There’s no mistaking Baruch’s Newman Vertical Campus for an ivory tower, given the engaged, real-world research conducted by Baruch faculty. Of recent note: a study led by Associate Professor of Psychology Kristin Sommer, on the psychological implications of ostracism, and an analytical tool for evaluating corporate social responsibility performance, developed by University Distinguished Professor of Management S. Prakash Sethi.
Published this year in the Journal of Personal and Social Relationships, the study conducted by Sommer and her then-PhD student Juran Yoon—which received coverage from CBS News, among others—examines ostracism from a fresh perspective. Although much research has been conducted on how ostracism (aka “the silent treatment”) affects the one who is excluded, relatively little attention has been devoted to understanding why people would choose to ignore others in the first place. Sommer’s groundbreaking study demonstrated that participants who were asked to make polite conversation with an unpleasant confederate (actually a research assistant) subsequently performed worse on a task requiring effortful thought regulation, whereas participants who were asked to ignore the rude person performed relatively well on the resource-demanding task. Such findings, she explains, suggest “that the silent treatment might sometimes be used as a strategy for offsetting the mental exhaustion that comes from talking with undesirable others.”
Sommer, whose main research interests lie in the areas of social exclusion and social influence processes, found her calling at age 15 in a high school psychology class taught by “an instructor who inspired a lot of passion for the topic. I decided then that I wanted to be a psychologist and never looked back,” she says. While in graduate school, she and a professor with whom she was working shared their experiences of being ostracized by family or friends, inspiring them to design a study to examine how being ostracized by group members affects how hard people are willing to work on behalf of those groups. “Since that time, hundreds of studies have been conducted on social exclusion, yet there is still so much we don’t understand about this topic,” Sommer observes.
The complex dynamics of social exclusion provide Sommer with ample avenues for further study. “The most common question we’ve received is, ‘Does ignoring aversive people make them go away, or does it inspire them to persist even more in their attempts to elicit a response?’ Scientifically this is much more difficult to study, but we’re trying to identify an appropriate and ethical way to do it,” she reveals, adding, “Our main concern always is with establishing cause and effect—and applying rigorous research methods to ensure a high degree of experimental validity.”
PR Week’s recent coverage of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a business strategy highlighted the CSR-Sustainability (CSR-S) Monitor, the brainchild of Sethi, who developed the monitor in 2009 as a vehicle for encouraging transparency in corporations’ communication of CSR achievements to stakeholders. The initiative is now part of Baruch’s Weissman Center for International Business (WCIB), where Sethi is a senior fellow. In January WCIB released a report, based on data generated by the CSR-S Monitor, on the scope and quality of CSR reporting by a sampling of international corporations.
Notes Sethi, whose pioneering work in the fields of corporate accountability and ethics spans nearly half a century, “CSR is an area that businesses wouldn’t even acknowledge 20 years ago. But with stakeholder engagement evolving on a global level, corporations have come to recognize its value. And—unlike corporate financial reporting, which is strictly regulated—current CSR reporting affords corporations total control of not only the message but the medium.” Thus, the CSR-S Monitor employs proprietary metrics to objectively evaluate corporations’ CSR reports, providing a value scale that facilitates comparison among companies, industries, and regions.
Sethi stresses that the goal of the CSR-S Monitor is to compare, not judge. “Reports are evaluated based on how they get their message across,” he explains. “As a social scientist, I sought to make sure our measures were rigorous and our scoring system was statistically valid.” He views the initiative as a tool to advance the public good by encouraging best practices: “We hope to publish annual reports that will incentivize companies to improve the substance of their CSR reporting and to recognize the stakeholder expectation of corporate social accountability.”
—Sally Fay
Photo credits: Sommer photo by Lukasz Drapala (’07); Sethi photo by Jerry Speier