John holds a PhD in behavioural decision research from Carnegie Mellon and is the James E. Burke Professor of Business Administration at HBS. Her main line of work is privacy decision-making: what actually drives someone to reveal or withhold personal information, and how people react to firms using what they gave up. A second line runs on health decisions. Her work appears in PNAS, Psychological Science, Management Science, and JAMA. She is the author of Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing.
That is a closer fit to this page than it first appears. A calibration call asks a near-stranger to disclose things they have no obligation to share: how they really spend their time, why hires failed, what they screen for now that they did not before. John’s research is precisely about the conditions under which people disclose, which is the research behind the part of “The Surprising Power of Questions” that Management Craft leans on for the escape hatch, telling someone they can change their answer later and getting more out of them as a result. Her authority is experimental, on disclosure rather than on hiring.