Research in environmental sciences has found that the ergonomic design of human-made environments influences thought, feeling, and action. In the research reported here, we examined the impact of physical environments on dishonest behavior. In four studies, we tested whether certain bodily configurations-or postures-incidentally imposed by the environment led to increases in dishonest behavior. The first three experiments showed that individuals who assumed expansive postures (either consciously or inadvertently) were more likely to steal money, cheat on a test, and commit traffic violations in a driving simulation. Results suggested that participants' self-reported sense of power mediated the link between postural expansiveness and dishonesty. Study 4 revealed that automobiles with more expansive driver's seats were more likely to be illegally parked on New York City streets. Taken together, the results suggest that, first, environments that expand the body can inadvertently lead people to feel more powerful, and second, these feelings of power can cause dishonest behavior.

Whether in everyday disagreements, bargaining episodes, or highstakes disputes, people typically see a spectrum of possible responses to dealing with differences with others, ranging from avoidance and accommodation to competition and aggression. We believe people judge their own and others' behaviors along this dimension, which we call interpersonal assertiveness, reflecting the degree to which someone stands up and speaks out for their own positions when they are faced with someone else who does not want the same outcomes. In this article, we review long-standing and recent scholarship to characterize the curvilinear consequences of assertiveness (both "too little" and "too much" can be problematic). We consider the sources of accommodating and assertive behavior, such as motivations, expectancies, and failures of self-regulation. We also examine ways in which people can assert themselves effectively, ranging from making precise offers in negotiations to employing rationales as part of their proposals. We conclude by noting promising directions for future research. | INTRODUCTIONCountless times each day, most of us are reminded that the people around us do not seek the same outcomes we do.We hope to vacation at the beach, but our families or friends want to head for the mountains. We want to fall asleep, but our neighbors hope their loud party lasts deep into the night. We seek a raise, a promotion, or a budget increase, but our colleagues and bosses have other plans. Because the people around us do not always want what we do, we repeatedly face a basic question of social life: How hard, and how, should we push to get our way? We can press forcefully for our ideal outcomes and resist giving in. We can consider creative solutions or cede selected ground.We can capitulate entirely or even duck and run. Answers to the question of "How hard should I push" vary in a variety of ways, but our focus here is on the dimension we call interpersonal assertiveness, the degree to which people speak out and stand up for their own interests when they are not perfectly aligned with others'. We take a folk psychological approach to this construct, believing that both actors and observers tend to agree in placing behavioralThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Do people know when they are seen as pressing too hard, yielding too readily, or having the right touch? And does awareness matter? We examined these questions in four studies. Study 1 used dyadic negotiations to reveal a modest link between targets' self-views and counterparts' views of targets' assertiveness, showing that those seen as under- and over-assertive were likely to see themselves as appropriately assertive. Surprisingly, many people seen as appropriately assertive by counterparts mistakenly thought they were seen as having been over-assertive, a novel effect we call the line crossing illusion. We speculated that counterparts' orchestrated displays of discomfort might be partly responsible-behaviors we termed strategic umbrage. Study 2 revealed evidence for widespread strategic umbrage in real-world negotiations and Study 3 linked these behaviors to the line crossing illusion in a controlled negotiation. Study 4 showed that this illusion predicted outcomes in a multi-round negotiation.

Monitoring is a common tactic used to constrain the behavior of organizational actors. Agency theory research on monitoring focuses at the institutional level on factors such as incentives, contracts, or self-interest, largely directed at those with high power. At the same time, significant monitoring is clearly directed at low-power workers, whose performance and compliance behaviors may be rigidly controlled; arguably, the degree to which monitoring is directed at low-power more than at high-power actors is disproportionate. In this paper, we examine a psychological predictor of decisions about whom to monitor: Specifically, we contend that people’s judgments of someone’s ethicality and thereby trustworthiness are predicted by the target’s power; and these inferences on the basis of power affect decisions about whom to monitor. As a consequence, institutions may excuse powerful actors from the monitoring requirements that should constrain any ethical lapses. That is, an overly credulous view of the powerful or misdirected suspicion toward the powerless may create conditions that enable abuses by the powerful. We examine these predictions in a series of 5 studies (3 experiments and 2 field studies). Our findings challenge the notion that people subscribe to a “power corrupts” view in evaluating powerholders, and our research highlights how the very mechanism organizations put in place to constrain powerholders’ behaviors (i.e., monitoring) may, because of psychological biases in power-based inferences, be directed away from the intended targets.

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