Let's get along
Power decreases trust in social exchange
Oliver Schilke, Martin Reimann & Karen Cook
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does lacking vs. possessing power in a social exchange affect people’s trust in their exchange partner? An answer to this question has broad implications for a number of exchange settings in which dependence plays an important role. Here, we report on a series of experiments in which we manipulated participants’ power position in terms of structural dependence and observed their trust perceptions and behaviors. Over a variety of different experimental paradigms and measures, we find that more powerful actors place less trust in others than less powerful actors do. Our results contradict predictions by rational actor models, which assume that low-power individuals are able to anticipate that a more powerful exchange partner will place little value on the relationship with them, thus tends to behave opportunistically, and consequently cannot be trusted. Conversely, our results support predictions by motivated cognition theory, which posits that low-power individuals want their exchange partner to be trustworthy and then act according to that desire. Mediation analyses show that, consistent with the motivated cognition account, having low power increases individuals’ hope and, in turn, their perceptions of their exchange partners’ benevolence, which ultimately leads them to trust.
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Supernatural and secular monitors promote human cooperation only if they remind of punishment
Onurcan Yilmaz & Hasan Bahçekapili
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
People’s large-scale cooperation with genetically unrelated people is widely assumed to lie beyond the scope of standard evolutionary mechanisms like kin selection and reciprocal altruism and to require mechanisms specific to human sociality. The emergence of the idea of being monitored by supernatural agents who can punish social norm violations has been proposed as one solution to this problem. In parallel, secular authorities can have similar functions with that of religious authority based on supernatural agents in today’s secularized world. However, it is not clear whether it is the idea of religious or secular authority in general or the punishing aspects of both institutions in particular that leads to increased cooperation and prosociality. Study 1 showed that people reported more prosocial intentions after being implicitly primed with punishing religious and secular authorities (versus non-punishing ones or a neutral one) in a scrambled sentence task. Study 2 showed that explicitly priming the punishing aspects of God (versus the non-punishing aspects or a neutral prime) led to an increase in the level of prosocial intentions. The findings support the supernatural punishment hypothesis and suggest a similar mechanism for the influence of secular authority on prosociality. More generally, the findings are consistent with views that punishment, whether real or imagined, played an important role in the evolution of large-scale cooperation in the human species.
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Ayse Uskul, Silke Paulmann & Mario Weick
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Listeners have to pay close attention to a speaker’s tone of voice (prosody) during daily conversations. This is particularly important when trying to infer the emotional state of the speaker. Although a growing body of research has explored how emotions are processed from speech in general, little is known about how psychosocial factors such as social power can shape the perception of vocal emotional attributes. Thus, the present studies explored how social power affects emotional prosody recognition. In a correlational study (Study 1) and an experimental study (Study 2), we show that high power is associated with lower accuracy in emotional prosody recognition than low power. These results, for the first time, suggest that individuals experiencing high or low power perceive emotional tone of voice differently.
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Stefanie Wening, Nina Keith & Andrea Abele
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In negotiations, a focus on interests (why negotiators want something) is key to integrative agreements. Yet, many negotiators spontaneously focus on positions (what they want), with suboptimal outcomes. Our research applies construal-level theory to negotiations and proposes that a high construal level instigates a focus on interests during negotiations which, in turn, positively affects outcomes. In particular, we tested the notion that the effect of construal level on outcomes was mediated by information exchange and judgement accuracy. Finally, we expected the mere mode of presentation of task material to affect construal levels and manipulated construal levels using concrete versus abstract negotiation tasks. In two experiments, participants negotiated in dyads in either a high- or low-construal-level condition. In Study 1, high-construal-level dyads outperformed dyads in the low-construal-level condition; this main effect was mediated by information exchange. Study 2 replicated both the main and mediation effects using judgement accuracy as mediator and additionally yielded a positive effect of a high construal level on a second, more complex negotiation task. These results not only provide empirical evidence for the theoretically proposed link between construal levels and negotiation outcomes but also shed light on the processes underlying this effect.
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Jennifer Glanville
Sociological Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars argue that trust is fundamental to maintaining a healthy society, and consequently, recent evidence that trust may be declining in the United States has generated an interest in the determinants of trust. According to the social capital literature, particularly the work of Robert Putnam, involvement in voluntary associations influences the development of generalized trust. One way in which organizational participation is thought to foster trust is through creating more diverse, or bridging, social networks. However, scarcely any research has empirically examined this mechanism. Using data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, I test whether network diversity (ties to persons from different social backgrounds) accounts for some of the influence of organizational involvement on trust. The results suggest that the influence of involvement in multiple associations on trust is largely mediated by its influence on network diversity. In addition, while recent research observes that some predictors of trust vary by race and ethnicity, I find no differences in these relationships across non-Hispanic white, African American, and Latino respondents.
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The Dynamics of Prosocial Leadership: Power and Influence in Collective Action Groups
Ashley Harrell & Brent Simpson
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper bridges insights from theories of collective action, power, and influence to address the conditions under which group leaders solve collective action problems. We show how leaders' behaviors impact the success of collective action groups as a whole via both power and influence processes. In a laboratory experiment, groups first completed a baseline measure of cooperation in a public good dilemma without punishment. In a second phase, the capacity to punish was introduced. One condition, the “peer-sanctioning condition,” was equivalent to the prevailing solution in the experimental literature on collective action, where the ability to punish others is distributed equally among all group members. In the other two conditions, only a single group “leader” could punish; we varied whether the person assigned to lead was other-regarding (prosocial) or self-regarding (proself). The results support our prediction that prosocial leaders increase their contributions to the group after ascending to leadership, while proself leaders reduce their contributions. Further, as expected, rank-and-file group members are influenced by leaders' contribution behaviors; as a result, prosocial-led groups as a whole were substantially more productive than proself-led groups. Indeed, as predicted, prosocial leaders were even more effective in maintaining large group contributions than the standard peer-sanctioning system. These findings suggest that putting power and influence in the right hands solves collective action problems and promotes collective welfare.
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The costs and benefits of coordinating with a different group
Paul Grout, Sébastien Mitraille & Silvia Sonderegger
Journal of Economic Theory, forthcoming
Abstract:
We consider a setup where agents care about i) taking actions that are close to their preferences, and ii) coordinating with others. The preferences of agents in the same group are drawn from the same distribution. Each individual is exogenously matched with other agents randomly selected from the population. Starting from an environment where everyone belongs to the same group, we show that introducing agents from a different group (whose preferences are uncorrelated with those of each of the incumbents) generates costs but may also (surprisingly) generate benefits in the form of enhanced coordination.
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Where do social preferences come from?
Chaning Jang & John Lynham
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
Where do preferences for fairness come from? We use a unique field setting to test for a spillover of sharing norms from the workplace to a laboratory experiment. Fishermen working in teams receive random income shocks (catching fish) that they must regularly divide among themselves. We demonstrate a clear correlation between sharing norms in the field and sharing norms in the lab. Furthermore, the spillover effect is stronger for fishermen who have been exposed to a sharing norm for longer, suggesting that our findings are not driven by selection effects. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that work environments shape social preferences.
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Facing expectations: Those that we prefer to fulfil and those that we disregard
Christophe Heintz et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, September 2015, Pages 442–455
Abstract:
We argue that people choosing prosocial distribution of goods (e.g., in dictator games) make this choice because they do not want to disappoint their partner rather than because of a direct preference for the chosen prosocial distribution. The chosen distribution is a means to fulfil one’s partner’s expectations. We review the economic experiments that corroborate this hypothesis and the experiments that deny that beliefs about others’ expectations motivate prosocial choice. We then formulate hypotheses about what types of expectation motivate someone to do what is expected: these are justifiable hopeful expectations that are clearly about his own choices. We experimentally investigate how people modulate their prosociality when they face low or unreasonably high expectations. In a version of a dictator game, we provide dictators with the opportunity to modulate their transfer as a function of their partner’s expectations. We observe that a significant portion of the population is willing to fulfil their partner’s expectation provided that this expectation expresses a reasonable hope. We conclude that people are averse to disappointing and we discuss what models of social preferences can account for the role of expectations in determining prosocial choice, with a special attention to models of guilt aversion and social esteem.
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An Evolutionary Perspective on Cooperative Behavior in Gamers
Grant Devilly et al.
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research was the first experimental study to investigate the effect of video gaming on measures of cooperative behavior from an evolutionary standpoint. The final sample comprised a total 117 participants (39 male, 78 females), with a mean age of 24 years (SD = 8.93). Participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 media conditions (violent book, violent video game, nonviolent video game, and violent TV show) and measured on prosocial behavior before any media exposure and assessed on cooperative behavior after media exposure. Novice and regular gamers did not differ on prosocial behavior before gaming. After media exposure, a self-constructed version of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game was used to measure cooperation. Further analyses were then conducted to measure differences between conditions on cooperative behavior. It was found that regular and multiplayer gamers were not significantly higher or lower on measures of cooperative behavior compared to novices or solitary gamers. Although nonsignificant, effect sizes were consistent with past research which suggests heightened cooperation in regular gamers. Media type exposure did not have a significant effect on cooperative behavior. Findings suggest that cooperative behavior is not less prominent in regular or multiplayer gamers than novices or solitary gamers. These results indicate that, contrary to the predictions one may make from the GAM model of violent gaming (Anderson & Bushman, 2001), violent media exposure does not appear to produce reductions in prosocial or cooperative behavior.
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Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status
Bradford Bitterly, Alison Wood Brooks & Maurice Schweitzer
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
Across five experiments, we demonstrate that humor can influence status, but that the use of humor is risky. Successful humor can increase status, but unsuccessful humor (e.g., inappropriate humor) can harm status. The relationship between humor and status is mediated by perceptions of competence; the effective use of humor signals competence, and in turn increases the joke teller’s status. Rather than conceptualizing humor as a frivolous or ancillary organizational behavior, we argue that humor plays a fundamental role in shaping interpersonal perceptions and hierarchies within groups.