Playing well with others
Ko Kuwabara
American Journal of Sociology, March 2015, Pages 1390-1428
Abstract:
Research shows that enforcing cooperation using contracts or tangible sanctions can backfire, undermining people’s intrinsic motivation to cooperate: when the enforcement is removed, people are less trusting or trustworthy than when there is no enforcement to begin with. The author examines whether reputation systems have similar consequences for generalized trust and trustworthiness. Using a web-based experiment simulating online market transactions (studies 1 and 2), he shows that reputation systems can reinforce generalized trust and trustworthiness, unlike contractual enforcement or relational enforcement based on repeated interactions. In a survey experiment (study 3), he finds that recalling their eBay feedback scores made participants more trusting and trustworthy. These results are predicated on the diffuse nature of reputational enforcement to reinforce perceptions of trust and trustworthiness. These results have implications for understanding how different forms of governance affect generalized trust and trustworthiness.
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Do people like working with computers more than human beings?
Marek Posard & Gordon Rinderknecht
Computers in Human Behavior, October 2015, Pages 232–238
Abstract:
This paper incorporates the concept of mindlessness from research on human–computer interactions with social exchange theory from sociology. We find that participants behaved no differently toward human or computerized partners during a repeated standard trust game. Despite exhibiting similar behaviors with these partners, participants believed that computers were more likely to share their interests during this game than humans. These participants also reported higher levels of commitment with computerized partners than human partners. Our results suggest that asking about social constructs (i.e. commitment) will break mindlessness in human–computer interactions. These results also highlight a disconnect between individual behaviors and their perceptions during human–computer interactions. We conclude that telling participants their partners are computers may actually improve their perceptions of interactions after they occur.
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The Effect of the “Evoking Freedom” Technique on an Unusual and Disturbing Request
Nicolas Guéguen et al.
Psychological Reports, June 2015, Pages 936-940
Abstract:
The “evoking freedom” technique consists in soliciting someone to comply with a request by simply saying that she is free to accept or to refuse the request. However, previous studies used low cost requests. The present study examined the magnitude of this technique associated with a more disturbing and costly request. Sixty men and 60 women aged approximately 20–25 years walking in the street were asked by a male confederate to hold a closed transparent box containing a live trap-door spider while he went into the post office to pick up a package. In the evoking freedom condition, the confederate added in his request that the participant was “free to accept or to refuse.” More compliance occurred in the “evoking freedom” condition (53.3%) than in the control condition (36.7%). These results confirm the robustness and the magnitude of the evoking freedom technique on compliance and show that this technique remained effective even when the request was psychologically costly to perform and was associated with fear.
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Letting Down the Team? Social Effects of Team Incentives
Philip Babcock et al.
Journal of the European Economic Association, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper estimates social effects of incentivizing people in teams. In three field experiments featuring exogenous team formation and opportunities for repeated social interactions, we find large team effects that operate through social channels. In particular, assignment to a team treatment increases productivity by 9–17% relative to an individual incentive treatment, even though the individual incentive yields a higher private return. Further, we find that in a choice treatment individuals overwhelmingly prefer the individual incentive to the team incentive, despite the latter being more effective. These results are most consistent with the team effects operating through guilt or social pressure as opposed to pure altruism.
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Selfish third parties act as peacemakers by transforming conflicts and promoting cooperation
Nir Halevy & Eliran Halali
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2 June 2015, Pages 6937–6942
Abstract:
The tremendous costs of conflict have made humans resourceful not only at warfare but also at peacemaking. Although third parties have acted as peacemakers since the dawn of history, little is known about voluntary, informal third-party intervention in conflict. Here we introduce the Peacemaker Game, a novel experimental paradigm, to model and study the interdependence between disputants and third parties in conflict. In the game, two disputants choose whether to cooperate or compete and a third party chooses whether or not to intervene in the conflict. Intervention introduces side payments that transform the game disputants are playing; it also introduces risk for the third party by making it vulnerable to disputants’ choices. Six experiments revealed three robust effects: (i) The mere possibility of third-party intervention significantly increases cooperation in interpersonal and intergroup conflicts; (ii) reducing the risk to third parties dramatically increases intervention rates, to everyone’s benefit; and (iii) disputants’ cooperation rates are consistently higher than third parties’ intervention rates. These findings explain why, how, and when self-interested third parties facilitate peaceful conflict resolution.
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Can Social Preferences Explain Gender Differences in Economic Behavior?
Linda Kamas & Anne Preston
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines whether gender differences in some economic behaviors are due to differences in social preferences as measured by dictator allocation decisions. We find that, compared to men, women are significantly more likely to be inequity averters and significantly less likely to be social surplus maximizers. These differences in social preferences explain to a large extent why women send less than men in trust games. Inequity averters can ensure equal payoffs if nothing is returned by sending one-fourth of the endowment while surplus maximizers can increase total payoffs by a factor of three for each dollar sent. Social preferences also help explain the size of gifts in dictator games and choice of compensation method for simple tasks, however, after controlling for social preference type, gender is still influential in these decisions. Women give significantly more to charity than men even after accounting for our measure of social preferences. Women prefer egalitarian payment systems both because they are inequity averters and because low self-confidence may lead them to believe they will earn more with equal sharing.
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Generalizing Trust: The Benign Force of Emancipation
Christian Welzel & Jan Delhey
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Trust in people is general insofar as it extends to out-groups, that is, unfamiliar and dissimilar others. But whether trust in out-groups can emerge independently from in-group trust is controversial, and conclusive evidence has been unavailable. This article fills this gap, analyzing which conditions create out-group trust independent from in-group trust. Using data from 76 countries around the world, we establish three insights. First, while a high level of in-group trust is the rule, out-group trust varies greatly across countries. Second, out-group trust emerges independent from in-group trust when human empowerment emancipates people from in-group control. Third, other conditions championed as trust-crediting forces do not confound the effect of human empowerment. In conclusion, trust generalizes to out-groups as a result of human empowerment’s emancipatory impulse.
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Cheap Talk, Round Numbers, and the Economics of Negotiation
Matthew Backus, Tom Blake & Steven Tadelis
NBER Working Paper, June 2015
Abstract:
Can sellers credibly signal their private information to reduce frictions in negotiations? Guided by a simple cheap-talk model, we posit that impatient sellers use round numbers to signal their willingness to cut prices in order to sell faster, and test its implications using millions of online bargaining interactions. Items listed at multiples of $100 receive offers that are 5% - 8% lower but that arrive 6 - 11 days sooner than listings at neighboring "precise" values, and are 3% - 5% more likely to sell. Similar patterns in real estate transactions suggest that round-number signaling plays a broader role in negotiations.
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Is Trust Rigid or Malleable? A Laboratory Experiment
Pamela Paxton & Jennifer Glanville
Social Psychology Quarterly, June 2015, Pages 194-204
Abstract:
An important debate within the trust literature is whether trust is modified by social experiences or resistant to change despite changing social circumstances. We address this debate by designing and implementing an experiment that exposes participants to a high or low trust environment and compares their change in generalized trust. We find that the experimental condition influences change in generalized trust, particularly for participants whose prior level of trust was mismatched with their experimental condition. The implications of these results for theories on the sources of trust are discussed.
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Building trust: Heart rate synchrony and arousal during joint action increased by public goods game
Panagiotis Mitkidis et al.
Physiology & Behavior, October 2015, Pages 101–106
Abstract:
The physiological processes underlying trust are subject of intense interest in the behavioral sciences. However, very little is known about how trust modulates the affective link between individuals. We show here that trust has an effect on heart rate arousal and synchrony, a result consistent with research on joint action and experimental economics. We engaged participants in a series of joint action tasks which, for one group of participants, was interleaved with a PGG, and measured their heart synchrony and arousal. We found that the introduction of the economic game shifted participants' attention to the dynamics of the interaction. This was followed by increased arousal and synchrony of heart rate profiles. Also, the degree of heart rate synchrony was predictive of participants' expectations regarding their partners in the economic game. We conclude that the above changes in physiology and behavior are shaped by the valuation of other people's social behavior, and ultimately indicate trust building process.
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Sustained cooperation by running away from bad behavior
Charles Efferson et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
For cooperation to evolve, some mechanism must limit the rate at which cooperators are exposed to defectors. Only then can the advantages of mutual cooperation outweigh the costs of being exploited. Although researchers widely agree on this, they disagree intensely about which evolutionary mechanisms can explain the extraordinary cooperation exhibited by humans. Much of the controversy follows from disagreements about the informational regularity that allows cooperators to avoid defectors. Reliable information can allow cooperative individuals to avoid exploitation, but which mechanisms can sustain such a situation is a matter of considerable dispute. We conducted a behavioral experiment to see if cooperators could avoid defectors when provided with limited amounts of explicit information. We gave each participant the simple option to move away from her current neighborhood at any time. Participants were not identifiable as individuals, and they could not track each other’s tendency to behave more or less cooperatively. More broadly, a participant had no information about the behavior she was likely to encounter if she moved, and so information about the risk of exploitation was extremely limited. Nonetheless, our results show that simply providing the option to move allowed cooperation to persist for a long period of time. Our results further show that movement, even though it involved considerable uncertainty, allowed would-be cooperators to assort positively and eliminate on average any individual payoff disadvantage associated with cooperation. This suggests that choosing to move, even under limited information, can completely reorganize the mix of selective forces relevant for the evolution of cooperation.
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Cynical Beliefs About Human Nature and Income: Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural Analyses
Olga Stavrova & Daniel Ehlebracht
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Based on the existing literature on worldview beliefs, cynical hostility, and Machiavellian cynicism, we suggest that holding cynical beliefs about human nature can be detrimental for individuals’ income. Cynical individuals are more likely to avoid cooperation and trust or to overinvest in monitoring, control, and other means of protection from potential exploitation. As a result, they are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help compared with their less cynical counterparts. Studies 1 and 2, using nationally representative longitudinal surveys of the American population, show that individuals who endorsed cynical beliefs about human nature at baseline earned comparatively lower incomes 9 (Study 1) and 2 (Study 2) years later. In Study 3, applying a multilevel model of change to a nationally representative panel study of the German population, we show that cynical beliefs at baseline undermined an income increase in the course of the following 9 years. In Study 4, the negative effect of cynical beliefs on income proved to be independent of individual differences in the Big Five personality dimensions. Study 5 provided the first tentative evidence of the hypothesized mechanism underlying this effect. Using survey data from 41 countries, it revealed that the negative effect of cynical beliefs on income is alleviated in sociocultural contexts with low levels of prosocial behavior, high homicide rates and high overall societal cynicism levels. Holding cynical beliefs about others has negative economic outcomes unless such beliefs hold true.
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Communicating With Distant Others: The Functional Use of Abstraction
Priyanka Joshi et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We introduce the construct of relational scope to refer to the degree to which an individual engages in communication with a more or less distant audience, with a contractive relational scope indicating a near audience and an expansive relational scope indicating a distant audience. Drawing on construal level theory, we argue that speakers use abstract messages strategically when faced with an expansive relational scope in order to be widely relevant and relatable. We show that speakers communicate more abstractly with distant others than near others (Studies 1–3) and experience greater fit when message framing matches audience distance (Study 4). We also demonstrate that framing messages abstractly prompts broader relational scope, with speakers more likely to direct concrete (abstract) messages to near (distal) audiences (Study 5). Finally, we show that when procedural information is critical to communication, communication with distant (vs. proximal) others will increasingly emphasize procedures over end states (Study 6).
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Wu Liu, Leigh Anne Liu & Jian-Dong Zhang
Journal of Organizational Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Fixed-pie bias, defined as the erroneous belief that the other negotiation party's interest is directly opposite to one's own, has been a consistent hurdle that negotiators must overcome in their efforts to achieve optimal negotiation outcomes. In this study, we explore the underlying cognitive mechanism and the social antecedents of fixed-pie bias reduction in negotiation. Using data from a negotiation simulation with 256 participants, we found that mental-model adjustments made by negotiators could effectively decrease fixed-pie bias. More interestingly, we also found that negotiators were less likely to reduce fixed-pie bias when negotiating with an in-group member than with an out-group member but only under a high accountability condition. Finally, we found that mental-model adjustment mediated the effects of the aforementioned social antecedents (in-groupness and accountability) on reduced fixed-pie bias. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
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Maarten Zaal et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Self-interested behavior may have positive consequences for individual group-members, but also negatively affects the outcomes of the group when group-level and individual-level interests are misaligned. In two studies, we examined such self-interested, group-undermining behavior from the perspective of regulatory focus theory. We predicted that when individual and group interests are out of alignment, individuals under promotion focus would be more likely than individuals under prevention focus to pursue individual success at the expense of their group. Two studies provided support for this prediction. Promotion oriented individuals were more willing to act in their self-interest (at the expense of their group) than individuals under prevention focus when self-interested goals were not compatible with cooperation. No effect of regulatory focus on group loyalty was found when cooperation formed the only viable route to individual success. We discuss how these findings extend our understanding of the role of regulatory focus in social situations and of the practice of ensuring loyalty in contexts where individual and group goals are misaligned while cooperation is an important part of group success.