Research
Culture
Dr. Savani’s research identifies the basic psychological tendencies that help people learn the norms of other cultures. He found that people who get stressed out more easily, are high in implicit intelligence, and engage in metacognition are faster at learning how to act in an appropriate manner in new cultural settings.
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Stress and sociocultural learning: Individuals with more stress-reactive physiologies are quicker to learn diverse sociocultural norms from experiential feedback
Madan, S., Savani, K., Phua, D., Hong, Y.-Y., & Morris, M. W. (2025). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Experiential learning of cultural norms: The role of implicit and explicit cognitive aptitudes
Savani, K., Morris, M. W., Fincher, K., Lu, J., & Kaufman, S. B. (2022). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123(2), 272-291.
Diversity
Dr. Savani’s research identifies ways to increase diversity without mentioning “DEI” or related constructs. He does so using two routes. One approach is by changing how options are presented so as to nudge hiring managers to consider qualified candidates from under-represented groups. For example, if resumes of men and women applicants are put into separate folders, hiring managers are more likely to interview a better balance of men and women even though they have full choice about who to interview.
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Let’s choose one of each: Using the partition dependence bias to increase diversity in hiring decisions
Feng, Z., Liu, Y., Wang, Z, & Savani, K. (2020). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 158, 11-26.
• Winner, Responsible Research in Management Award, Academy of Management
Choice
Dr. Savani has conceptualized a new construct, the “choice mindset.” Although scholars had extensively studied what people choose, they assumed that what counts as a choice is an objective fact. Dr. Savani documented that given the same number of options, people vary in whether they perceive that they have a choice. He identified numerous implications of the choice mindset, including positive consequences for the self (such as a sense of strength and independence, increased employee voice, and better decision-making) but negative consequences for society (such as harsher social judgments, reduced social responsibility, and the illusion of control).
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The salience of choice reduces social responsibility: Evidence from lab experiments and compliance with Covid-19 stay-at-home orders
Wang, Y., & Savani, K. (2022). PNAS Nexus, 1(4), pgac200.
The salience of choice fuels independence: Implications for self-perception, cognition, and behavior
Nanakdewa, K. A., Madan, S., Savani, K., & Markus, H. R. (2021). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(30), e2021727118.
Decision-making
Most decision-making researchers have focused on identifying the many ways in which people’s decisions deviate from rationality. Dr. Savani, in contrast, has focused on how we can help people make more rational decisions. He has identified being in a choice mindset and evaluating all options simultaneously as two key mechanisms for improved decision making.
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Choosing not to get anchored: A choice mindset reduces the anchoring bias
Savani, K. & Wadhwa, M. (2024). Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 112, Article 104575.
Choosing among options presented sequentially versus simultaneously
Basu, S., & Savani, K. (2019). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28, 97-101.
Mindsets
Mindsets are people’s beliefs about the nature of human characteristics, such as intelligence, personality, and morality. Dr. Savani has conceptualized a new construct, the “universal-nonuniversal mindsets about potential,” that is, whether people believe that nearly everyone or only a few people have high potential in a given domain. He found that if managers have a universal mindset about intellectual potential, they are more likely to support affirmative action for under-represented groups, and if they have a universal mindset about leadership potential, they show less gender bias.
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Reducing gender bias in perceptions of leadership capability and leader selection: Role of managers’ implicit theories about the universality of leadership potential
Liu, Z., Rattan, A., & Savani, K. (2023). Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(12), 1924–1951.
Computational social science
Many social scientists use machine learning methods for prediction, and when they use machine learning to provide explanations for social phenomena, they just assume that the machine learning-provided explanation is correct. Dr. Savani and his collaborators were the first in social science to use machine learning to build a predictive model, unravel the model to generate hypotheses, and then test the hypotheses using experiments.
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Using machine learning to generate novel hypotheses: Increasing optimism about Covid-19 makes people less willing to justify unethical behaviors
Sheetal, A., Feng, Z., & Savani, K. (2020). Psychological Science, 31, 1222-1235.
• Featured in The New York Times