Jackson G. Lu

Ziv Epstein (postdoctoral associate; MIT Media Arts and Sciences PhD ’23), Jackson G. Lu (General Motors Professor of Management and professor of Work and Organization Studies), David G. Rand (visiting professor of Marketing; Cornell University), and Michael Stagnaro (research scientist) have won the 2026 Best Publication Award for Innovation in Behavioral Policy from the Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA).

This year’s award recognizes research published 2022-2025 “that advances the rigorous application and development of behavioral/social science to policy and practice in public, private and nonprofit sectors … to encourage work that has potential to improve the quality of life of individuals and/or organizations.”

Their winning paper, titled “Understanding and Combatting Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents” (Nature Human Behaviour 7, 1502-1513, 2023), is co-authored with Antonio Arechar (CIDE—Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, Mexico), Jennifer Allen (New York University Stern; MIT Sloan Marketing PhD ’24), Adam Berinsky (MIT Political Science), Rocky Cole (iVerify), Kiran Garimella (Rutgers), Andrew Gully (Microsoft), Gordon Pennycook (Cornell University), Robert M. Ross (Macquarie University), and Yunhao (Jerry) Zhang (Psychology of Technology Institute; MIT Sloan PhD ’23).

The paper focuses on misinformation about COVID-19, with nearly 35,000 participants in global experiments that validate major findings from previous work focused on the U.S. factors that predict susceptibility to misinformation, as well as effectiveness of interventions to help, are found to be similar across the world. A Cornell news article has more information.

The award was announced Cambridge at the BSPA 2026 Conference in June.

Jackson Lu, General Motors Associate Professor of Management and associate professor of Work and Organization Studies, has recently received four honors:

First, Lu received the 2025 Cummings Early to Mid-Career Scholarly Achievement Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management (AOM). This award places a high value on rigor (scientific quality and methodological soundness of work), relevance (impact of work on the field and society), and relationships (collaborative efforts, leadership, and involvement within the field and community). The award committee noted Lu’s thought leadership and service and described his work as “rigorous, highly impactful, well-rounded and multidisciplinary, crossing wider topics of organizational behavior with culture and diversity.” The full award citation includes: “He exemplifies early-career excellence through groundbreaking research that has fundamentally challenged conventional understanding of workplace diversity and organizational behavior. Professor Lu's research on the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ has revolutionized understanding of Asian American workplace experiences. His work has revealed why East Asians face leadership underrepresentation despite educational success, identifying cultural assertiveness rather than discrimination as the primary mechanism. This work has been featured in over 300 media outlets … demonstrating exceptional translation of academic insights to public discourse.” 

Second, Lu won the 2025 Best Paper in Management Education and Development Award from the AOM MED (Management Education and Development) Division. His winning paper, “Breaking Ceilings: Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence by Increasing Assertiveness” (published recently in Journal of Applied Psychology, 110(9), 1225-1239), is co-authored with Michelle X. Zhao (Washington University in St. Louis), Hui Liao (University of Maryland), and Lu Doris Zhang (MIT Sloan PhD student).

The two awards above were presented in July at the AOM 2025 Annual Meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Third, Lu received the International Association for Chinese Management Research (IACMR) 2025 Best Conference Micro Paper Award, which recognizes an outstanding paper “that deals with individual and group level issues within the organizational setting, including topics such as leadership, motivation, conflict, group dynamics, individual attitudes and performance, as well as cross-cultural issues at the individual or group levels.” Lu’s winning paper, “Artificial Intelligence Quotient (AIQ),” which introduces the novel concept of AIQ, is co-authored with Xin Qin, Chen Chen, Xiang Zhou, and Yuqing Gan (all from Sun Yat-sen University); Wanlu Li (Guangdong University of Finance & Economics); and Lesley Luyang Song (Tsinghua University). The award was presented in June at the IACMR Biennial Conference in Xi’an, China.

Fourth, the paper above, “Artificial Intelligence Quotient (AIQ),” was also a finalist for the AOM’s Managerial and Organizational Cognition (MOC) Division’s 2025 Best Paper with Practical Implications for Organizations.

Jackson Lu, Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies, has won the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, a 2024 Outstanding Single Contribution Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). This prize recognizes “the author of an article or book chapter judged to provide the most innovative theoretical contribution to social/personality psychology” in the prior year, honoring both “conceptual innovation and potential to motivate new research and further conceptual investigation” to advance the field.

Lu’s winning paper, “A Socioecological-Genetic Framework of Culture and Personality: Their Roots, Trends, and Interplay” (Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 74:363-390, 2023), was co-authored with MIT Sloan Organization Studies PhD student Laura Changlan Wang and Verónica Benet-Martínez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).

The award was announced in October, and will be presented during an awards ceremony at the SPSP Annual Convention February 2025 in Denver.

Jackson Lu, Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies,  recently received five honors:

First, Lu is a recipient of the Early Career Achievement Award from the Human Resources (HR) Division of the Academy of Management (AOM),  which honors distinguished contributions of HR scholars during their early- to mid-career stage (within 7 years of receiving their PhD) and which recognizes Lu's research stream on the Bamboo Ceiling. The AOM HR Division Chair said: “The award acknowledges Professor Lu’s clear record of excellence in research and the promise that his impact will continue to have on the science, teaching, and practice of human resource management. This is the most prestigious early career award granted by the HR Division of the Academy of Management. Professor Lu is a true rising star within the HR research community."

Second, a paper regarding the Bamboo Ceiling in starting salaries  (“Asians Don’t Ask? Relational Concerns, Negotiation Propensity, and Starting Salaries,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(2), 273-290) was runner-up for the Best Published Paper Award (for papers published in the past year) from the Careers Division of the AOM.

Third, Lu received the AOM IM (International Management) Division Florida International University Business Emerging Scholar Award for outstanding contributions to international management scholarship by a junior scholar (within 8 years of PhD).  This award recognizes Lu’s research stream on how multicultural experiences (e.g., working abroad) shape key organizational outcomes.

Fourth, Lu is also a winner of the 2024 “Responsible Research in Management” Award sponsored by the AOM Fellows (co-sponsored by the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management), which honors “significant contributions to the science and practice of management” with “recent research that benefits society by producing credible and useful knowledge” that informs policy and influences practice.  Lu’s winning paper is entitled, “Global Leaders for Global Teams: Leaders with Multicultural Experiences Communicate and Lead More Effectively, Especially in Multinational Teams” (Organization Science, 33(4), 1554-1573).

The honors above were announced in September at the Chicago at the Annual Meeting of the AOM.

Additionally, the paper above, ("Global Leaders for Global Teams: Leaders with Multicultural Experiences Communicate and Lead More Effectively, Especially in Multinational Teams”) also won the 2024 Outstanding Empirical Paper Award from the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM).  This award was presented at the IACM Annual Conference in June in Singapore.
 

Jackson Lu, Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies, recently received three honors:

First, Lu is a recipient of the 2024 Association for Psychological Science (APS) Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, recognizing cutting-edge research of “particularly creative and promising APS members who embody the future of the field,” from among scholars of all domains of psychology (e.g., social psychology, personality psychology, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, etc.), making it perhaps the most prestigious early-career award in psychology. The award announcement cites “Lu’s groundbreaking research on the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ … that East Asians face in the United States” and his studies of “the benefits and drawbacks of multicultural experiences,” as well as noting “Lu’s innovative scientific methods,” concluding: “Lu’s work has advanced multiple areas of exploration, including industrial-organizational, social, cognitive, and educational psychology.”

Second, Lu has won the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues 2023 Louise Kidder Early Career Award, which recognizes “social issues researchers who have made substantial contributions to the field early in their careers” (within 10 years of a graduate degree).

Third, Lu is the winner of the 2023 Future of Work Research Prize from the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work at the University of Zurich. The award announcement includes a short video of his research proposal for his winning project, “The Dark Side of Using Generative AI,” with collaborators Lesley Song (MIT), Dong Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Li Zhu and Jingjing Ma (both at Peking University), and notes: “Dr. Lu’s research, conducted through surveys and a longitudinal field experiment in both China and the US, will shed light on the ethical implications of generative AI and its impact on the future of work.”

Jackson Lu has received three honors:

First, Lu received the 2023 New Investigator Award from the Behavioral Science & Policy Association (BSPA). This award recognizes “an early career scholar whose body of work has advanced the rigorous application and development of behavioral/social science to policy and practice in public, private and/or non-profit sectors.” The award was presented in May at the 2023 BSPA Online Conference on Behavioral Policy.

Second, Lu received the 2023 Outstanding Publication Award from the International Association for Conflict Management, which honors a publication that “significantly advances the study of conflict management and negotiation.” Lu’s winning paper, entitled “Multicultural Experiences: A Systematic Review and New Theoretical Framework,” is co-authored with William W. Maddux (UNC-Chapel Hill), Salvatore J. Affinito (Harvard Business School), and Adam D. Galinsky (Columbia University). The award was announced in July in Thessaloniki, Greece, at the 2023 International Association for Conflict Management annual conference.  (As announced last year, this paper also had won the 2022 Academy of Management Annals Best Article Award, chosen from those published in 2021.)

Third, Lu was a finalist for the Conference Theme Best Paper Award of the International Association for Chinese Management Research, for his working paper entitled, “Polyculturalism: Developing a Broader Scale and Understanding its Links to Creativity,” co-authored with Michael Morris (Columbia University) and Jaee Cho (HKUST). 

Jackson Lu has received the 2022 Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). This award recognizes “the best paper or article of the year on intergroup relations” and was named for Dr. Gordon W. Allport, an SPSSI founder and past president who is widely considered one of the founding fathers of the fields of social psychology and personality psychology.

Lu’s winning paper, entitled “Disentangling Stereotypes From Social Reality: Astrological Stereotypes and Discrimination in China,” was co-authored with Xin Lucy Liu (Peking University), Hui Liao (University of Maryland, College Park), and Lei Wang (Peking University).

Jackson Lu is a winner of the 2022 SAGE Early Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in collaboration with SAGE Publications. This award recognizes “outstanding achievements by early career scholars (between 4 and 6 years post-PhD) in social and personality psychology, including contributions to teaching, research, or service to the field.” Recipients (only five across the span of social and personality psychology fields) were announced in the fall of 2022.

Jackson Lu (Sloan School Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies) has received four honors (with three of them for three different papers).

First, Lu received the 2022 Early Career Award from the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM). This award honors scholars in the first five years post-PhD, “who have shown exceptional promise for making significant contributions to the study of conflict and negotiation.”  The award announcement in April includes: “Jackson Lu has been prolific, with influential and important work that touches on key areas of conflict in society … Jackson published over 25 papers, in journals such as Nature Human Behavior, PNAS, JAP, OBHDP, JPSP, and Psych Science.”

Lu also won the 2022 IACM Outstanding Conference Paper Award for his solo-authored paper entitled “Asians Don’t Ask? Relational Concerns, Negotiation Propensity, and Starting Salaries,” published earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Third, Lu won the 2022 Award for Best Paper in Graduate Management Education from the Management Education and Development Division of the Academy of Management for his paper entitled “The Surprising Underperformance of East Asians in US Law and Business Schools: The Liability of Low Assertiveness and the Ameliorative Potential of Online Classrooms.” The winning paper was co-authored with Richard E. Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia University) and published earlier this year in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

Finally, Lu received the 2022 Academy of Management Annals Best Article Award (chosen from those published in 2021) for another paper, entitled “Multicultural Experiences: A Systematic Review and New Theoretical Framework” and co-authored with William W. Maddux (UNC-Chapel Hill), Salvatore J. Affinito (Harvard Business School), and Adam D. Galinsky (Columbia University).

Jackson G. Lu, Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies (WOS) and Rahul Bhui, Assistant Professor of Marketing, have both been named APS (Association for Psychological Science) Rising Stars. This designation “is presented to outstanding APS members in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD”—“researchers whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions.”  This is one of the top honors for junior psychologists (selected from across all fields of psychology—cognitive, clinical, developmental, social, etc.).

The APS Rising Stars were announced last month. 

Sinan Aral, Jackson Lu, Hal Gregersen, Andy McAfee, and Geoff Parker have received Thinkers50 honors. Since 2001 Thinkers50 has recognized leading business and management ideas every two years with their Top 50 global rankings of the most influential business thinkers, emerging Radar ones to watch, and Distinguished Achievement Awards in specific management categories – “the Oscars of Management Thinking” (Financial Times). 

Sinan Aral, David Austin Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology and Marketing as well as Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE), has won the 2021 Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award, which "celebrates the thinker who has done the most to convert the digital language of the 0 and 1 into useful human insights,” whose “research and insights shed the newest and most original light on the new digital reality.”

The top 50 honorees on the Thinkers50 2021 Ranking of Management Thinkers include:

Sinan Aral, who “forensically and persuasively gets to the reality inside social media and tech”;

Hal Gregersen, Senior Lecturer of Work and Organization Studies (WOS) and former Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center, a “catalytic questioner and global innovator, exploring how asking the right questions builds leadership and innovation, and drives purposeful change”;

Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist and Co-Director of the MIT IDE, who with Erik Brynjolfsson (former IDE Director) “launched into the thought leadership stratosphere in 2014 with The Second Machine Age”—“their work continues to provide a road-map for success in a digital economy”;  and

Geoff Parker, Visiting Scholar at the IDE, who with Marshall Van Alstyne (former Visiting Scholar at the IDE) “developed the concept of two-sided markets, which is used extensively in platform business models, and delivered the first comprehensive analysis of platform technology.”

In addition, each January Thinkers50 announces 30 emerging thinkers “with the potential to make lasting contributions to management theory and practice” to watch in the year ahead, and the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2021 included Jackson Lu, Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies.  The citation notes his being the first “to systematically research the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ phenomenon” experienced by Asians in the United States, with “The Bamboo Ceiling: Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership Positions in the United States” (2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), co-authored with Richard Nesbitt (Univ. of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia). 

Jackson Lu was also subsequently shortlisted for the Thinkers50 2021 RADAR Thinker Award—which recognizes the emerging scholar “most likely to shape the future of business and business thinking,” whose “work has the potential to challenge the way we think about management”—“for his impactful research on cross-cultural management and psychology, especially his research on the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ faced by Asians.”

Jackson G. Lu, Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies (WOS), has won the 2021 Academy of Management (AOM) Network of Leadership Scholars (NLS) Rising Star Early Career Award, sponsored by the Exeter Centre for Leadership. This award recognizes Lu’s significant contributions to the field of leadership research through his core research stream on the Bamboo Ceiling experienced by Asians in the United States.

Two published papers in Jackson’s winning stream of research are: 

1) “The Bamboo Ceiling: Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership Positions in the United States” (2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), co-authored with Richard Nesbitt (University of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia University); and

2) his sole-authored “A Social Network Perspective on the Bamboo Ceiling: Ethnic Homophily Explains Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership in Multiethnic Environments” (forthcoming, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology).

The award was announced recently. Lu will be presented with the award in a ceremony at the 2022 AOM Conference in Seattle.

Jackson Lu has recently received four honors for three different papers.

First, Lu won the 2021 Phillips and Nadkarni Award for Outstanding Paper on Diversity and Cognition from the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management (AOM). Lu’s sole-authored winning paper is entitled “Cultural Diversity Stimulates Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Two Large-Scale Natural Experiments”.
Worth noting, is the distinction that two of the five finalist papers were Lu’s, and the one above won: Lu also was a finalist for this same award with a different sole-authored paper entitled “The Bamboo Ceiling: A Network Perspective on Why East Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership”.

The second paper above was also honored with a nomination for the AOM’s Carolyn B. Dexter Award, an academy-wide honor for the paper that “best meets the objective of internationalizing the Academy of Management.” 

Finally, Lu was a finalist for the 2021 Responsible Research in Management Award, selected by AOM Fellows and co-sponsored by Responsible Research in Business and Management to recognize recent research that “benefits society by producing credible and useful knowledge.” Lu’s finalist paper, entitled “The Bamboo Ceiling: Why East Asians but Not South Asians Are Underrepresented in Leadership Positions in the United States” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mar 2020, 117(9), 4590-4600), was co-authored with Richard E. Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Michael W. Morris (Columbia University).

Jackson Lu has won the 2019 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Center for Leadership at Florida International University, in partnership with the Network of Leadership Scholars. This award recognizes a dissertation’s outstanding contribution to the field of leadership. As the award recipient, Lu will deliver an invited presentation at the Leadership Research Colloquium at the FIU Center for Leadership in 2020. Lu’s winning dissertation is entitled “Global Leader or Cultural Outsider? The Divergent Effects of International Experiences on Leadership Effectiveness vs. Leadership Selection” (abstract since currently under embargo until April – additional information about his dissertation is included in this article).