Indulge me
Investing in Karma: When Wanting Promotes Helping
Benjamin Converse, Jane Risen & Travis Carter
Psychological Science, August 2012, Pages 923-930
Abstract:
People often face outcomes of important events that are beyond their personal control, such as when they wait for an acceptance letter, job offer, or medical test results. We suggest that when wanting and uncertainty are high and personal control is lacking, people may be more likely to help others, as if they can encourage fate's favor by doing good deeds proactively. Four experiments support this karmic-investment hypothesis. When people want an outcome over which they have little control, their donations of time and money increase (Experiments 1 and 2), but their participation in other rewarding activities does not (Experiment 1b). In addition, at a job fair, job seekers who feel the process is outside (vs. within) their control make more generous pledges to charities (Experiment 3). Finally, karmic investments increase optimism about a desired outcome (Experiment 4). We conclude by discussing the role of personal control and magical beliefs in this phenomenon.
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Here Is a Tip: Prosocial Gratuities Are Linked to Corruption
Magnus Thor Torfason, Francis Flynn & Daniella Kupor
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated the link between tipping, an altruistic act, and bribery, an immoral act. We found a positive relationship between these two seemingly unrelated behaviors, using archival cross-national data for 32 countries, and controlling for per capita gross domestic product, income inequality, and other factors. Countries that had higher rates of tipping behavior tended to have higher rates of corruption. We suggest that this surprising association may be accounted for by temporal focus - people may tip and bribe others in order to receive special services in the future. Indeed, in a pair of follow-up survey studies, we find evidence that the link between tipping and bribery can be partly accounted for by prospective orientation.
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Fairness modulates non-conscious facial mimicry in women
Dennis Hofman et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 7 September 2012, Pages 3535-3539
Abstract:
In societies with high cooperation demands, implicit consensus on social norms enables successful human coexistence. Mimicking other people's actions and emotions has been proposed as a means to synchronize behaviour, thereby enhancing affiliation. Mimicry has long been thought to be reflexive, but it has recently been suggested that mimicry might also be motivationally driven. Here, we show during an economic bargaining game that automatic happy mimicry of those making unfair offers disappears. After the bargaining game, when the proposers have acquired either a fair or unfair reputation, we observe increased angry mimicry of proposers with an unfair reputation and decreased angry mimicry of fair proposers. These findings provide direct empirical evidence that non-conscious mimicry is modulated by fairness. We interpret the present results as reflecting that facial mimicry in women functions conditionally, dependent on situational demands.
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The Effects of Racial Segregation on Trust and Volunteering in US Cities
Jonathan Rothwell
Urban Studies, August 2012, Pages 2109-2136
Abstract:
A large body of recent research claims that racial diversity hinders the general trust of others, but these studies rarely consider how racial segregation mediates diversity. This article re-examines the issue by considering how the residential isolation of minorities alters general trust and one manifestation of trust: volunteering in cities. Using data from the US, the results from a regression analysis suggest that metropolitan-level racial segregation decreases trust and volunteering. Diversity has no significant effect. The results are robust to a variety of specifications and assumptions. The use of historical metropolitan and state characteristics improves the fit between segregation and distrust, and political affiliation is explored as a potential link between group distrust and general distrust. High levels of trust have been identified as a source of good governance and economic performance; integration is likely to enhance these attributes regardless of the level of diversity.
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Cassie Mogilner, Zoe Chance & Michael Norton
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four experiments reveal a counterintuitive solution to the common problem of feeling that one does not have enough time: giving some of it away. Although people's objective amount of time cannot be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), this research demonstrates that people's subjective sense of time affluence can be increased: compared with wasting time, spending time on oneself, and even gaining a windfall of "free" time, spending time on others increases feelings of time affluence. The impact of giving time on feelings of time affluence is driven by a boosted sense of self-efficacy - such that giving time makes people more willing to commit to future engagements despite their busy schedules.
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Time for Blood: The Effect of Paid Leave Legislation on Altruistic Behavior
Nicola Lacetera & Mario Macis
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Organizations and public agencies that promote pro-social activities constantly struggle to attract and encourage more contributions. In this article, we study the effects of an explicit reward in the context of blood donation. Specifically, we analyze the effects of a legislative provision that grants a one-day paid leave of absence to blood donors who are employees in Italy, using a unique data set with the complete donation histories of the blood donors in an Italian town. The across-donor variation in employment status, and within-donor changes over time are the sources of variation that we employ to study whether the paid-day-off incentive affects the frequency of their donations. Our analysis indicates that the day-off privilege leads donors who are employees to make, on average, one extra donation per year, which represents an increase of around 40%. We also find that the provision has persistent effects, with donors maintaining higher donation frequencies even when they cease to be eligible for the incentive. We discuss the implications of our findings for policies aimed at reducing the shortages in the supply of blood and, more generally, for organizations that try to motivate voluntary contributors.
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The Effects of Power on Prosocial Outcomes: A Self-Validation Analysis
Kenneth DeMarree, Pablo Briñol & Richard Petty
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research distinguishes between primary (cognitive) and secondary (metacognitive) processes in the domain of power. Power is a central construct in economic decision making, influencing people's thoughts and behavior in organizational, political, consumer, and interpersonal contexts. Whereas most research has discussed ways that power can influence primary cognition (e.g., increased self-focused thoughts, heuristic processing), we examine how power can influence secondary cognition (i.e., thinking about thinking). We argue that high (relative to low) power can increase reliance on one's current thoughts, magnifying their influence on judgment. If thoughts are antisocial (prosocial), increased power will produce antisocial (prosocial) judgments and behavior. We activated prosocial or antisocial concepts through priming before activating powerfulness or powerlessness. As predicted, primes impacted people's self-perceptions of cooperation (Experiment 1) and the extent to which they were willing to help others (Experiment 2) when induced to feel powerful, but not when led to feel powerless.
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Beneficiary or Benefactor: Are People More Prosocial When They Reflect on Receiving or Giving?
Adam Grant & Jane Dutton
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research shows that reflecting on benefits received can make people happier, but it is unclear whether or not such reflection makes them more helpful. Receiving benefits can promote prosocial behavior through reciprocity and positive affect, but these effects are often relationship-specific, short-lived, and complicated by ambivalent reactions. We propose that prosocial behavior is more likely when people reflect on being a benefactor to others, rather than a beneficiary. The experience of giving benefits may encourage prosocial behavior by increasing the salience and strength of one's identity as a capable, caring contributor. In field and laboratory experiments, we found that participants who reflected about giving benefits voluntarily contributed more time to their university, and were more likely to donate money to natural-disaster victims, than were participants who reflected about receiving benefits. When it comes to reflection, giving may be more powerful than receiving as a driver of prosocial behavior.
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Trust and Credit: The Role of Appearance in Peer-to-peer Lending
Jefferson Duarte, Stephan Siegel & Lance Young
Review of Financial Studies, August 2012, Pages 2455-2484
Abstract:
Although it is well known that appearance-based impressions affect labor market and election outcomes, little is known about the role appearance plays in financial transactions. We address this question using photographs of potential borrowers from a peer-to-peer lending site. Consistent with the trust-intensive nature of lending, we find that borrowers who appear more trustworthy have higher probabilities of having their loans funded. Moreover, borrowers who appear more trustworthy indeed have better credit scores and default less often. Overall, our findings suggest that impressions of trustworthiness matter in financial transactions as they predict investor, as well as borrower, behavior.
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Beyond negotiated outcomes: The hidden costs of anger expression in dyadic negotiation
Lu Wang, Gregory Northcraft & Gerben Van Kleef
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, September 2012, Pages 54-63
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the hidden costs of expressing anger in negotiations. Two experimental studies show that an opponent's expression of anger can elicit both concessionary and retaliatory responses by focal negotiators. In the first study, equal-power negotiators exhibited overt concessionary behaviors when their opponents expressed anger, but also sabotaged their opponents covertly. Feelings of mistreatment mediated the relationship between opponents' anger expression and focal negotiators' covert retaliation. In the second study, low-power negotiators made larger concessions when high-power opponents expressed anger, but they retaliated covertly against high-power negotiators. High-power negotiators were overtly demanding (and not concessionary) regardless of whether or not the opponent expressed anger, but also retaliated covertly against low-power opponents who expressed anger. The two studies suggest that the value-claiming advantages of expressed anger need to be weighed against the costs of eliciting (covert) retaliation. We discuss implications of the findings and provide recommendations for future research.
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Gert-Jan Lelieveld et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, September 2012, Pages 1209-1221
Abstract:
In two experiments, the authors investigated the interpersonal effects of anger and disappointment in negotiations. Whereas previous research focused on the informational inferences that bargainers make based on others' emotions, this article emphasizes the importance of affective reactions. The findings of this study show that anger evoked a complementary emotion (fear) in targets when reported by a high-power bargainer but evoked a reciprocal emotion (anger) when reported by a low-power bargainer. This reciprocal anger led participants to offer less to low-power counterparts who reported anger. Disappointed bargainers, however, evoked a complementary emotion (guilt) in participants and increased offers, regardless of the bargainer's power position.
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Steffen Huck, Gabriele Lünser & Jean-Robert Tyran
Games and Economic Behavior, September 2012, Pages 195-209
Abstract:
We study the effects of reputation and competition in a trust game. If trustees are anonymous, such markets perform poorly: trustees are not trustworthy, and trustors do not trust. If trustees are identifiable and can, hence, build a reputation, efficiency quadruples but is still at only a third of the first best. Adding more information by granting trustors access to all trusteesʼ complete history has, somewhat surprisingly, no effect. On the other hand, we find that competition, coupled with some minimal information, eliminates the trust problem almost completely.
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Young Children Are Intrinsically Motivated to See Others Helped
Robert Hepach, Amrisha Vaish & Michael Tomasello
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Young children help other people, but it is not clear why. In the current study, we found that 2-year-old children's sympathetic arousal, as measured by relative changes in pupil dilation, is similar when they themselves help a person and when they see that person being helped by a third party (and sympathetic arousal in both cases is different from that when the person is not being helped at all). These results demonstrate that the intrinsic motivation for young children's helping behavior does not require that they perform the behavior themselves and thus "get credit" for it, but rather requires only that the other person be helped. Thus, from an early age, humans seem to have genuine concern for the welfare of others.
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Tit for Tat in the Face of Death: The Effect of Mortality Salience on Reciprocal Behavior
Simon Schindler, Marc-André Reinhard & Dagmar Stahlberg
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on terror management theory has found evidence that people under mortality salience strive to live up to salient cultural norms and values, such as egalitarianism, pacifism, or helpfulness. A basic and strong internalized norm in most human societies is the norm of reciprocity: People should support those who have supported them, and people should injure those who have injured them, respectively. In two experiments, the authors demonstrate that mortality salience (MS) increases adherence to the norm of reciprocity. In Study 1, a favor of a server led to higher tipping after making mortality salient. Study 2 indicated that MS motivated participants to act according to their high dispositional relevance of the norm of negative reciprocity following an unfavorable treatment: those participants gave less money to a person who had previously refused to help them.
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Private and Public Decisions in Social Dilemmas: Evidence from Children's Behavior
Daniel Houser, Natalia Montinari & Marco Piovesan
PLoS ONE, August 2012
Abstract:
Are selfish impulses less likely to be pursued when decisions are publicly observable? Is the presence of peers a potential solution to social dilemmas? In this paper we report data on the self-control decisions of children aged 6 to 11 who participated in games that require one to resist a selfish impulse for several minutes in order to benefit others. In Public Condition children make decisions in public view of the group of other participants, while in Private Condition they have the possibility to decide privately. We find that children aged 9 and higher are better able to resist selfish impulses in public environments. Younger children, however, display no such effect. Further, we find self-control substantially impacted by group size. When decisions are public, self-control is better in larger groups, while in private condition the opposite holds.
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The cognitive demands on cooperation in social dilemmas: An fMRI study
Griet Emonds et al.
Social Neuroscience, September/October 2012, Pages 494-509
Abstract:
This study uses fMRI to investigate the cognitive demands of decision-making in two types of cooperation games: a prisoner's dilemma (PD) eliciting a temptation to free-ride, leading to a dominant, self-interested response, and a stag hunt (SH) that has no dominant response but offers pay-off incentives that make mutual cooperation collectively beneficial but risky. Consequently, the PD poses greater conflict between self- and collective interest, greater demands for computational reasoning to derive the optimal solution, and greater demands for mentalizing to infer the intentions of others. Consistent with these differences between the two games, the results indicate that the PD is associated with increased activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus, prefrontal cortex, parietal lobe, and temporoparietal junction. With less conflict, the demands for computation and mentalizing are reduced in the SH, and cooperation levels increase dramatically. The differences in brain activation elicited by the different incentive structures of the PD and the SH appear to be independent of individual differences in revealed social preferences.
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Yosuke Morishima et al.
Neuron, 12 July 2012, Pages 73-79
Abstract:
Human altruism shaped our evolutionary history and pervades social and political life. There are, however, enormous individual differences in altruism. Some people are almost completely selfish, while others display strong altruism, and the factors behind this heterogeneity are only poorly understood. We examine the neuroanatomical basis of these differences with voxel-based morphometry and show that gray matter (GM) volume in the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is strongly associated with both individuals' altruism and the individual-specific conditions under which this brain region is recruited during altruistic decision making. Thus, individual differences in GM volume in TPJ not only translate into individual differences in the general propensity to behave altruistically, but they also create a link between brain structure and brain function by indicating the conditions under which individuals are likely to recruit this region when they face a conflict between altruistic and selfish acts.
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The Neural Components of Empathy: Predicting Daily Prosocial Behavior
Sylvia Morelli, Lian Rameson & Matthew Lieberman
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous neuroimaging studies on empathy have not clearly identified neural systems that support the three components of empathy: affective congruence, perspective-taking, and prosocial motivation. These limitations stem from a focus on a single emotion per study, minimal variation in amount of social context provided, and lack of prosocial motivation assessment. In the current investigation, 32 participants completed an fMRI session assessing empathic responses to individuals experiencing painful, anxious, and happy events that varied in valence and amount of social context provided. They also completed a 14-day experience sampling survey that assessed real-world helping behaviors. The results demonstrate that empathy for positive and negative emotions selectively activates regions associated with positive and negative affect, respectively. Also, the mirror system was more active during empathy for context-independent events (pain), whereas the mentalizing system was more active during empathy for context-dependent events (anxiety, happiness). Finally, the septal area, previously linked to prosocial motivation, was the only region that was commonly activated across empathy for pain, anxiety, and happiness. Septal activity during each of these empathic experiences was predictive of daily helping. These findings suggest that empathy has multiple input pathways, produces affect-congruent activations, and results in septally-mediated prosocial motivations.
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Altruism from the house: The impact of home equity on charitable giving
Chau Do & Irina Paley
Review of Economics of the Household, September 2012, Pages 375-393
Abstract:
This paper exploits the dramatic increase in house prices in early 2000 and the panel nature of the data to investigate the effect of home equity on charitable giving. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 2001 to 2007, we find that a 10% increase in home equity increases a household's contributions to charity by almost 1%. This is in contrast to the effect of non-housing wealth, which we estimate to be one tenth the magnitude. Our results are consistent with the consumption literature that reports a distinct effect of housing wealth that is significantly larger than that of financial wealth.
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Heterogeneous networks do not promote cooperation when humans play a Prisoner's Dilemma
Carlos Gracia-Lázaro et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 7 August 2012, Pages 12922-12926
Abstract:
It is not fully understood why we cooperate with strangers on a daily basis. In an increasingly global world, where interaction networks and relationships between individuals are becoming more complex, different hypotheses have been put forward to explain the foundations of human cooperation on a large scale and to account for the true motivations that are behind this phenomenon. In this context, population structure has been suggested to foster cooperation in social dilemmas, but theoretical studies of this mechanism have yielded contradictory results so far; additionally, the issue lacks a proper experimental test in large systems. We have performed the largest experiments to date with humans playing a spatial Prisoner's Dilemma on a lattice and a scale-free network (1,229 subjects). We observed that the level of cooperation reached in both networks is the same, comparable with the level of cooperation of smaller networks or unstructured populations. We have also found that subjects respond to the cooperation that they observe in a reciprocal manner, being more likely to cooperate if, in the previous round, many of their neighbors and themselves did so, which implies that humans do not consider neighbors' payoffs when making their decisions in this dilemma but only their actions. Our results, which are in agreement with recent theoretical predictions based on this behavioral rule, suggest that population structure has little relevance as a cooperation promoter or inhibitor among humans.
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A positive effect of flowers rather than eye images in a large-scale, cross-cultural dictator game
Nichola Raihani & Redouan Bshary
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 7 September 2012, Pages 3556-3564
Abstract:
People often consider how their behaviour will be viewed by others, and may cooperate to avoid gaining a bad reputation. Sensitivity to reputation may be elicited by subtle social cues of being watched: previous studies have shown that people behave more cooperatively when they see images of eyes rather than control images. Here, we tested whether eye images enhance cooperation in a dictator game, using the online labour market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In contrast to our predictions and the results of most previous studies, dictators gave away more money when they saw images of flowers rather than eye images. Donations in response to eye images were not significantly different to donations under control treatments. Dictator donations varied significantly across cultures but there was no systematic variation in responses to different image types across cultures. Unlike most previous studies, players interacting via AMT may feel truly anonymous when making decisions and, as such, may not respond to subtle social cues of being watched. Nevertheless, dictators gave away similar amounts as in previous studies, so anonymity did not erase helpfulness. We suggest that eye images might only promote cooperative behaviour in relatively public settings and that people may ignore these cues when they know their behaviour is truly anonymous.
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Foot-in-the-door and problematic requests: A field experiment
Alexandre Pascual et al.
Social Influence, forthcoming
Abstract:
The "Foot-in-the-door" (FITD) is a compliance technique that consists of making a small initial request to a participant, then making a second, more onerous request. In this way greater compliance with the second request is obtained than under a control condition where the focal request is not preceded by the initial request. Most of the studies using this paradigm have tested prosocial requests. So the generalization of this compliance technique to other types of requests remains an open question. The authors carried out two experiments in which the FITD effect on deviant behaviors was tested. Results showed that the FITD technique increased compliance with the focal request, but only among male participants.
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Exaggerated, Mispredicted, and Misplaced: When "It's the Thought That Counts" in Gift Exchanges
Yan Zhang & Nicholas Epley
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gift-giving involves both the objective value of a gift and the symbolic meaning of the exchange. The objective value is sometimes considered of secondary importance as when people claim, "It's the thought that counts." We evaluated when and how mental state inferences count in gift exchanges. Because considering another's thoughts requires motivation and deliberation, we predicted gift givers' thoughts would increase receivers' appreciation only when triggered to consider a giver's thoughts, such as when a friend gives a bad gift. Because gift givers do not experience this trigger, we expected they would mispredict when their thoughts count and when they do not. Three experiments support these predictions. A final experiment demonstrated that thoughts "count" for givers by increasing social connection to the receiver. These results suggest that mental state inferences are not automatic in social interactions and that inferences about how much thoughts count are systematically miscalibrated.
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Donald Conlon et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, September 2012, Pages 64-77
Abstract:
In the context of purchasing ultimatums, consumers may dislike the freedom of choice that comes with proposing offers due to their awareness that the other party may have better information than they do and the fact that the attractiveness of outside alternatives is uncertain. Indeed, across three studies, we find that people prefer to receive rather than propose offers. In Study 1, proposers reached fewer agreements and experienced less favorable attitudes (e.g., satisfaction, fairness, recommendation intentions), particularly when their offers were rejected. In Study 2, proposers experienced more uncertainty and cognitive depletion as compared to receivers, again particularly if the proposed offer was rejected. In Study 3, role preferences were explained by the existence of higher regret in the proposer role, particularly if the proposed offer was rejected. We conclude with a consideration of the theoretical and practical implications of our research for scholars, customers, and service providers.