Cheap talk
Daniel Re & Nicholas Rule
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, March 2016, Pages 86–93
Abstract:
Previous studies have found that facial appearance can predict both the selection and performance of leaders. Little is known about the specific facial features responsible for this relationship, however. One possible feature is mouth width, which correlates with the propensity for physical combat in primates and could therefore be linked to one's perceived dominance and achievement of greater social rank. Here, we found that mouth width correlated with leader selection in experimentally standardized (Study 1A) and experimentally manipulated (Study 1B) faces. Applying these findings to real leaders, we observed that mouth width correlated with judgments of CEOs' leadership ability and with a measure of their actual leadership success (i.e., the profitability of their companies; Study 2). Individuals with wider mouths were also more likely to have won U.S. senate, but not gubernatorial, races (Study 3). Mouth width may therefore be a valid cue to leadership selection and success.
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Kevin Kniffin et al.
Human Performance, Fall 2015, Pages 281-306
Abstract:
Cooperative activities among coworkers can provide valuable group-level benefits; however, previous research has often focused on artificial activities that require extraordinary efforts away from the worksite. We investigate organizational benefits that firms might obtain through various supports for coworkers to engage in commensality (i.e., eating together). We conducted field research within firehouses in a large city to explore the role that interacting over food might have for work-group performance. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, our field research shows a significant positive association between commensality and work-group performance. Our findings establish a basis for research and practice that focuses on ways that firms can enhance team performance by leveraging the mundane and powerful activity of eating.
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The Favor Request Effect: Requesting a Favor from Consumers to Seal the Deal
Simon Blanchard, Kurt Carlson & Jamie Hyodo
Georgetown University Working Paper, December 2015
Abstract:
In situations in which consumers and sellers negotiate on price, the seller’s goal is to complete the sale at a profitable price. We demonstrate that sellers that pair a discounted offer with a favor request can increase the probability that a consumer will accept the deal, an effect we refer to as the “favor request effect.” We show the favor request effect across multiple shopping contexts and multiple types of favor requests (experiment 1) and in negotiations involving real financial consequences (experiment 2). We then show that the favor request effect operates by increasing consumers’ perceptions that the interaction with the seller is reciprocal, which in turn increases their confidence that they have obtained the lowest price (experiments 3 and 4). Finally, we explore the moderating role of the magnitude of the discount offered on effectiveness of the favor request (experiment 5).
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Michael Haselhuhn et al.
Journal of Business Ethics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars have assumed that trust is fragile: difficult to build and easily broken. We demonstrate, however, that in some cases trust is surprisingly robust — even when harmful deception is revealed, some individuals maintain high levels of trust in the deceiver. In this paper, we describe how implicit theories moderate the harmful effects of revealed deception on a key component of trust: perceptions of integrity. In a negotiation context, we show that people who hold incremental theories (beliefs that negotiating abilities are malleable) reduce perceptions of their counterpart’s integrity after they learn that they were deceived, whereas people who hold entity theories (beliefs that negotiators’ characteristics and abilities are fixed) maintain their first impressions after learning that they were deceived. Implicit theories influenced how targets interpreted evidence of deception. Individuals with incremental theories encoded revealed deception as an ethical violation; individuals with entity theories did not. These findings highlight the importance of implicit beliefs in understanding how trust changes over time.
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Reductions in Goal-Directed Cognition as a Consequence of Being the Target of Empathy
Jacquie Vorauer, Matthew Quesnel & Sara St. Germain
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, January 2016, Pages 130-141
Abstract:
Although empathy is widely promoted as a beneficial practice across both intergroup and interpersonal contexts, the implications of being the target of empathy for the target’s own psychological state are unclear. Three experiments examined how being the target of empathy affects goal-directed cognition outcomes related to a psychological sense of power, namely, the ability to maintain goal focus and readiness to ask for more in negotiations. We reasoned that because individuals typically empathize with others they perceive as disadvantaged and needing support, trying to empathize would raise individuals up in terms of such outcomes at the same time as it pushed the targets of their empathy down in a complementary fashion. Results were consistent with these predictions across intergroup and intragroup interaction. The findings thus suggest that individuals’ efforts to empathize can undermine the targets of their empathy in a subtle manner by hindering their ability to pursue their goals.
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Nudge for (the Public) Good: How Defaults Can Affect Cooperation
Toke Fosgaard & Marco Piovesan
PLoS ONE, December 2015
Abstract:
In this paper we test the effect of non-binding defaults on the level of contribution to a public good. We manipulate the default numbers appearing on the decision screen to nudge subjects toward a free-rider strategy or a perfect conditional cooperator strategy. Our results show that the vast majority of our subjects did not adopt the default numbers, but their stated strategy was affected by the default. Moreover, we find that our manipulation spilled over to a subsequent repeated public goods game where default was not manipulated. Here we found that subjects who previously saw the free rider default were significantly less cooperative than those who saw the perfect conditional cooperator default.
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The Role of Physical Formidability in Human Social Status Allocation
Aaron Lukaszewski et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why are physically formidable men willingly allocated higher social status by others in cooperative groups? Ancestrally, physically formidable males would have been differentially equipped to generate benefits for groups by providing leadership services of within-group enforcement (e.g., implementing punishment of free riders) and between-group representation (e.g., negotiating with other coalitions). Therefore, we hypothesize that adaptations for social status allocation are designed to interpret men’s physical formidability as a cue to these leadership abilities, and to allocate greater status to formidable men on this basis. These hypotheses were supported in 4 empirical studies wherein young adults rated standardized photos of subjects (targets) who were described as being part of a white-collar business consultancy. In Studies 1 and 2, male targets’ physical strength positively predicted ratings of their projected status within the organization, and this effect was mediated by perceptions that stronger men possessed greater leadership abilities of within-group enforcement and between-group representation. Moreover, (a) these same patterns held whether status was conceptualized as overall ascendancy, prestige-based status, or dominance-based status, and (b) strong men who were perceived as aggressively self-interested were not allocated greater status. Finally, 2 experiments established the causality of physical formidability’s effects on status-related perceptions by manipulating targets’ relative strength (Study 3) and height (Study 4). In interpreting our findings, we argue that adaptations for formidability-based status allocation may have facilitated the evolution of group cooperation in humans and other primates.
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Daniel Tumminelli O'Brien
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
In recent years, many North American cities and towns have implemented 311 systems, by which residents can request government services for nonemergency problems (e.g., pothole, graffiti). These systems are an example of coproduction as they join government and residents in the collaborative maintenance of the urban commons. The current article takes an applied evolutionary approach to understanding the motivations underlying constituent participation in this process, positing that reporting an issue in the public space is reflective of territoriality — that is, to feel ownership for spaces and objects. This territoriality thesis is examined in 3 studies of the 311 system in Boston, Massachusetts, focusing on whether reporting and the motivations for it are centered around the home. Study 1 demonstrated that the vast majority of those using 311’s traditional channels (i.e., hotline and Internet) reported issues exclusively within a narrow range around their homes. Study 2 found that a smart phone application, which presumably increases mobility, expanded this range, but only into other spaces in the neighborhood. In Study 3, a field experiment found that advertisements for the 311 system that prime territoriality by referencing the local neighborhood were more effective in encouraging reporting than those referencing the broader city. Implications for extending research and policy on territoriality and maintenance of the urban commons and for coproduction policies, more generally, are discussed.
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Ming-Hong Tsai & Corinne Bendersky
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Group members often over-weigh shared information and under-value unique information during discussions to the detriment of decision quality. Fortunately, perceiving other group members as receptive to dissenting opinions may enhance information sharing. We distinguish between two ways of expressing opinion-differences about tasks — debates and disagreements — that we predict are perceived by others as conveying varying degrees of receptivity to dissenting opinions. In four studies with mixed methods and a causal chain design, we manipulate and measure group members’ (the “senders”) expressions of debates and disagreements, others’ (the “receivers”) perceptions of the senders’ receptivity to dissenting opinions, and receivers’ information sharing intentions and behavior. We demonstrate that task conflicts that are expressed as debates rather than as disagreements are associated with greater information sharing because receivers perceive senders to be more receptive to dissenting opinions. We, thus, offer a novel approach to increasing information utilization during group decision making and help resolve the paradoxical effects of opinion differences on group performance.
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Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation
Adam Bear & David Rand
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans often cooperate with strangers, despite the costs involved. A long tradition of theoretical modeling has sought ultimate evolutionary explanations for this seemingly altruistic behavior. More recently, an entirely separate body of experimental work has begun to investigate cooperation’s proximate cognitive underpinnings using a dual-process framework: Is deliberative self-control necessary to reign in selfish impulses, or does self-interested deliberation restrain an intuitive desire to cooperate? Integrating these ultimate and proximate approaches, we introduce dual-process cognition into a formal game-theoretic model of the evolution of cooperation. Agents play prisoner’s dilemma games, some of which are one-shot and others of which involve reciprocity. They can either respond by using a generalized intuition, which is not sensitive to whether the game is one-shot or reciprocal, or pay a (stochastically varying) cost to deliberate and tailor their strategy to the type of game they are facing. We find that, depending on the level of reciprocity and assortment, selection favors one of two strategies: intuitive defectors who never deliberate, or dual-process agents who intuitively cooperate but sometimes use deliberation to defect in one-shot games. Critically, selection never favors agents who use deliberation to override selfish impulses: Deliberation only serves to undermine cooperation with strangers. Thus, by introducing a formal theoretical framework for exploring cooperation through a dual-process lens, we provide a clear answer regarding the role of deliberation in cooperation based on evolutionary modeling, help to organize a growing body of sometimes-conflicting empirical results, and shed light on the nature of human cognition and social decision making.
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Spillovers From Coordination to Cooperation: Evidence for the Interdependence Hypothesis?
Hannes Rusch & Christoph Luetge
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
It has recently been proposed that the evolution of human cooperativeness might, at least in part, have started as the cooptation of behavioral strategies evolved for solving problems of coordination to solve problems with higher incentives to defect, that is, problems of cooperation. Following this line of thought, we systematically tested human subjects for spillover effects from simple coordination tasks (2 × 2 stag hunt [SH] games) to problems of cooperation (2 × 2 prisoner’s dilemma [PD] games) in a laboratory experiment with rigorous controls to rule out subject confusion or habituation. Supporting the hypothesis that decision mechanisms for cooperation problems are linked with decision mechanisms for coordination, our main finding is that cooperation levels in PD games embedded in a sequence of SH games were significantly increased compared to a baseline sequence consisting only of PDs when subjects played in fixed pairs. No such effects could be found when players were randomly rematched each round. Additional findings include that this spillover effect cannot prevent a decay of cooperation over time, that there is no indication of a reversed effect (i.e., no signs of negative spillovers from failed cooperation to miscoordination), and that subjects’ self-reported preferences in SH games are prosocial.
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Strategic Consequences of Emotional Misrepresentation in Negotiation: The Blowback Effect
Rachel Campagna et al.
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research indicates that expressing anger elicits concession making from negotiating counterparts. When emotions are conveyed either by a computer program or by a confederate, results appear to affirm a long-standing notion that feigning anger is an effective bargaining tactic. We hypothesize this tactic actually jeopardizes postnegotiation deal implementation and subsequent exchange. Four studies directly test both tactical and strategic consequences of emotional misrepresentation. False representations of anger generated little tactical benefit but produced considerable and persistent strategic disadvantage. This disadvantage is because of an effect we call “blowback.” A negotiator’s misrepresented anger creates an action-reaction cycle that results in genuine anger and diminishes trust in both the negotiator and counterpart. Our findings highlight the importance of considering the strategic implications of emotional misrepresentation for negotiators interested in claiming value. We discuss the benefits of researching reciprocal interdependence between 2 or more negotiating parties and of modeling value creation beyond deal construction to include implementation of terms.