In this together
Looking Like a Leader – Facial Shape Predicts Perceived Height and Leadership Ability
Daniel Re et al.
PLoS ONE, December 2013
Abstract:
Judgments of leadership ability from face images predict the outcomes of actual political elections and are correlated with leadership success in the corporate world. The specific facial cues that people use to judge leadership remain unclear, however. Physical height is also associated with political and organizational success, raising the possibility that facial cues of height contribute to leadership perceptions. Consequently, we assessed whether cues to height exist in the face and, if so, whether they are associated with perception of leadership ability. We found that facial cues to perceived height had a strong relationship with perceived leadership ability. Furthermore, when allowed to manually manipulate faces, participants increased facial cues associated with perceived height in order to maximize leadership perception. A morphometric analysis of face shape revealed that structural facial masculinity was not responsible for the relationship between perceived height and perceived leadership ability. Given the prominence of facial appearance in making social judgments, facial cues to perceived height may have a significant influence on leadership selection.
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Oxytocin and the Biological Basis for Interpersonal and Political Trust
Jennifer Merolla et al.
Political Behavior, December 2013, Pages 753-776
Abstract:
Political scientists have documented the many ways in which trust influences attitudes and behaviors that are important for the legitimacy and stability of democratic political systems. They have also explored the social, economic, and political factors that tend to increase levels of trust in others, in political figures, and in government. Neuroeconomic studies have shown that the neuroactive hormone oxytocin, a peptide that plays a key role in social attachment and affiliation in non-human mammals, is associated with trust and reciprocity in humans (e.g., Kosfeld et al., Nature 435:673–676, 2005; Zak et al., Horm Beh 48:522–527, 2005). While oxytocin has been linked to indicators of interpersonal trust, we do not know if it extends to trust in government actors and institutions. In order to explore these relationships, we conducted an experiment in which subjects were randomly assigned to receive a placebo or 40 IU of oxytocin administered intranasally. We show that manipulating oxytocin increases individuals’ interpersonal trust. It also has effects on trust in political figures and in government, though only for certain partisan groups and for those low in levels of interpersonal trust.
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Sumitava Mukherjee, Jaison Manjaly & Maithilee Nargundkar
Frontiers in Psychology, November 2013
Abstract:
With continuous growth in information aggregation and dissemination, studies on privacy preferences are important to understand what makes people reveal information about them. Previous studies have demonstrated that short-term gains and possible monetary rewards make people risk disclosing information. Given the malleability of privacy preferences and the ubiquitous monetary cues in daily lives, we measured the contextual effect of reminding people about money on their privacy disclosure preferences. In experiment 1, we found that priming money increased willingness to disclose their personal information that could be shared with an online shopping website. Beyond stated willingness, experiment 2 tested whether priming money increases propensity for actually giving out personal information. Across both experiments, we found that priming money increases both the reported willingness and the actual disclosure of personal information. Our results imply that not only do short-term rewards make people trade-off personal security and privacy, but also mere exposure to money increases self-disclosure.
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Why do survey respondents disclose more when computers ask the questions?
Laura Lind et al.
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Self-administration of surveys has been shown to increase respondents’ reporting of sensitive information, and audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) has become the self-administration method of choice for many social surveys. The study reported here, a laboratory experiment with 235 respondents, examines why ACASI seems to promote disclosure. It compares responses in a voice-only (self-administered) interface with responses to a face-to-face (FTF) human interviewer and to two automated interviewing systems that presented animated virtual interviewers with more and less facial movement. All four modes involved the same human interviewer’s voice, and the virtual interviewers’ facial motion was captured from the same human interviewer who carried out the FTF interviews. For the ten questions for which FTF-ACASI mode differences (generally, more disclosure in ACASI than FTF) were observed, we compared response patterns for the virtual interviewer conditions. Disclosure for most questions was greater under ACASI than in any of the other modes, even though the two virtual interview modes involved computerized self-administration. This suggests that the locus of FTF-ACASI effects is particularly tied to the absence of facial representation in ACASI. Additional evidence suggests that respondents’ affective experience (e.g., comfort) during the interview may mediate these mode effects.
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Exploring own-age biases in deception detection
Gillian Slessor et al.
Cognition & Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present study explored own-age biases in deception detection, investigating whether individuals were more likely to trust those in their own-age group. Younger and older participants were asked to detect deceit from videos of younger and older speakers, rating their confidence in each decision. Older participants showed an own-age bias: they were more likely to think that deceptive speakers of their own age, relative to younger speakers, were telling the truth. Older participants were also more confident in their judgements of own-age, relative to other-age, speakers. There were no own-age biases for younger participants. In a subsequent (apparently unrelated) task, participants were asked to rate the trustworthiness of the speakers. Both age groups of participants trusted younger speakers who had previously told the truth more compared to those who had lied. This effect was not found for older speakers. These findings are considered in relation to the in-group/out-group model of social cognition and common stereotypical beliefs held about younger and older adults.
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Second thoughts on free riding
Ulrik Nielsen, Jean-Robert Tyran & Erik Wengström
Economics Letters, February 2014, Pages 136–139
Abstract:
We use the strategy method to classify subjects into cooperator types in a large-scale online Public Goods Game and find that free riders spend more time on making their decisions than conditional cooperators and other cooperator types. This result is robust to reversing the framing of the game and is not driven by free riders lacking cognitive ability, confusion, or natural swiftness in responding. Our results suggest that conditional cooperation serves as a norm and that free riders need time to resolve a moral dilemma.
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Gary Bolton & Axel Ockenfels
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, January 2014, Pages 143–154
Abstract:
Laboratory market experiments observe a sharp dichotomy between (selfish) competitive behavior and fair-minded social behavior depending on competitive conditions. While the dichotomy is consistent with social preference theory, the often advanced hypothesis that social behavior is an artifact of laboratory conditions has not heretofore been ruled out. We tested these competing hypotheses in a field experiment on eBay conducted with experienced traders. The buyer behavior we observe strongly confirms the social preference hypothesis. Also, the behavioral patterns in the field experiment mirror fully naturally occurring trading patterns in the market. For instance, some sellers do not use their commitment power as predicted by theories of both selfish and social behavior, with the pattern of deviation reflecting traders’ market experience outside the experiment.
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Forgiver Triumphs in Alternating Prisoner's Dilemma
Benjamin Zagorsky et al.
PLoS ONE, December 2013
Abstract:
Cooperative behavior, where one individual incurs a cost to help another, is a wide spread phenomenon. Here we study direct reciprocity in the context of the alternating Prisoner's Dilemma. We consider all strategies that can be implemented by one and two-state automata. We calculate the payoff matrix of all pairwise encounters in the presence of noise. We explore deterministic selection dynamics with and without mutation. Using different error rates and payoff values, we observe convergence to a small number of distinct equilibria. Two of them are uncooperative strict Nash equilibria representing always-defect (ALLD) and Grim. The third equilibrium is mixed and represents a cooperative alliance of several strategies, dominated by a strategy which we call Forgiver. Forgiver cooperates whenever the opponent has cooperated; it defects once when the opponent has defected, but subsequently Forgiver attempts to re-establish cooperation even if the opponent has defected again. Forgiver is not an evolutionarily stable strategy, but the alliance, which it rules, is asymptotically stable. For a wide range of parameter values the most commonly observed outcome is convergence to the mixed equilibrium, dominated by Forgiver. Our results show that although forgiving might incur a short-term loss it can lead to a long-term gain. Forgiveness facilitates stable cooperation in the presence of exploitation and noise.
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Too good to be true: Suspicion-based rejections of high offers
Wolfgang Steinel, Ilja van Beest & Eric Van Dijk Group
Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is a common belief that high offers are more readily accepted than low offers. In contrast to this general notion, the current set of studies shows that there is a limit to the beneficial effects of making high offers and that becoming too generous may backfire. This paradoxical finding is observed when offers are made in an ambiguous situation of asymmetric information. In three studies, we found that when bargaining opponents had private information over the total amount that was to be distributed, participants became suspicious about high offers (i.e., offers that were beneficial to themselves), but not about low or equal offers. Due to suspicion, participants rejected high offers more often than equal offers.
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Jolie Martin et al.
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
In social interactions, decision makers are often unaware of their interdependence with others, precluding the realization of shared long-term benefits. In an experiment, pairs of participants played an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma under various conditions involving differing levels of interdependence information. Each pair was assigned to one of four conditions: “No-Info” players saw their own actions and outcomes, but were not told that they interacted with another person; “Min-Info” players knew they interacted with another person but still without seeing the other's actions or outcomes; “Mid-Info” players discovered the other's actions and outcomes as they were revealed over time; and “Max-Info” players were also shown a complete payoff matrix mapping actions to outcomes from the outset and throughout the game. With higher levels of interdependence information, we found increased individual cooperation and mutual cooperation, driven by increased reciprocating cooperation (in response to a counterpart's cooperation). Furthermore, joint performance and satisfaction were higher for pairs with more information. We discuss how awareness of interdependence may encourage cooperative behavior in real-world interactions.
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Defectors Cannot Be Detected during “Small Talk” with Strangers
Joseph Manson, Matthew Gervais & Michelle Kline
PLoS ONE, December 2013
Abstract:
To account for the widespread human tendency to cooperate in one-shot social dilemmas, some theorists have proposed that cooperators can be reliably detected based on ethological displays that are difficult to fake. Experimental findings have supported the view that cooperators can be distinguished from defectors based on “thin slices” of behavior, but the relevant cues have remained elusive, and the role of the judge's perspective remains unclear. In this study, we followed triadic conversations among unacquainted same-sex college students with unannounced dyadic one-shot prisoner's dilemmas, and asked participants to guess the PD decisions made toward them and among the other two participants. Two other sets of participants guessed the PD decisions after viewing videotape of the conversations, either with foreknowledge (informed), or without foreknowledge (naïve), of the post-conversation PD. Only naïve video viewers approached better-than-chance prediction accuracy, and they were significantly accurate at predicting the PD decisions of only opposite-sexed conversation participants. Four ethological displays recently proposed to cue defection in one-shot social dilemmas (arms crossed, lean back, hand touch, and face touch) failed to predict either actual defection or guesses of defection by any category of observer. Our results cast doubt on the role of “greenbeard” signals in the evolution of human prosociality, although they suggest that eavesdropping may be more informative about others' cooperative propensities than direct interaction.
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Unintended imitation affects success in a competitive game
Marnix Naber, Maryam Vaziri Pashkam & Ken Nakayama
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10 December 2013, Pages 20046-20050
Abstract:
Imitation typically occurs in social contexts where people interact and have common goals. Here, we show that people are also highly susceptible to imitate each other in a competitive context. Pairs of players performed a competitive and fast-reaching task (a variant of the arcade whac-a-mole game) in which money could be earned if players hit brief-appearing visual targets on a large touchscreen before their opponents. In three separate experiments, we demonstrate that reaction times and movements were highly correlated within pairs of players. Players affected their success by imitating each other, and imitation depended on the visibility of the opponent’s behavior. Imitation persisted, despite the competitive and demanding nature of the game, even if this resulted in lower scores and payoffs and even when there was no need to counteract the opponent’s actions.