One Part Story

Customer Description: This is a thank-you gift to my Ph.D. advisor, George. I’d like a depiction of the 5-year saga of our developing and writing a paper that eventually got accepted to a top journal and got me my first faculty job. Title: The Making of Responsibility Exchange Theory. The process was a joint effort and included: the two of us brainstorming ideas on walks through the park; the two of us working through mathematical equations on a chalkboard; me banging my head against a wall and standing upside down trying to coming up with better ideas; lots of rejected ideas (It would be great if you could depict a small trashcan overflowing with wadded up pieces of paper). Eventually, I had a Eureka moment — I called George, who was on vacation hiking a mountain with his wife, and I told him the idea. He said, “That’s it!” It felt like striking gold. (The idea can be depicted by the pictures I’m attaching of the mathematical model, the 2x2 grid with the words bragging, thanking, apologizing, and blaming, and the diagram of the gray stick figures.) However, there was still a lot of work to be done—we needed to have several rounds of presenting our idea to others, getting their feedback, running surveys with experimental participants to test our theory’s predictions, and making changes to the theory. In the meantime, I graduated with my Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University—George “hooded” me at the hooding ceremony—and I moved on to a postdoc at Wharton for a few years. In the final year, while I was applying for faculty jobs at university across the country, the paper got accepted at a top journal, Psychological Review. I was on a street corner in Philadelphia when I was reading my email on my phone and received the acceptance email from the journal. That was the most exciting gratifying moment. I immediately called George on the phone. We were both thrilled. Even though we were only talking on the phone, I imagine us jumping in the air and giving each other a huge high-five. All the years and time we spent on it finally paid off. It led to my getting a job as Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Notes on our sizes for the drawing: George is about a foot taller than me. I’m 5’1”, and he’s at least 6’1”. It would be nice to have elements of the cityscape of Pittsburgh throughout (e.g., the famous bridges and convergence of three rivers). The style of art should be similar to the dog time travel one-day story. I'm willing to pay way more than $7 to have this drawing be well-done.