Leigh Thompson
Leigh Thompson is an organisational psychologist at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, best known for her work on negotiation and teams. On this site she appears as second author of the 1997 rosy-view studies, with Terence Mitchell, Erika Peterson and Randy Cronk, which tracked people through three real events and found recollection reliably more positive than the experience had been.
Who they are
Thompson's research home is the psychology of negotiation and of group performance: how people bargain, where they leave value on the table, why teams underperform the sum of their members, and what can be trained. That work reaches practitioners largely through her teaching and her textbook writing on negotiation, and it is the body of work her name is usually attached to.
The rosy-view paper sits slightly outside that line, though not as far outside as it first looks. Both concern the gap between what people believe about an episode and what the episode was, and both are interested in that gap because it has consequences for the next decision. A negotiator working from a rosier memory of the last deal is in the same position as a holidaymaker booking the same trip again.
This page does not extend her biography beyond what has been verified. Her role on the 1997 paper is the reason she is here.
Key papers
Mitchell, T. R., Thompson, L., Peterson, E., & Cronk, R. (1997), "Temporal Adjustments in the Evaluation of Events: The 'Rosy View'," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33(4), 421-448. Three real events, rated in anticipation, during and afterwards. Anticipation and recollection were both more positive than the experience.
Her principal body of work is on negotiation and teams and is not otherwise cited on this site.
Key ideas
Rosy retrospection, established with her co-authors on real events rather than in the laboratory: recollection runs more positive than the experience did.
Negotiation and team performance, her main research field, where the gap between believed and actual outcomes has direct practical consequences.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
Her Kellogg page embeds her LinkedIn posts under that vanity URL and carries a Google Scholar button. No X or Bluesky account is linked from it
Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Mitchell, T. R., Thompson, L., Peterson, E., & Cronk, R. (1997), "Temporal Adjustments in the Evaluation of Events: The 'Rosy View'," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33(4), 421-448.
- Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, faculty listing. (Affiliation and research field.)