Going along with it
The threat premium in economic bargaining
Shawn Geniole, Elliott MacDonell & Cheryl McCormick
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Costly punishment is thought to have evolved because it promotes cooperation and the equitable sharing of resources, but the costs associated with punishment - for both the punisher and the punished - limit the efficiency of this enforcement system in economic interactions. Reputation may also guide decision-making, but this information is not always available (e.g., in interactions involving strangers). Across several bargaining studies, we provide evidence of an efficient and flexible "threat-based" bargaining system that can influence the division of resources without the need for costly punishment and reputational information. We found that participants, without prompting, dynamically adjusted bargaining based on the perceived threat-potential (resource holding power and aggressiveness) of the bargaining partner, giving larger offers to individuals who appeared more threatening. These effects of perceived threat-potential were strongest among participants who were most vulnerable to harm in physical contests (women vs men and weaker men vs stronger men), despite that offers were made on-line and anonymously to photographs of the individuals rather than in face-to-face interactions. These results may reflect an overgeneralization of a real-world threat heuristic that allows low threat individuals to extract resources when possible, while avoiding physical retaliation and harm, and high threat individuals to appropriate larger shares of a resource through static facial cues of threat rather than by physically expressing their propensity to punish. Previously, researchers have highlighted the monetary advantages of attractiveness (the "beauty premium"), but the effects of threat either trumped, devalued, or were equivalent to those of attractiveness.
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Bridging the Parochial Divide: Closure and Brokerage in Mafia Families
Daniel DellaPosta
Cornell University Working Paper, August 2016
Abstract:
Network analysts have long argued that the occupancy of brokerage positions between otherwise weakly connected social groups yields power and access to novel resources. In cultural and organizational contexts where group solidarity and cohesion are heavily valued, however, boundary-spanning brokers may be viewed with suspicion rather than rewarded for their diversity of interests. When social groups demand unfettered commitment and suspect dilettantes, what kinds of actors make the wide-ranging connections necessary to bridge the parochial divide? Addressing this puzzle, I argue that organizational attempts at institutional closure ensure a robust demand for brokerage while simultaneously ensuring that few insiders will emerge to fill this demand, thus empowering excluded actors to form wide-ranging connections that undermine the very boundaries these attempts at closure are designed to protect. Using a unique network dataset featuring 707 members of 24 mid-century American-Italian mafia families, I document a division of network labor in which a small number of brokers - often, surprisingly, ethnic outsiders excluded from formal membership - bridged otherwise disconnected islands of criminal activity to gain power within exclusive mafia circles. While social closure in solidary groups ensures a heavy premium on insider status, it can also paradoxically increase the returns to outsider brokerage, albeit only when taken up in a way that does not violate group norms.
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Not so fast: Fast speech correlates with lower lexical and structural information
Uriel Cohen Priva
Cognition, March 2017, Pages 27-34
Abstract:
Speakers dynamically adjust their speech rate throughout conversations. These adjustments have been linked to cognitive and communicative limitations: for example, speakers speak words that are contextually unexpected (and thus add more information) with slower speech rates. This raises the question whether limitations of this type vary wildly across speakers or are relatively constant. The latter predicts that across speakers (or conversations), speech rate and the amount of information content are inversely correlated: on average, speakers can either provide high information content or speak quickly, but not both. Using two corpus studies replicated across two corpora, I demonstrate that indeed, fast speech correlates with the use of less informative words and syntactic structures. Thus, while there are individual differences in overall information throughput, speakers are more similar in this aspect than differences in speech rate would suggest. The results suggest that information theoretic constraints on production operate at a higher level than was observed before and affect language throughout production, not only after words and structures are chosen.
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Moving on or Digging Deeper: Regulatory Mode and Interpersonal Conflict Resolution
Christine Webb et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conflict resolution, in its most basic sense, requires movement and change between opposing motivational states. Although scholars and practitioners have long acknowledged this point, research has yet to investigate whether individual differences in the motivation for movement from state-to-state influence conflict resolution processes. Regulatory Mode Theory (RMT) describes this fundamental motivation as locomotion. RMT simultaneously describes an orthogonal motivational emphasis on assessment, a tendency for critical evaluation and comparison. We argue that this tendency, in the absence of a stronger motivation for locomotion, can obstruct peoples' propensity to reconcile. Five studies, using diverse measures and methods, found that the predominance of an individual's locomotion over assessment facilitates interpersonal conflict resolution. The first two studies present participants with hypothetical conflict scenarios to examine how chronic (Study 1) and experimentally induced (Study 2) individual differences in locomotion predominance influence the motivation to reconcile. The next two studies investigate this relation by way of participants' own conflict experiences, both through essay recall of previous conflict events (Study 3) and verbal narratives of ongoing conflict issues (Study 4). We then explore this association in the context of real-world conflict discussions between roommates (Study 5). Lastly, we examine results across these studies meta-analytically (Study 6). Overall, locomotion and assessment can inform lay theories of individual variation in the motivation to "move on" or "dig deeper" in conflict situations. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of using RMT to go beyond instrumental approaches to conflict resolution to understand fundamental individual motivations underlying its occurrence.
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The Effect of Early Education on Social Preferences
Alexander Cappelen et al.
NBER Working Paper, December 2016
Abstract:
We present results from the first study to examine the causal impact of early childhood education on social preferences of children. We compare children who, at 3-4 years old, were randomized into either a full-time preschool, a parenting program with incentives, or to a control group. We returned to the same children when they reached 7-8 years old and conducted a series of incentivized experiments to elicit their social preferences. We find that early childhood education has a strong causal impact on social preferences several years after the intervention: attending preschool makes children more egalitarian in their fairness view and the parenting program enhances the importance children place on efficiency relative to fairness. Our findings highlight the importance of taking a broad perspective when designing and evaluating early childhood educational programs, and provide evidence of how differences in institutional exposure may contribute to explaining heterogeneity in social preferences in society.
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Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status
Bradford Bitterly, Alison Wood Brooks & Maurice Schweitzer
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Across 8 experiments, we demonstrate that humor can influence status, but attempting to use humor is risky. The successful use of humor can increase status in both new and existing relationships, but unsuccessful humor attempts (e.g., inappropriate jokes) can harm status. The relationship between the successful use of humor and status is mediated by perceptions of confidence and competence. The successful use of humor signals confidence and competence, which in turn increases the joke teller's status. Interestingly, telling both appropriate and inappropriate jokes, regardless of the outcome, signals confidence. Although signaling confidence typically increases status and power, telling inappropriate jokes signals low competence and the combined effect of high confidence and low competence harms status. Rather than conceptualizing humor as a frivolous or ancillary behavior, we argue that humor plays a fundamental role in shaping interpersonal perceptions and hierarchies within groups.
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Dustin Wood & P.D. Harms
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, January 2017, Pages 33-45
Abstract:
Although the effects of personality traits on social environments are regularly thought to mirror the effects of social environments on personality traits, the causal dynamics existing between personality traits and social power may represent an important exception. Using a sample of 181 fraternity and sorority members surveyed over a year, we show that agentic traits are more likely to show cross-sectional associations with social power, and may increase from the experience of social power. However, increases in social power over a year are predicted better by communal characteristics. The findings are consistent with the understanding that social power acts as a disinhibitor allowing people to enact their desires with less risk and greater efficacy, but is differentially afforded to individuals perceived as likely to promote the goals of others. We discuss the conditions that may need to exist for personality traits and environments to show corresponsive relationships more generally.