About

Shereen J. Chaudhry is an Associate Professor of Behavioral Science and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her research focuses on the intersection of behavioral science and business, with a particular interest in conversation research, social influence, and decision-making.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Actuarial science
• Business
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Computer Security
• Philosophy
• Econometrics
• Advertising
• Internet privacy
• Finance
• Geography
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Telecommunications

Selected publications

• The downside of generosity: How rare giving fosters stronger social connection

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2026-03-20

  articleOpen access

  Giving serves not only to benefit others and society but also to foster social connections between givers and recipients. However, more giving is not necessarily merrier. This research finds that social connection depends not only on the act of giving but also on how many others receive the gesture from the same giver. Rare givers—those who give to fewer recipients—are perceived as more socially connected to each recipient than broad givers—those who give to many (the rare giving effect). This effect emerges across diverse contexts, including interpersonal gift exchanges in both new and existing relationships and corporate donations. As a result, rare givers enjoy a relational advantage: their gifts are valued more, and they are more likely to receive reciprocation (e.g., a gift in return or purchasing from the firm), even though they are perceived as less generous than broad givers. However, the negative effect of the number of recipients on perceived connection is attenuated when recipients are closely connected (e.g., donations to multiple charities supporting the same cause) or when gifts reinforce connections between recipients (e.g., friends sharing items in a matching set). These findings highlight an overlooked cost of broad generosity, with implications for managing interpersonal relationships and firms’ giving strategies.

  PublisherDOI

• The lesser of two evils: Explaining a bad choice by revealing the choice set

  2025-07-25

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Making the right choice sometimes involves selecting the “lesser of two evils,” and only seeing the chosen option can lead others to misunderstand the decision maker’s intentions. Are decision-makers intrinsically driven to fix this misjudgment by revealing the choice set? If so, why, and what is the effect on the audience? Previous studies could not examine this desire to be understood because the research designs did not isolate the decision to reveal information from the original choice. In two experiments (N=448 pairs), we show that people are willing to pay ex post to reveal their choice set to the recipient, even after a one-shot anonymous interaction with no reputational consequences, and in some cases even when doing so reveals their selfish intentions. We find that this revealing behavior is effective at improving recipients’ rating of their outcome when it signals generous intentions, but not when it signals selfish intentions. The choice to reveal is driven by concern for the beliefs of strangers, but only when revealing signals generous intentions; those who reveal a choice that appears selfish report doing so out of a desire to be or appear honest. And though some people leave a misunderstanding in place when it is self-enhancing to do so, almost no one is willing to create a misunderstanding (by hiding the other option), even when it could conceal selfish behavior.

  PublisherDOI

• Thinking About the Other Person in Conversations

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Good impressions play a vital role in organizational decisions, such as whom to hire, whom to affiliate with, and whom to avoid. A prominent way in which people form impressions is through conversations. This symposium brings together five presentations examining how conversation partners’ behaviors toward one another impact impressions and decisions. The first three presentations provide insights into the role of reply speed in impression management. Using both lab experiments and field data with over 6.7 million observations, Hart, VanEpps, Sezer, and Amir show that faster reply speeds increase hiring likelihood when replies are seen as authentic rather than automatic. Nguyen and Ames demonstrate communicators’ tendency to reply quickly in synchronous conversation impacts impressions of the speaker as a function of whether the judge is high or low on responsiveness, showing key individual differences in interpersonal evaluations. Gordon and Schweitzer examine reply speed in failures and find that excuses delivered before (vs. after) negative outcomes are evaluated more favorably. In the fourth presentation, Chen, Chaudhry, and VanEpps continue to explore impression management in failures and show that allocating (all or more) blame to oneself after joint failures increases warmth and does not hurt competence perceptions. Finally, Welker, Mahaphanit, Schmidt, Chang, and Hawkins explore how conversation topics impact people’s perception of shared alignment with their conversation partners and shape interpersonal dynamics. Taken together, this symposium highlights the importance of conversational behaviors for creating positive impressions, and their influence on conflict management and organizational outcomes. Too Slow to Hire? Reply Speed Penalties in Hiring Decisions Author: Einav Hart; George Mason University Author: Eric VanEpps; The University of Utah Author: Ovul Sezer; Cornell University Author: On Amir; University of California San Diego Perceiver and Target Effects of Blirtatiousness in Group Conversations Author: Christine Nguyen; Author: Daniel Ames; Columbia University in the City of New York Timing Is (Almost) Everything: Excuses Are More Effective When They Are Delivered Early Author: Alexis Gordon; University of Pennsylvania Author: Maurice Schweitzer; University of Pennsylvania My Bad or Your Bad? The Reputational Impacts of Claiming Blame After Joint Failures Author: Eva Yiyu Chen; University of Chicago Author: Shereen J. Chaudhry; University of Chicago Author: Eric VanEpps; The University of Utah When and Why Does Shared Reality Generalize? Author: Christopher Welker; Dartmouth College Author: Wasita Mahaphanit; Dartmouth College Author: Helen Schmidt; Temple University Author: Luke J. Chang; Dartmouth College Author: Robert Hawkins; Stanford University

  PublisherDOI

• Building Connections: How Our Words Shape Impressions and Relationships

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Effective communication is fundamental to organizations - it is essential for building relationships, improving individuals' performance and lower well-being. However, people often struggle to navigate communications to achieve the intended interpersonal outcomes, resulting in misunderstandings, conflicts, lower performance, and well-being. In this symposium, we bring together leading scholars in communication research to share their most recent works that unpack how the way we communicate influences our impressions and relationships. The papers focus on various aspects of communication, including content (i.e., what to say), the temporal dimension (i.e., when or whether to respond), and interpersonal outcomes (i.e., people's impressions of their communication partners). They draw on empirical research conducted with various methods including surveys, experiments, natural language processing methods, and machine learning to investigate communication phenomena in multiple settings. The findings provide deep insights into how people make judgments and decisions in communication and suggest effective interventions that can guide communications for more positive outcomes. Disagreement Gets Mistaken for Bad Listening Author: Zhiying Ren; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Author: Rebecca Schaumberg; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania The Psychology of Ghosting:Initiators’ and Responders’ Reactions to Ghosting in Online Communication Author: Sophia Li; Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley Author: Coral HY Zheng; Cambridge Judge Business School Author: Juliana Schroeder; U. of California, Berkeley More on You or Myself? The Role of Self-focus and Other-focus in Conversations Author: Yaoxi Shi; Imperial College London Author: Hanne Collins; Harvard U. Author: Shereen J. Chaudhry; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Trust Your Doctor? An Exploration of How Physicians Signal Trustworthiness through Natural Language Author: Bushra Sarah Guenoun; Harvard Business School Author: Julian Jake Zlatev; Harvard Business School

  PublisherDOI

• The credibility dilemma: When acknowledging a (perceived) lack of credibility can make a boast more believable

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2024-07-01 · 3 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Ignorance can be trustworthy: The effect of social self-awareness on trust.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2024-12-02 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  = 4,707) using online experiments, a recall study paradigm, and live interactions in a laboratory setting, we find support for this framework. We also show that when we constrain the extent to which people can infer a target's intentions toward others from their behaviors-by reducing the target's control over their own behavior or by reducing the impact of the target's actions on others-the effect of self-awareness on trust attenuates. Our findings suggest that self-awareness, though often considered a desirable quality, does not universally increase others' trust. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Resolving Conflict via Conversations: How Beliefs, Motives, and Expressions Shape Conflict Dynamics

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  To truly bring a conflict to an end, it is important for disputants to reconcile through conversations, yet navigating the discussion of conflict is not a trivial pursuit. This symposium brings together four presentations exploring how beliefs, motives, and the way people communicate about conflicts impact conflict resolution. In the first presentation, Yeomans and colleagues offer an important advance in methods for detecting linguistic features of conflict expression. Using real conflict conversations, they show the precision of their coding manual and Natural Language Processing model in forecasting conflict dynamics and provide empirical support for conflict expression theory. In the second presentation, Chen and Chaudhry examine a novel psychological motive in conflict conversations: establishing a shared reality over relative blame. They demonstrate that whether disputants agree with the counterpart’s relative blame perception impacts how disputants respond after being blamed (i.e., apologizing or blaming). In the third presentation, Li, Batista, and Schroeder investigate how different perceptions of responsibility division arise in miscommunication. They test whether people hold speakers as more responsible than listeners, and whether people consider their counterparts to be more responsible than themselves. In the final presentation, Boland and Davidai explore how specific beliefs can lead people to avoid potentially conflictual conversations and find that people who hold zero-sum beliefs about politics are more likely to avoid political conversations. Taken together, this symposium highlights how conflict dynamics are affected by what people believe, what they want, and what they say in conversations, providing insights into actionable recommendations for conflict resolution. A Natural Language Processing Model for Conflict Expression Author: Michael Yeomans; Imperial College Business School Author: Corinne Bendersky; U. of California, Los Angeles Author: Laurie R. Weingart; Carnegie Mellon U. Author: Yeonjeong Kim; Massachusetts Institute of Technology To Blame or to Apologize? Resolving a Conflict Requires Negotiating Over a Shared Reality Author: Eva Yiyu Chen; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Author: Shereen J. Chaudhry; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Who's at Fault? Assignment of Responsibility in Miscommunication Author: Sophia Li; Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley Author: Rafael Batista; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Author: Juliana Schroeder; U. of California, Berkeley Zero-Sum Beliefs and the Avoidance of Political Conversations Author: F Katelynn Boland; Columbia Business School Author: Shai Davidai; Columbia Business School

  PublisherDOI

• Creating Stronger Ties: Building and Managing Social Connections in the Workplace

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Fostering strong social connections between conversation partners is crucial to psychological well-being and productivity in the workplace (Olguin et al., 2008; Holt-Lunstad, 2018). However, people often struggle to effectively connect with their conversation partners (Mastroianni et al., 2021; Collins et al., 2022; Boothby et al., 2018), resulting in conflict escalation, lower task performance, and higher stress (Sarfati et al., 2020; Kluger & Itzchakov, 2022; Robinson et al., 1995). The current symposium delves into how to build social connections in work-related conversations. The five presentations in this symposium call attention to how people build interpersonal connections at work, provide guidance on how to better facilitate relationship satisfaction, and note potential caveats in developing strong social bonds. These presentations offer advice to researchers and practitioners on how to construct communication environment that better facilitate workplace efficiency and relationship satisfaction. The Mutual Satisfaction Effect in Negotiation Author: Jared R. Curhan; MIT Sloan School of Management Author: Hillary Anger Elfenbein; Washington U. in St. Louis Author: Shirli Kopelman; U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor Author: René Paulson; Elite Research LLC The Joy of Feeling Known: Relationship Satisfaction Depends More on Feeling Known Than Knowing Author: Juliana Schroeder; U. of California, Berkeley Author: Ayelet Fishbach; professor Reminders Undermine Impressions of Genuine Gratitude Author: Jiabi Wang; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Author: Shereen J. Chaudhry; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Author: Alex Koch; U. of Chicago Booth School of business Beyond Accuracy: The Reputational Costs of Independent Judgment Aggregation Author: Charles Adam Dorison; - Author: Bradley DeWees; United States Air Force Author: Julia Alexandra Minson; Harvard Kennedy School You Agree? Then We Think alike! People Overgeneralize Agreement on Outcomes to Agreement on Reasons Author: Zhiying Ren; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Author: Rebecca Schaumberg; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania

  PublisherDOI

• Reminders Undermine Impressions of Genuine Gratitude

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• “Thanks, but no thanks”: Gratitude expression paradoxically signals distance.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2023-10-05 · 16 citations

  articleSenior author

  Many studies have found that feelings and expressions of gratitude bring profound benefits to people and relationships. We complicate this view of gratitude. We examine two variables known to impact people's expectations for relationships: culture (collectivist vs. individualist) and relational distance (close vs. distant), and we find evidence that expressing gratitude conveys that relationship expectations have been exceeded, such that people view it as less desirable to give and receive gratitude for actions that are expected duties of a relationship. In both observational data and real behavior in an experiment, we found that people in a collectivist culture (China) are less likely than those in an individualist culture (America) to express gratitude to close others (Studies 1 and 2). Using hypothetical vignettes, we confirmed this pattern and further found there was no cultural difference for distant others (Study 3). These differences in expressing gratitude reflect differences in underlying feelings of gratitude, as well as differences in expectations of how the target would react to being thanked (Study 4). This cultural difference can be explained by cultural differences in the extent of duties placed on close others (Studies 5 and 6): People in China expect more of their close others. Perhaps as a result, people in China show a weaker preference than Americans for direct expressions of gratitude toward close others, but no difference for distant others (Study 7). Overall, our findings suggest that expressing gratitude may not always be good for close relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• George Loewenstein

  20 shared

• András Molnár

  19 shared

• Arno Villringer

  Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  14 shared

• Daniel S. Margulies

  Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging

  12 shared

• Jane Neumann

  8 shared

• Howard Kunreuther

  University of Pennsylvania

  7 shared

• Annette Horstmann

  Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

  6 shared

• Valeria Burdea

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Behavioral Science

  University of Chicago

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Alumni Award