Polly (she/they) is currently a postdoctoral scholar at INSEAD. She holds a Ph.D. in Operations, Information, and Decisions from Wharton, an M.A. in Statistics from Wharton, and a B.S./B.A. in Economics and Public Policy from Duke.
She theorizes and tests how feelings drive decisions in negotiations and organizations, and how people can lead more productive, generous, and fulfilling lives. In particular, most of her work combines massive datasets with cutting-edge quantitative tools (from statistics, econometrics, and machine learning) to identify how contextual factors causally influence motivation and behavior in natural field settings, using natural field experiments and quasi-experiments.
Her research is published in top academic outlets such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and has been covered by major media outlets such as TIME.​
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Selected Awards:
Conflict Management Division Best Paper Award for Conflict in Context at Academy of Management 2024
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Conflict Management Division Top Paper Award (Overall) at Academy of Management 2021
Recently featured:
https://time.com/6990595/workers-quitting-task-sequencing-essay/
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https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/a-simple-intervention-that-can-reduce-turnover/
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@pollykangtweets
Selected Working Papers:
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Kang, P., & Daniels, D. P. More Need, Less Help: Major Disasters Create A Supply-Demand Paradox In Organizational Prosocial Behavior. Revise and Resubmit at Organization Science.
Daniels, D. P. & Kang, P. Massive field quasi-experiments with continuous treatment variables reveal inverted-U causal links between mood and prosocial decisions. Revise and Resubmit at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bitterly, T. B., Kang, P., & Schweitzer, M. E. The Valence of Power. Revise and Resubmit at Management Science.
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Selected Publications:
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Kang, P. Daniels, D., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2022). The streak-end rule: How past experiences shape decisions about future behaviors in a large-scale natural field experiment with volunteer crisis counselors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204460119
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Decisions about future behaviors are clearly shaped by the content of past experiences, but whether the order of past experiences matters remains controversial. By analyzing the largest field experiment about prosocial behavior to date, a natural field experiment involving 14,383 volunteer crisis counselors over five years, we examine how the content and order of past experiences causally influence decisions about future behaviors – whether individuals continue volunteering or quit. Volunteers were repeatedly and randomly assigned to perform 1,976,649 prosocial behaviors that were either harder (suicide conversations) or easier (non-suicide conversations). We found that the content of past experiences mattered: Harder (versus easier) behaviors encouraged quitting. However, the order of past experiences mattered far beyond their content alone: Harder behaviors caused disproportionately more quitting if they came in long “streaks” or at the “end.” These “streak”/“end” effects reveal important practical insights for leaders and policymakers seeking to boost prosocial behavior. For instance, a simple reordering intervention – assigning behaviors so as to avoid creating hard “streaks” – would reduce volunteer quitting rates by at least 22% (more than double the impact of previous behavioral interventions), boosting prosocial behavior and likely saving lives.
Kang, P. & Schweitzer, M. (2022). Emotional Deception in Negotiation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 173, 104193.
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2022.104193
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We investigate perceptions of emotional deception and introduce a novel distinction between the Up-display of emotion (the fabricated and the exaggerated expression of emotions) and the Down-display of emotion (the suppression of felt emotions). Observers judge Down-displays of anger, sadness, and happiness as more ethical (less deceptive, less intentional, and less harmful) than commensurate Up-displays. We integrate these findings to build a unifying framework of perceptions of deception, the Deception Perception Model, to assert that perceptions of deception are influenced by Deception Intention, Deception Magnitude, Consequences of Deception, Contextual Norms of Deception, and Deception Discovery.