Jon M Jachimowicz

great ideas 1003 and 1004 @uniofstandrews.bsky.social — two semesters long, each dept on campus got 2 weeks, 4 lectures a week, each one a different prof, to share the biggest idea in the field they are most excited about.

Research: When It’s Time to Leave a Career You’re Passionate About If you’re someone pursuing your passion and thinking about quitting, ask yourself: Are you staying because you want to—or because you’re afraid of what others will think? It’s easy to assume that walk...

"People flourish when they see their careers as evolving journeys rather than fixed destinations, and yet so much of the discourse around passion pursuit focuses on ceaseless perseverance...Some pursuits of passion become less tenable over time as life circumstances change."
hbr.org/2025/07/rese...

Congrats!!!!

🚨 New paper alert 🚨
In my latest out now in JPSP (w/ @brianjlucas.bsky.social
& @jonj.bsky.social), we show across 10 studies (including w/nurses, teachers, & PhD students) that people considering giving up a passion pursuit overestimate how harshly others will judge them 🧵 doi.org/10.1037/pspa...

psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-...

Excited to come out to @umich.edu this week for the Positive Organizational Scholarship Conference. Our lab will be well-represented with five presentations—please stop by and engage with our work, we'd love to hear what you think!

My editorial on how journals can earn trust.

We often use journal names as proxies for quality. This is bad bc it’s not valid. But it could be. Editors could make journal name a valid signal. And we could place value on journals that show us how they do that.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Social media use in adolescents with and without mental health conditions - Nature Human Behaviour Using a nationally representative UK sample of adolescents with clinical-level mental health symptoms, this Registered Report examined differences in social media use. The results suggest that adolesc...

After 3 years in the making, our Registered Report is out in @nathumbehav.nature.com!

We analyse nationally representative UK data from 3,340 adolescents (aged 11–19) to examine how social media use differs between those with and without mental health conditions. 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Abstract: Globally, women continue to bear a disproportionate share of unpaid household labor. Recent research highlights that gender disparities in cognitive labor—the “thinking work” required to anticipate and monitor household needs—are even more pronounced than in physical household labor. Traditional theories attribute these inequalities to time availability, relative resources, and gender norms. However, it remains unclear whether these frameworks apply equally to cognitive and physical household labor. This paper introduces a new theory of gendered cognitive stickiness to explain how the domestic mental load is distributed. We argue that cognitive labor’s invisibility and lack of clear boundaries make it uniquely resistant to negotiation. Even women who successfully bargain their way out of physical chores remain disproportionately responsible for cognitive labor. Using a large-scale survey of 2,133 partnered, heterosexual U.S. parents, we find that while women’s employment and earnings have reduced their physical household labor, these factors do not alleviate their cognitive household burden. Mothers perform nearly all of this work, regardless of their time or resources. Cognitive labor remains an “unbargainable burden” for women, exposing a hidden constraint that suggests progress toward gender equality in the home is even more incomplete than previously recognized.

🚨New working paper🚨
"Take a Load Off? Not for Mothers"
Time & money help mothers offload physical household labor —but not the mental load. Cognitive labor is an “unbargainable burden.”
w/ @helenkowalewska.bsky.social @leahruppanner.bsky.social
📄 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Feedback welcome!

🚨New Preprint Alert! 🚨

How do people perceive those who outsource tasks to AI – especially in deeply human domains like relationships?

In a new preprint led by my PostDoc Scott Claessens and PhD student Pierce Veitch, we explore this.

I am teaching my phd writing workshop course this quarter, question: are there any words/phrases said to you by an advisor/mentor that stuck with you, were memorable, or particularly helpful? If so please reply below!

🚨 I’m hiring a full-time lab manager to help me build my lab start in July or August 2025! 🚨

If you know any stellar candidates who might be interested, please send this their way.

🗓 Application review begins April 15
⏰ Final deadline is April 25
📎 Apply here ➡️ lnkd.in/evhfqzTP

Congrats!!!

📣New preprint 📣

@leonieschorrlepp.bsky.social, @domimaciejewski.bsky.social, @bringmannlaura.bsky.social, Mithra Hesselink and I wrote a paper illustrating the value of qualitative methods for checking the validity of your ESM data.

doi.org/10.31219/osf...

Congrats!!

Screenshot of title + abstract of the paper.

🚨New paper alert!🚨

Women are less likely to enter competitions than men—even when equally qualified. But telling them this can change behavior.

📈 In a field experiment on a job application platform, we found that highlighting this gender gap increased the # of job apps women submitted by ~20%.

Remembering Psychology Professor Sam Sommers Sam Sommers, longtime professor at Tufts, studied the psychological causes and consequences of racism

Social psychology lost a giant, and I lost a dear friend and collaborator. Still processing the loss of Sam Sommers, and probably will be for some time. Cherish the time you have with your people, folks.

now.tufts.edu/2025/03/20/r...

this guy turned 4 years old today, but he will always be our little puppy to us

Map showing a highway section in red and social ties in space crossing the highway. Wherever a tie crosses the highway, there is a cross. There are 94 crosses.

🎉 New paper in PNAS: Urban highways are barriers to social ties
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2408937122

Highways are barriers that cut opportunities for social ties. We quantify this effect by overlaying the US highway network with millions of social ties from Twitter.

a man talking to another man with the words this is a business ALT: a man talking to another man with the words this is a business

✨ new paper from me & blue-sky-less Rebecca Ponce de Leon! out now in JPSP ✨

we ask - does the prototype of leaders as being people high in agency match the preference of followers? do people really want to work for the Logan Roy, Ms. Cobel, or Don Drapers of the world?

Link to open-access paper: www.hbs.edu/faculty/Page...

There is SO MUCH MORE in this paper—additional data and analyses, theorizing, speculating, & more. I'd strongly encourage you to read the final piece! And massive thanks to co-authors Emma, Kai, & Wen for this amazing (passionate!) collaboration. 8/8

We bring this all together in developing a theory of differentiated passion contagion, distinguishing the process of catching a state from the end state reached. This provides the foundation for our findings—& lays the ground for research on emotional contagion more broadly. 7/8

Finally, we find that passion caught from others holds less value than passion incited from within. If you are feeling low-passion and are looking to catch it from others, that might be a less effective strategy than figuring out your own passion roadblocks. 6/8

We next conducted a pre-reg experiment & find that passion contagion is particularly effort-laden—more so than contagion of positive affect & intrinsic motivation. There is sth unique about passion—which we speculate arises in part because of its strong societal emphasis. 5/8

Crucially, these effects were stronger when the focal employee was more distant in their passion levels from the rest of the team; and in particular, when they were the least passionate person on their team. When you're the least passionate person, you feel the most pressure! 4/8

First, we surveyed 829 employees three times per day for 20 consecutive work days, finding that while employees caught their teammates’ passion—consequently reported better performance—they also incurred costs associated with increasing their passion. 3/8

We suggest and find that high-passion teams also evoke pressures that lead employees to expend effort to increase their levels of passion. These pressures exist alongside the more automatic "catching" of passion—and negates its benefits. 2/8

"Prior work argues employees benefit from passionate teammates because passion is contagious—it spreads easily from one employee to the next.

In a new paper @ASQJournal, we find that's not quite the full story... 1/8

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Yes please!