best tap into the mechanisms that underlie bias? Which organizational norms reinforce discriminatory outcomes and how can these be changed to mitigate them instead?

 

Social Judgment

 

What organizational aspects influence the precision of social judgments? Which contextual and individual aspects impact the accuracy of metaperceptions in professional settings?

Image of 2 women staring and making judgements of each other.
Image of a person holding a digital outline of a brain.
 

Metascience

 

How can measurement instruments be improved? What research practices best support scientific quality and transparency?

 

Publications

 

Costa, E. (2024). Examining the effectiveness of interventions to reduce discriminatory behavior at work: An attitude dimension consistency perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology.  Editor's Choice https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/apl0001215.

Costa, E., Inbar, Y., & Tannenbaum, D. (2022). Do Registered Reports Make Scientific Findings More Believable to the Public?. Collabra: Psychology, 8(1).[PDF]

Tenney, E., Costa, E. & Watson, R., (2021, June 16). Why Business Schools Need to Teach Experimentation. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2021/06/why-business-schools-need-to-teach-experimentation.

Tenney, E., Costa, E., Allard, A., & Vazire, S. (2020). Open Science and Reform Practices in Organizational Behavior Research over Time (2011 to 2019). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 162, 218-223. [PDF]

Contributions to Crowd-Sourced Research Collaborations:

Schaerer, M., du Plessis, C., Nguyen, M. H. B., van Aert, R. C., Tiokhin, L., Lakens, D., ... & Gender Audits Forecasting Collaboration. (2023). On the trajectory of discrimination: A meta-analysis and forecasting survey capturing 44 years of field experiments on gender and hiring decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 179, 104280. [Member of the Gender Audits Forecasting Collaboration].

Fišar, M., Greiner, B., Huber, C., Katok, E., Ozkes, A., and the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration. (2023). Reproducibility in Management Science. Management Science. [Member of the Management Science Reproducibility Collaboration].