Erica Boothby

Erica Boothby is a clinical professor in the Organizational Behavior research group at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Her research explores the persistent gaps between how we think others see us and how they actually do, and how these misperceptions shape our social lives. This includes her work on the “liking gap,” the tendency for people to underestimate how much new acquaintances and colleagues like them, and “dissimilarity pessimism,” the mistaken belief that we are more interested in connecting with people different from us than they are in connecting with us.

She examines these effects in first impressions, workplace conversations, and negotiations. Her research has been published in Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Annual Review of Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Erica teaches Negotiations and was named one of Poets&Quants' 50 best business school professors. She leads workshops for executives and has written for the New York Times and Harvard Business Review. Before joining Tuck, she was at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and, previously, Cornell University's Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. She received her PhD in social psychology from Yale University.