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RESEARCH RECOGNITIONS The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor has received the Academy of Management's inaugural AOM Practice Theme Committee's Research Cen- ter Impact Award. The center was recognized for its work to promote positive work environ- ments and create purpose- driven organizations. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Coun- tries (OPEC) has recognized Øystein Noreng of BI Norwe- gian Business School in Oslo, Norway, with the OPEC Award for Research. The award rec- ognizes his lifetime of research related to the field of energy economics and petroleum. Doctoral student Ikechukwu Kelikume and faculty mem- ber Adedoyin Salami of Lagos Business School in Nigeria have won the Institute for Business and Finance Research's 2012 Outstand- ing Research Award for their paper "Is Inflation Always and Everywhere a Monetary Phe- nomenon? The Case of Nige- ria." In it, the authors question the use of some monetary policy tools to achieve price stability in the country. Researchers Set Out to Measure 'The Emotional Oracle' Effect SHOULD BUSINESS leaders make decisions based on logic? Or should they trust their guts? Those who trust their feelings make more accurate pre- dictions than those who don't, accord- ing to Michel Tuan Pham, professor of business at Columbia Business School in New York City; Leonard Lee, asso- ciate professor of marketing at Colum- bia; and Andrew Stephen, assistant professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business in Penn- sylvania. The trio has written a new study on the predictive power of emo- tion—what they call "the emotional oracle effect." In a series of experiments, the researchers asked participants to pre- dict the outcome of future events, including the 2008 Democratic presi- dential primary race, the winner of the talent show "American Idol," the success of upcoming films, the move- ment of the stock market, and the weather. They placed some participants in a "high-trust-in-feelings" condi- tion by asking them to remember two moments when they trusted their feel- ings to make a decision that turned out to be right. In the "low-trust-in- feelings" condition, they asked partici- pants to remember ten such situations, which was much more difficult. In the high-trust group, for exam- ple, 71.9 percent of participants pre- dicted that Barack Obama would win the 2008 Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton; in the low-trust condition, only 63.9 percent made that prediction. The authors speculate that this phenomenon could arise for one of two reasons. One, those with high trust in their emotions could be better tuned into the emotions and behaviors of others. Or, two, they could be more open to the details of their external environments, according to what's called the "privi- leged-window hypothesis." "It appears that it is mostly high trust in feel- ings that improves predic- tion accuracy rather than low trust in feelings that impairs it," the authors write. They conclude that "although most theorists would suggest that we ought to rely on logic and reason to make such pre- dictions, it appears that Michel Tuan Pham Leonard Lee Andrew Stephen more intuitive, feeling-based processes may in fact lead to more accurate predictions." "Feeling the Future: The Emotional Oracle Effect" was scheduled to be published in the Octo- ber issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. It is available at www. columbia.edu/~tdp4/ Pham-Lee-Stephen- JCR2012.pdf. BizEd November/December 2012 51