Nadav Klein

I’m an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD.

When all the other kids were having fun during recess in elementary school, I used to sit off to the side and “analyze” their character and actions. Why was one kid more popular than another? Why were some boys more or less likely to talk to girls? What was the reputational benefit of being funny? Or “tough”?

At the time, those questions were utterly fascinating—to myself and no one else. And my answers were total gibberish.

My career has been a continuation of this practice, with two revisions:
(1) My questions about people are now more relevant to leaders and organizations than to schoolboys.
(2) My answers are based on data rather than a kid’s intuition.

My research focuses on the basic processes of judgment that affect how we make decisions, process information, and evaluate others and ourselves. Some of our findings include the surprising reputational benefits of being a little bit nice, the ability of groups to detect lies, our weak desire to be seen as moral and strong desire not to be seen as immoral, our overestimation of how much information we actually use to make decisions, and our misunderstanding of how often we actually interact in person while in the office.

This work has been published in academic outlets such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. It has also appeared in practitioner outlets such as INSEAD Knowledge, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Business Insider, and Fortune.

I came to INSEAD from the University of Chicago, where I completed my Ph.D. and M.B.A. In a previous life, I was an economic consultant at Cornerstone Research and a student at Amherst College. At INSEAD, I teach the OB1 core course.