Prof. Yaniv Shani
Researcher & Scientist at Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University
About Me
My research focuses on how counterfactual emotions, anticipated or experienced, influence and bias behavioral choices. My research on information search identifies reasons that motivate people to search for useless information (e.g., why consumers compare prices of products purchased a while ago). My research about the psychological principles underpinning consumers’ economic behaviors, examines the repercussions of inserting an economic transaction mindset into a social relationship (i.e., mixing money and friendship). Finally, I seek to unravel the link between self-deception proclivities and consumers’ choices and explain how consumers justify the purchase of products they do not really need.
Selected Publications
The Pain of Suspecting and the Comforts of Knowing the Worst (Yaniv Shani & Marcel Zeelenberg)
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Current Opinion in Psychology
Highlights
• Avoiding information can delay emotional distress; seeking painful truths can provide closure and relieve uncertainty in social as well personal decisions.
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• Two Opposing Behaviors, One Emotional Goal: People avoid useful information and seek painful, useless information, both as strategies to manage emotional readiness and psychological needs.
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• Willful ignorance can be sustained as long as ambiguity enables individuals to preserve their moral self-image. Once that ambiguity collapses, the need to seek information arises as a way to restore psychological closure.
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• Decisions to search for or avoid information hinge on two psychological rules: Can I handle uncertainty and Can I handle the emotional cost of knowing?
Misaligned mindsets between borrowers and lenders of small interpersonal loans (Coby Morvinski & Yaniv Shani)
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Highlights
• Borrowers of small interpersonal loans think they should repay monies that lenders do not expect them to repay.
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• Borrowers of small interpersonal loans operate under exchange mindset and lenders operate under communal mindset.
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• Paradoxically, lenders (vs. borrowers) hold stronger memories of interpersonal loaning incidences.
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• The loan-repayment expectation gap may explain why many small interpersonal loans remain unpaid