Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EMOSKILLS (Emotional skills: The role of emotional intelligence for strategic interactions and markets)
Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2025-06-30
Emotional intelligence, like anticipating the emotions of others and regulating one’s own emotions, is thought to be a crucial skill to do well in the workplace. This may be especially true for strategic interactions relevant for the workplace such as cooperation, bargaining, and market interactions. From experimental studies, we know that emotions play an important role in these interactions. Yet, whether or how emotional skills influence strategic interactions is unknown. While we have a good understanding of other key elements of strategic interactions like social preferences and strategic reasoning, no such investigation exists for emotional skills. The goal of this project is to provide the foundation to jumpstart the study of emotional skills in strategic interactions and markets.
The project has three main objectives, which we address in three working packages. The first objective is to develop a new emotional skills test, specifically designed to study the role of emotional skills in strategic interactions. For this work package, the first phase of data collection was completed, where we collected data to create the stimuli to be used in the test. These stimuli are used to construct and experimentally validate the test. The second objective is to experimentally investigate how emotional skills shape outcomes and decisions in strategic interactions and markets. For this work package, we are currently finalizing the designs of the studies. We will start data collection as soon as we have completed a first version of the emotional skills test developed in the first work package, as this forms an essential input for the second work package. The third objective is to study the supply of emotional labor – the requirement that workers have to display certain emotions on the job that may mismatch their own. For this work package, we completed the study design and data collection is planned to start in spring 2025.
A key goal of the project is to develop a new test of emotional skills, specifically geared towards the role of emotional intelligence in strategic settings. The emotional skills test will be used in this project to experimentally investigate how emotional skills shape outcomes and decisions in strategic interactions and markets. Moreover, we are developing a new experimental paradigm to study the supply of emotional labor. These tools and methods will give researchers a toolkit to study emotional skills in strategic interactions, markets, and related settings.