Dr. Maya Enisman

Maya Enisman
Dr.
Maya
Enisman
Former PhD student

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Action Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences.

I received my Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2024, where I investigated the differences between conflicts involving desirable alternatives (Approach-Approach conflicts) and those involving undesirable alternatives (Avoidance-Avoidance conflicts).

Together with Prof. Shoham Choshen-Hillel and Prof. Ilan Yaniv, I study advice-based decision-making. Decision-makers are generally considered oblivious to the potential benefits of equally weighting different opinions. We suggest that this misappreciation of averaging is rooted in the decision-makers’ social role: Actors (decision-makers) and observers (people who observe the actors’ behaviors) approach the task of combining information differently. We show that actors value their own opinions, whereas observers value giving unbiased weights to all opinions, displaying an implicit understanding of the benefit of advisory opinions.

 

Selected Publications 

- Enisman, M., & Levy, A., & Kleiman, T. (2024). Hand movement trajectories illustrate the mechanism underlying Kurt Lewin’s distinction between approach-approach and avoidance-avoidance motivational conflictsJournal of Personality and Social Psychology, 127(2), 239–258.

- Enisman, M., & Kleiman, T. (2024). Considering motivational conflicts in context: The relative difficulty of Approach-Approach and Avoidance-Avoidance conflicts is affective context-dependent. Emotion, 24(6), 1358–1375. 

- Enisman, M., Shpitzer, H., & Kleiman, T. (2021). Choice changes preferences, not merely reflects them: A meta-analysis of the artifact-free free-choice paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(1), 16–29.