All on the same page
Sören Holmberg & Bo Rothstein
Journal of Public Affairs, February-May 2017
Abstract:
The importance of interpersonal social trust is difficult to exaggerate. It builds societies and lowers most kinds of transaction costs. The normative ideal in a society is to have high levels of social trust and a minimum of differences in trust between social, economic, and political groups. These normative expectations are put to a test using World Value Survey data from some 80 different countries. If one had high hopes, the outcome is somewhat of a disappointment. The level of social trust is only on a reasonable level in a very limited number of countries - in the Nordic countries, in the Netherlands, in Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand. In most other countries, the majority of citizens do not trust their fellow man. Furthermore, except for gender and age differences in social trust, which tend to be minor in most countries, there are rather clear (and normatively unwanted) group differences in social trust in many countries, and especially so in established democracies. Citizens with university degrees, in good health, and gainfully employed do trust other people much more than citizens with low education, in poor health, and out of work. Less fortunate and less privileged people across the world tend to have lower levels of interpersonal trust. That is not good for them, and it is not good for society.
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In-Group Favoritism Caused by Pokemon Go and the Use of Machine Learning to Learn Its Mechanisms
Alexander Peysakhovich & David Rand
Yale Working Paper, January 2017
Abstract:
A large body of laboratory-based research suggests that arbitrary group assignments (i.e., "minimal groups") can lead to in-group bias. We use the release of a popular augmented reality game Pokemon Go to study this phenomenon in a hybrid lab-field experiment. We analyze the behavior of 940 Pokemon Go players randomly matched to other Pokemon Go players to participate in Prisoner's Dilemma games. We find that participants are much more cooperative when their partner is from the same Pokemon Go team, demonstrating an ecologically valid occurrence of the minimal group paradigm. We also use transformed outcome lasso regressions to look for heterogeneity in treatment effects. Machine learning, rather than manual data mining, minimizes overfitting and reduces susceptibility to multiple comparison issues and researcher degrees of freedom. We find one important moderator of the effect: the salience of Pokemon Go. As its popularity wanes, so does the size of the group bias in our experiments. Thus our full set of results show that real-world minimal group bias is quick to arise but also potentially fragile.
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Testing Coleman's Social-Norm Enforcement Mechanism: Evidence from Wikipedia
Mikołaj Jan Piskorski & Andreea Gorbatâi
American Journal of Sociology, January 2017, Pages 1183-1222
Abstract:
Since Durkheim, sociologists have believed that actors in dense network structures experience fewer norm violations. Coleman proposed one explanatory mechanism, arguing that dense networks provide an opportunity structure to reward those who punish norm violators, leading to more frequent punishment and in turn fewer norm violations. Despite ubiquitous scholarly references to Coleman's theory, little empirical work has directly tested it in large-scale natural settings with longitudinal data. The authors undertake such a test using records of norm violations during the editing process on Wikipedia, the largest user-generated online encyclopedia. These data allow them to track all three elements required to test Coleman's mechanism: norm violations, punishments for such violations, and rewards for those who punish violations. The results support Coleman's mechanism.
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Tsachi Ein-Dor et al.
Journal of Personality, forthcoming
Objective: People believe that they can respond effectively to threats, but actually experience difficulties in disengaging from ongoing tasks and shifting their attention to life-threatening events. We contend that this tendency is especially true for secure people with respect to their worldview and perception of others and not to insecure individuals.
Method: In Study 1 (N=290), we examined individuals' reactions to various threat scenarios. In Study 2 (N=65), we examined these reactions using a behavioral design high in ecological validity. In Study 3 (N=78), we examined group-level benefits for the actions of insecure individuals by manipulating asocial behavior in response to an emergency.
Results: Study 1 indicated that anxiously attached individuals stayed away from threats and sought help; avoidant people tended to take action by either assessing the risk of the event and/or enacting an asocial action such as fight-or-flight. Study 2 added ecological validity to these findings, and Study 3 showed that priming asocial behavior responses promoted actions that increased group members' chances of survival.
Conclusion: Results validate the central tenants of social defense theory, and indicate that actions that are deemed asocial may paradoxically promote the survival of individuals and groups.
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The social contagion of incremental and entity trait beliefs
Edward Burkley, Jessica Curtis & Thomas Hatvany
Personality and Individual Differences, 1 April 2017, Pages 45-49
Abstract:
This study examined if people's own beliefs regarding the malleability of traits is influenced by the beliefs of surrounding others. Consistent with the idea of social contagion, people who read a vignette of someone espousing an incremental view (i.e., perceive traits as malleable) were more likely to endorse an incremental view themselves than those who read a vignette of someone with an entity view (i.e., perceive traits as fixed). Results indicated this contagion effect is not domain specific and can spread from one skill domain (e.g., athletics) to another (e.g., mathematics). Furthermore, others who espoused an incremental view were perceived to be more inspiring and therefore more likely to serve as positive role models than those who espoused an entity view. Overall, these results provide a bridge between the largely disparate literature areas of implicit trait beliefs, social contagion, and role models and indicate one potential source for the origination of these trait beliefs.