About

Taya Cohen is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Business Ethics at the Tepper School of Business. Her role involves research and teaching in the areas of organizational behavior and ethics, contributing to the academic leadership at Carnegie Mellon University. She is engaged in exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning intersect with business, management science, and organizational behavior, reflecting a data-informed, human-driven approach to innovation and problem solving. Her work supports the Tepper School's strategic vision to lead at the intersection of business, technology, and analytics, emphasizing the importance of leadership, ethics, and organizational dynamics in the evolving landscape of business education.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Epistemology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Neuroscience
• Medicine
• Law
• Psychiatry
• Psychotherapist
• Nursing
• Public relations
• Applied psychology
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• It's Not About Winning or Losing: How Consultants Navigate Disagreement in Serious Illness

  Journal of Pain and Symptom Management · 2026-02-09

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Surveys and Recruitment

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-05

  otherOpen access
  Publisher

• A multicenter, ethnographic study of interprofessional support for families facing goals of care decisions in intensive care units

  Annals of the American Thoracic Society · 2026-04-28

  article

  RATIONALE: Professional society guidelines recommend interprofessional support for families facing goals-of-care decisions in intensive care units (ICU). However, there is limited knowledge about whether this occurs and how best to achieve it. OBJECTIVES: We sought to characterize the current nature of, barriers to, and suggestions for interprofessional support for surrogates in ICUs. METHODS: We conducted a multi-method ethnographic study, including direct observation and semi-structured interviews with interprofessional ICU team members in four hospitals. Our conceptual approach combined elements of the Implementation Outcomes Framework and the COM-B model. We used an inductive thematic analysis approach with findings organized into previously identified, theory-derived domains of teamwork. RESULTS: Between March 2021 and December 2023, we conducted 133 hours of observations and 53 interviews with ICU team members such as physicians, nurses, and social workers. Although participants endorsed the value of interprofessional support during interviews, ethnographic observation revealed numerous shortcomings in actual practice. Nurses, social workers, and chaplains were not frequently invited to family meetings, and there was low involvement of social workers and chaplaincy in longitudinal family support. Barriers to interprofessional support included insufficient role clarity, physician-leader inclusiveness, valuing of psychosocial support of families in addition to informational support, psychological safety, training among non-physicians, team member availability, and standardized care processes. Participants made suggestions for improvement, including establishing organizational expectations for the structure and content of interprofessional support, increasing psychological safety and role clarity, training in serious illness communication, and promoting leader inclusiveness. CONCLUSIONS: We identified numerous shortcomings in interprofessional support for surrogate decision-makers in the ICUs across multiple domains of effective teams. Organizations can improve interprofessional support by clarifying roles and increasing visibility of non-physician team members, providing opportunities for communication and coordination of support through enhanced routines such as pre-rounds huddles or pre-family meeting huddles as well as improved documentation of support, providing specialty communication training, improving psychological safety, developing family support protocols, and altered staffing models. This would involve targeting multiple levels for behavior change-individual, team, and organizational.

  PublisherDOI

• IRB

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-05

  otherOpen access
  Publisher

• The Structure of Social Situations: Insights From the Large-Scale Automated Coding of Text

  Psychological Science · 2026-03-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Social situations are key determinants of cognition and behavior, and although several frameworks for representing situations have been proposed, these remain partial, nonintegrated, and not systematically mapped onto the rich space of situations encountered in everyday life. We address this problem by analyzing more than 20,000 detailed textual descriptions of dyadic social interactions obtained from participant-generated stories, published fiction, blogs, and autobiographical narratives. Our main methodological contribution is to use generative artificial intelligence to code these textual descriptions along a very large set of features and derive a detailed taxonomy of situational classes or categories of social interactions. We subsequently relate these situational classes to high-level situational variables like conflict, power, and duty, which have been identified by prior theory. In this way, our article provides a comprehensive, data-driven, and integrative framework for quantifying situational structure, advancing the study of social cognition and behavior.

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "The Structure of Social Situations: Insights from the Large-Scale Automated Coding of Text"

  2026-01-06

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "The Structure of Social Situations: Insights from the Large-Scale Automated Coding of Text"

  2025-09-24

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Abusive behavior of employees against their managers: an explorative study

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2025-05-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Objective: Workplace abusive behavior is behavior that causes harm to people's dignity and their mental and physical health. It encompasses abusive or violent behaviors, harassment, or intimidation, and can be directed against co-workers, managers, customers, or suppliers. Extant literature has focused mainly on abuse by managers, or by peers and colleagues. This study investigates 'upward abusive behavior'"- abuse by an employee against people in management positions, and whether there is awareness of or exposure to this phenomenon. While not common, abusive behavior from employees toward their supervisors can manifest through disrespectful conduct and inappropriate challenges to authority, creating a difficult work environment. Method: 120 employees and managers from a variety of organizations, and with varying seniority, answered a questionnaire (based on Tepper, 2000) that included 15 statements relating to the conduct and dynamics between employees and managers. The statements were assessed on a Likert scale of 1 ("I cannot remember him/her ever using this behavior with me") to 5 ("He/she uses this behavior very often with me"). Results: Several significant associations were found between managers' exposure to abuse and some of the respondents' demographic data such as age, gender, seniority in the workplace, and tenure. Conclusion: The result of this exploratory study indicates that many employees and managers are aware of the existence and various aspects of upward abuse as it is expressed in organizations. However, they still do not give it an explicit name or are not willing to acknowledge it. The phenomenon of employee abuse of managers is not only not recognized in legislation (as is the phenomenon of regular workplace abusive behavior), but it is also not discussed in organizations. There are no procedures or processes to prevent and eradicate it.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The science of honesty: A review and research agenda

  Advances in experimental social psychology · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  reviewOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Science of Honesty: A Review and Research Agenda

  2024-12-16 · 1 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Honesty, defined as freedom from fraud or deception, is widely valued in many aspects of life, from personal relationships to professional settings. Yet acts of dishonesty remain widespread, including political and corporate scandals, misinformation, personal betrayal, and so on. Understanding honesty and the factors that influence it provides insights that are essential for fostering trust and combating corruption. In this review, we synthesize key findings from research on honesty, focusing on when people choose to be truthful or deceptive. We argue that although much is known about honesty in isolated, low-risk contexts, an urgent need exists to study honesty in more complex, realistic settings, such as those involving interpersonal relationships, potential sanctions, or group influences. Our proposed framework highlights understudied contexts and encourages future studies to explore settings where enforcement and social dynamics play a significant role in decision-making. To do so, we point out 66 open research questions that we find most promising to explore. By integrating insights from multiple disciplines, we aim to advance the understanding of honesty and provide a roadmap for research that can inform policies and interventions to promote integrity in society.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Isaac F. Young

  Beloit College

  50 shared

• Miquel Alabèrnia-Segura

  Universitat de Barcelona

  50 shared

• Pooya Razavi

  50 shared

• A. T. Panter

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  27 shared

• Daniel Sullivan

  26 shared

• Qian Yang

  University of Hong Kong

  25 shared

• Daniel Sullivan

  JPMorgan Chase & Co (United States)

  25 shared

• Qian Yang

  Northwestern Polytechnical University

  25 shared

Education

• PhD, Psychology

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2008

• BA, Psychology

  Pennsylvania State University

  2002