The feeling is mutual
Hidden Paths from Morality to Cooperation: Moral Judgments Promote Trust and Trustworthiness
Brent Simpson, Ashley Harrell & Robb Willer
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Classic sociological solutions to cooperation problems were rooted in the moral judgments group members make about one another's behaviors, but more recent research on prosocial behaviors has largely ignored this foundational work. Here, we extend theoretical accounts of the social effect of moral judgments. Where scholars have emphasized the roles of moral judgments in clarifying moral boundaries and punishing deviants, we present two less intuitive paths from moral judgments to social behavior. We argue that those who engage in moral judgments subsequently act more morally. Further, we argue that group members anticipate the more moral behavior of judges, trusting them more under situations of risk and uncertainty. We thus establish paths from moral judgments to the primary foundations of voluntary cooperation: trust and trustworthiness. The results of three experiments support the predicted effects: Participants randomly assigned to make moral judgments were more trustworthy in subsequent interactions (Study 1). A follow-up experiment sought to clarify the underlying mechanism, showing that making moral judgments led individuals to view themselves as more moral (Study 2). Finally, audience members anticipated the greater trustworthiness of moral judges (Study 3).
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The loss of power: How illusions of alliance contribute to powerholders' downfall
Sebastien Brion & Cameron Anderson
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, May 2013, Pages 129-139
Abstract:
Though people in positions of power have many advantages that sustain their power, stories abound of individuals who fall from their lofty perch. How does this happen? The current research examined the role of illusions of alliance, which we define as overestimating the strength of one's alliances with others. We tested whether powerholders lose power when they possess overly positive perceptions of their relationships with others, which in turn leads to the weakening of those relationships. Studies 1 and 2 found that powerful individuals were more likely to hold illusions of alliance. Using laboratory as well as field contexts, Studies 3, 4, and 5 found that individuals with power who held illusions of alliance obtained fewer resources, were excluded more frequently from alliances, and lost their power. These findings suggest that power sometimes leads to its own demise because powerful individuals erroneously assume that others feel allied to them.
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The automatic activation of (un)fairness behavior in organizations
Agnes Zdaniuk & Ramona Bobocel
Human Resource Management Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We conducted a high impact, laboratory experiment to examine the possibility that the enactment of (un)fairness behavior can be influenced by non-conscious processes. In Phase 1, participants completed an impression formation task in which they read a description of a fair and an unfair leader. The descriptions also included photographs of each leader. Later, we subliminally exposed participants to either the face of the fair leader, the face of the unfair leader, or a neutral face. In Phase 2, under the guise of an unrelated study, participants assumed the role of a manager and wrote a letter communicating a dismissal decision to a subordinate. The results demonstrate that participants were significantly less interactionally fair when communicating the dismissal decision after being subliminally exposed to the face of a leader whom they had mentally associated with unfairness, as compared to either the face of a leader they associated with fairness or the neutral face. The data suggest that people's enactment of fairness toward a third-party can be influenced by their mental representation of the unfairness of a salient other via automatic, non-conscious cognitive processes. We highlight the implications of our conceptual approach and current findings for theorizing on justice and on leadership, as well as for the study of organizational behavior more broadly. We also discuss several possible negative implications for organizations.
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Detecting Cheaters without Thinking: Testing the Automaticity of the Cheater Detection Module
Jens Van Lier, Russell Revlin & Wim De Neys
PLoS ONE, January 2013
Abstract:
Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that our brain is composed of evolved mechanisms. One extensively studied mechanism is the cheater detection module. This module would make people very good at detecting cheaters in a social exchange. A vast amount of research has illustrated performance facilitation on social contract selection tasks. This facilitation is attributed to the alleged automatic and isolated operation of the module (i.e., independent of general cognitive capacity). This study, using the selection task, tested the critical automaticity assumption in three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 established that performance on social contract versions did not depend on cognitive capacity or age. Experiment 3 showed that experimentally burdening cognitive resources with a secondary task had no impact on performance on the social contract version. However, in all experiments, performance on a non-social contract version did depend on available cognitive capacity. Overall, findings validate the automatic and effortless nature of social exchange reasoning.
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Outgroup Primes Induce Unpredictability Tendencies under Conditions of Distrust
Kimberly Rios, Oscar Ybarra & Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2013, Pages 372-377
Abstract:
The present research provides novel insights into people's automatic reactions to outgroup members. Specifically, three experiments examine the unpredictability tendencies that can arise from mere primes of outgroups and the circumstances that produce these tendencies. In Studies 1 and 2, participants reported stronger unpredictability tendencies (Study 1) and were rated by independent coders as more unpredictable (Study 2) after being subliminally primed with a racial outgroup than a racial ingroup, but only if they had a chronically high distrust of others. Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by using a different ingroup/outgroup context (university affiliation) and experimentally manipulating distrust. Together, these studies reveal that people's unpredictability tendencies emerge upon being reminded of outgroup members and when distrust is high, which ironically may make understanding and trust between parties all the more difficult to achieve.
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The effects of temperature priming on cooperation in the iterated prisoner's dilemma
Simon Storey & Lance Workman
Evolutionary Psychology, January 2013, Pages 52-67
Abstract:
Based on initial research findings by Williams and Bargh (2008) and Kang, Williams, Clark, Gray and Bargh (2011) on the interaction between interpersonal and physical warmth, theoretical models such as cognitive scaffolding and the importance of evaluations of interpersonal warmth in trust-based decisions, this experiment investigated the effect of temperature priming on 30 pairs of British university students with hot and cold objects on frequency of cooperation in a game of iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Participants were found to cooperate significantly more frequently when primed with hot objects than with cold objects, supporting the assertion that physical warmth sensation positively affects interpersonal trust evaluation. No support was found for the prediction that male-male pairs would cooperate less than female-female pairs. The implications of these findings to evolutionary and developmental theories of interpersonal warmth are discussed.
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I Am my (High-Power) Role: Power and Role Identification
Priyanka Joshi & Nathanael Fast
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research indicates that power liberates the self, but findings also show that the powerful are susceptible to situational influences. The present article examines whether enacting roles that afford power leads people to identify with the roles or, instead, liberates them from role expectations altogether. The results of three experiments support the hypothesis that power enhances role identification. Experiment 1 showed that enacting a particular role resulted in greater implicit and explicit role identification when the role contained power. In Experiment 2, infusing a role with power resulted in greater role identification and role congruent behavior. Experiment 3 demonstrated that power resulted in greater role congruent self construal, such that having power in a close relationship caused participants to define themselves relationally whereas having power in a group situation caused participants to embrace a collective self construal. Implications for research on power, roles, and the self are discussed.
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Tonya Shoda & Allen McConnell
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2013, Pages 440-443
Abstract:
Previous research has demonstrated that chronically accessible self-knowledge impacts how corresponding traits are perceived in oneself and in others. Although people perceive and judge others in line with their chronic traits, we know less about the accuracy of these judgments. In the current work, we explored whether chronicity results in greater accuracy in interpersonal sensitivity. Using a response time measure of attribute chronicity, we found that individuals for whom trustworthiness was a chronic trait were better able to distinguish cheaters from cooperators in a real life prisoner's dilemma game. Implications for how self-knowledge affects the accuracy of social perceptions are discussed.
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Harnessing the Benefits of Betrayal Aversion
Jason Aimone & Daniel Houser
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research suggests that while betrayal aversion may have negative effects, the presence of betrayal-averse agents is beneficial in reducing trustees' willingness to betray trust. In light of this, many common knowledge institutions may have adopted rules and features which mitigate the emotional disutility associated with betrayal aversion, while simultaneously maintaining the high levels of reciprocation brought about by the presence of betrayal-averse agents. Here we conduct a laboratory experiment that identifies one such feature common to many institutions successfully governing economic and social interaction: the option to avoid knowing painful details of failed economic exchange.
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Behavioral Responses to Inequity in Reward Distribution and Working Effort in Crows and Ravens
Claudia Wascher & Thomas Bugnyar
PLoS ONE, February 2013
Abstract:
Sensitivity to inequity is considered to be a crucial cognitive tool in the evolution of human cooperation. The ability has recently been shown also in primates and dogs, raising the question of an evolutionary basis of inequity aversion. We present first evidence that two bird species are sensitive to other individuals' efforts and payoffs. In a token exchange task we tested both behavioral responses to inequity in the quality of reward (preferred versus non-preferred food) and to the absence of reward in the presence of a rewarded partner, in 5 pairs of corvids (6 crows, 4 ravens). Birds decreased their exchange performance when the experimental partner received the reward as a gift, which indicates that they are sensitive to other individuals' working effort. They also decreased their exchange performance in the inequity compared with the equity condition. Notably, corvids refused to take the reward after a successful exchange more often in the inequity compared with the other conditions. Our findings indicate that awareness to other individuals' efforts and payoffs may evolve independently of phylogeny in systems with a given degree of social complexity.
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Marwan Sinaceur et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2013, Pages 498-508
Abstract:
Integrating recent work on emotional communication with social science theories on unpredictability, we investigated whether communicating emotional inconsistency and unpredictability would affect recipients' concession-making in negotiation. We hypothesized that emotional inconsistency and unpredictability would increase recipients' concessions by making recipients feel less control over the outcome. In Experiment 1, dyads negotiated face-to-face after one negotiator within each dyad expressed either anger or emotional inconsistency (by alternating between anger and happiness). In Experiment 2, participants received angry and/or happy messages from a simulated negotiation opponent. In Experiment 3, participants read a scenario about a negotiator who expressed either anger or emotional inconsistency by alternating between anger and disappointment. In all three experiments, emotional inconsistency induced recipients to make greater concessions compared to expressing a consistent emotion. Further, in all three experiments, the effect of emotional inconsistency was mediated by recipients' feeling less control. These findings qualify previous research on anger in negotiation and demonstrate the importance of feelings of control for negotiation outcomes.
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On the social nature of eyes: The effect of social cues in interaction and individual choice tasks
Aurélien Baillon, Asli Selim & Dennie van Dolder
Evolution and Human Behavior, March 2013, Pages 146-154
Abstract:
In an experimental setting, we applied a dual strategy to better understand the effect of pictures of eyes on human behavior. First, we investigated whether the effect of eyes was limited to interaction tasks in which the subjects' decisions influenced the outcomes of other subjects. We expanded the range of tasks to include individual choice tasks in which the subjects' decisions only influenced their own outcomes. Second, we investigated whether pictures of eyes were one of many social cues or were unique in their effect. We compared the effect of pictures of eyes with the effect of a different condition in which we presented the subjects with pictures of other students (peers). Our results suggest that the effect of pictures of eyes is limited to interaction tasks and that eyes should be considered distinct from other social cues, such as reminders of peers. While pictures of eyes uniformly enhanced pro-social behavior in interaction tasks, this was not the case for reminders of peers. Furthermore, the reminders of peers led to more rational behavior in individual choice tasks, whereas the effect of pictures of eyes was limited to situations involving interaction. Combined, these findings are in line with the claim that the effect of pictures of eyes on behavior is caused by a social exchange heuristic that works to enhance mutual cooperative behavior.
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Players of Matching Pennies automatically imitate opponents' gestures against strong incentives
Michèle Belot, Vincent Crawford & Cecilia Heyes
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 19 February 2013, Pages 2763-2768
Abstract:
There is a large body of evidence of apparently spontaneous mimicry in humans. This phenomenon has been described as "automatic imitation" and attributed to a mirror neuron system, but there is little direct evidence that it is involuntary rather than intentional. Cook et al. supplied the first such evidence in a unique strategic game design that gave all subjects a pecuniary incentive to avoid imitation [Cook R, Bird G, Lünser G, Huck S, Heyes C (2012) Proc Biol Sci 279(1729):780-786]. Subjects played Rock-Paper-Scissors repeatedly in matches between fixed pairs, sometimes with one and sometimes with both subjects blindfolded. The frequency of draws in the blind-blind condition was at chance, but in the blind-sighted condition it was significantly higher, suggesting automatic imitation had occurred. Automatic imitation would raise novel issues concerning how strategic interactions are modeled in game theory and social science; however, inferring automatic imitation requires significant incentives to avoid it, and subjects' incentives were less than 3 US cents per 60-game match. We replaced Cook et al.'s Rock-Paper-Scissors with a Matching Pennies game, which allows far stronger incentives to avoid imitation for some subjects, with equally strong incentives to imitate for others. Our results are important in providing evidence of automatic imitation against significant incentives. That some of our subjects had incentives to imitate also enables us clearly to distinguish intentional responding from automatic imitation, and we find evidence that both occur. Thus, our results strongly confirm the occurrence of automatic imitation, and illuminate the way that automatic and intentional processes interact in a strategic context.
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A City-Wide Experiment on Trust Discrimination
Armin Falk & Christian Zehnder
Journal of Public Economics, April 2013, Pages 15-27
Abstract:
This paper reports evidence from a city-wide field experiment on trust. About 1,000 inhabitants of Zurich take part in a trust experiment, in which first movers can condition their investments on the residential districts of second movers. First movers differentiate their investments systematically depending on where in Zurich the second mover lives. The observed discrimination pattern is robust as indicated by additional data collected in a newspaper study and a laboratory experiment. Economic status seems to be key for a district's reputation: first movers invest more if second movers live in high-income districts. Investments into districts are positively correlated with the corresponding willingness to repay, which indicates that first movers correctly anticipate the relative trustworthiness of inhabitants of different districts. Furthermore, we find that people trust strangers from their own district significantly more than strangers from other districts. This in-group effect is, at least partly, driven by more accurate beliefs about the trustworthiness of in-group members.
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Matthew Gervais et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 April 2013
Abstract:
Recent evidence suggests that psychopathy is a trait continuum. This has unappreciated implications for understanding the selective advantage of psychopathic traits. Although clinical psychopathy is typically construed as a strategy of unconditional defection, subclinical psychopathy may promote strategic conditional defection, broadening the adaptive niche of psychopathy within human societies. To test this, we focus on a ubiquitous real-life source of conditional behaviour: the expected relational value of social partners, both in terms of their quality and the likely quantity of future interactions with them. We allow for conversational interaction among participants prior to their playing an unannounced, one-shot prisoner's dilemma game, which fosters naturalistic interpersonal evaluation and conditional behaviour, while controlling punishment and reputation effects. Individuals scoring higher on factor 1 (callous affect, interpersonal manipulation) of the Levenson self-report psychopathy scale defected conditionally on two kinds of low-value partners: those who interrupted them more during the conversation, and those with whom they failed to discover cues to future interaction. Both interaction effects support the hypothesis that subclinical primary psychopathy potentiates defection on those with low expected relational value. These data clarify the function and form of psychopathic traits, while highlighting adaptive variation in human social strategies.
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Social Distance and Trust: Experimental Evidence from a Slum in Cairo
Christine Binzel & Dietmar Fehr
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
While strong social ties help individuals cope with missing institutions, trade is essentially limited to those who are part of the social network. We examine what makes the decision to trust a stranger different from the decision to trust a member of a given social network (a friend), by comparing the determinants of these two decisions for the same individual. We implement a binary trust game with hidden action in a lab-in-the-field experiment with residents of an informal housing area in Cairo. Our results show that trust is higher among friends than among strangers and that higher trust among friends is related to the principal's belief of trustworthiness. However, on average a principal underestimates her friend's trustworthiness leading to inefficient outcomes. Our findings suggest that even within a social network, trade may often be limited to exchanges with few information asymmetries.
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A normative explanation of antisocial punishment
Kyle Irwin & Christine Horne
Social Science Research, March 2013, Pages 562-570
Abstract:
While much research shows that people punish free-riders, recent studies find evidence that people also engage in antisocial punishment. That is, they sometimes punish those who contribute generously to collective actions. Such sanctioning is puzzling because generous individuals increase the welfare of all group members. When and why are such individuals punished? In this paper, we propose that descriptive norms are part of the explanation. People may sanction those whose behavior is atypical - even when that behavior benefits the group. We test our theory with a laboratory experiment. We examine the effect of descriptive norms on sanctioning of generous and stingy deviants and find that descriptive norms encourage antisocial punishment, but not punishment of free-riders.
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You Can't Put Old Wine in New Bottles: The Effect of Newcomers on Coordination in Groups
Matthew McCarter & Roman Sheremeta
PLoS ONE, January 2013
Abstract:
A common finding in social sciences is that member change hinders group functioning and performance. However, questions remain as to why member change negatively affects group performance and what are some ways to alleviate the negative effects of member change on performance? To answer these questions we conduct an experiment in which we investigate the effect of newcomers on a group's ability to coordinate efficiently. Participants play a coordination game in a four-person group for the first part of the experiment, and then two members of the group are replaced with new participants, and the newly formed group plays the game for the second part of the experiment. Our results show that the arrival of newcomers decreases trust among group members and this decrease in trust negatively affects group performance. Knowing the performance history of the arriving newcomers mitigates the negative effect of their arrival, but only when newcomers also know the oldtimers performance history. Surprisingly, in groups that performed poorly prior to the newcomers' arrival, the distrust generated by newcomers is mainly between oldtimers about each other rather than about the newcomers.
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Chimpanzees play the ultimatum game
Darby Proctor et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 5 February 2013, Pages 2070-2075
Abstract:
Is the sense of fairness uniquely human? Human reactions to reward division are often studied by means of the ultimatum game, in which both partners need to agree on a distribution for both to receive rewards. Humans typically offer generous portions of the reward to their partner, a tendency our close primate relatives have thus far failed to show in experiments. Here we tested chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and human children on a modified ultimatum game. One individual chose between two tokens that, with their partner's cooperation, could be exchanged for rewards. One token offered equal rewards to both players, whereas the other token favored the chooser. Both apes and children responded like humans typically do. If their partner's cooperation was required, they split the rewards equally. However, with passive partners - a situation akin to the so-called dictator game - they preferred the selfish option. Thus, humans and chimpanzees show similar preferences regarding reward division, suggesting a long evolutionary history to the human sense of fairness.
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Do Young Toddlers Act on Their Social Preferences?
Audun Dahl, Rachel Schuck & Joseph Campos
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
From preschool age to adulthood, most humans prefer to help someone who has treated others well over helping someone who has treated others badly. Researchers have recently made opposing predictions about whether such observation-based preferential helping is present when children begin to help in the second year of life. In the present study, 84 toddlers (16-27 months) observed 1 experimenter (antisocial) take a ball from, and 1 experimenter (prosocial) return a ball to, a neutral experimenter. In subsequent tests, children could help either the antisocial or the prosocial experimenter. Only the oldest children showed a significant preference for helping the prosocial agent first. Most children in all age groups were willing to help both experimenters when given multiple opportunities to help. Across age groups, children who looked longer at the continuation of the antisocial interaction were more likely to help the prosocial agent. These findings suggest that social evaluations do affect toddlers' helping behavior but that interactions between human agents may be difficult to evaluate for very young children.
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The development of contingent reciprocity in children
Bailey House et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, March 2013, Pages 86-93
Abstract:
Cooperation between nonrelatives is common in humans. Reciprocal altruism is a plausible evolutionary mechanism for cooperation within unrelated pairs, as selection may favor individuals who selectively cooperate with those who have cooperated with them in the past. Reciprocity is often observed in humans, but there is only limited evidence of reciprocal altruism in other primate species, raising questions about the origins of human reciprocity. Here, we explore how reciprocity develops in a sample of American children ranging from 3 to 7.5 years of age, and also compare children's behavior to that of chimpanzees in prior studies to gain insight into the phylogeny of human reciprocity. Children show a marked tendency to respond contingently to both prosocial and selfish acts, patterns that have not been seen among chimpanzees in prior studies. Our results show that reciprocity increases markedly with age in this population of children, and by about 5.5 years of age children consistently match the previous behavior of their partners.
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Kari Schroeder, Richard McElreath & Daniel Nettle
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Punishment of free-riding has been implicated in the evolution of cooperation in humans, and yet mechanisms for punishment avoidance remain largely uninvestigated. Individual variation in these mechanisms may stem from variation in the serotonergic system, which modulates processing of aversive stimuli. Functional serotonin gene variants have been associated with variation in the processing of aversive stimuli and widely studied as risk factors for psychiatric disorders. We show that variants at the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) and serotonin 2A receptor gene (HTR2A) predict contributions to the public good in economic games, dependent upon whether contribution behavior can be punished. Participants with a variant at the serotonin transporter gene contribute more, leading to group-level differences in cooperation, but this effect dissipates in the presence of punishment. When contribution behavior can be punished, those with a variant at the serotonin 2A receptor gene contribute more than those without it. This variant also predicts a more stressful experience of the games. The diversity of institutions (including norms) that govern cooperation and punishment may create selective pressures for punishment avoidance that change rapidly across time and space. Variant-specific epigenetic regulation of these genes, as well as population-level variation in the frequencies of these variants, may facilitate adaptation to local norms of cooperation and punishment.
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From the Lab to the Field: Cooperation among Fishermen
Jan Stoop, Charles Noussair & Daan van Soest
Journal of Political Economy, December 2012, Pages 1027-1056
Abstract:
We conduct a field experiment to measure cooperation among groups of recreational fishermen at a privately owned fishing facility. Group earnings are greater when group members catch fewer fish. Consistent with classical economic theory, though in contrast to prior results from laboratory experiments, we find no cooperation. A series of additional treatments identifies causes of the difference. We rule out the subject pool and the laboratory setting as potential causes and identify the type of activity involved as the source of the lack of cooperation in our field experiment. When cooperation requires reducing fishing effort, individuals are not cooperative.
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Personal experience and reputation interact in human decisions to help reciprocally
Lucas Molleman, Eva van den Broek & Martijn Egas
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 April 2013
Abstract:
There is ample evidence that human cooperative behaviour towards other individuals is often conditioned on information about previous interactions. This information derives both from personal experience (direct reciprocity) and from experience of others (i.e. reputation; indirect reciprocity). Direct and indirect reciprocity have been studied separately, but humans often have access to both types of information. Here, we experimentally investigate information use in a repeated helping game. When acting as donor, subjects can condition their decisions to help recipients with both types of information at a small cost to access such information. We find that information from direct interactions weighs more heavily in decisions to help, and participants tend to react less forgivingly to negative personal experience than to negative reputation. Moreover, effects of personal experience and reputation interact in decisions to help. If a recipient's reputation is positive, the personal experience of the donor has a weak effect on the decision to help, and vice versa. Yet if the two types of information indicate conflicting signatures of helpfulness, most decisions to help follow personal experience. To understand the roles of direct and indirect reciprocity in human cooperation, they should be studied in concert, not in isolation.
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Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall
Jonathan Cook & Shahzeen Attari
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, December 2012, Pages 682-687
Abstract:
In a national online longitudinal survey, participants reported their attitudes and behaviors in response to the recently implemented metered paywall by the New York Times. Previously free online content now requires a digital subscription to access beyond a small free monthly allotment. Participants were surveyed shortly after the paywall was announced and again 11 weeks after it was implemented to understand how they would react and adapt to this change. Most readers planned not to pay and ultimately did not. Instead, they devalued the newspaper, visited its Web site less frequently, and used loopholes, particularly those who thought the paywall would lead to inequality. Results of an experimental justification manipulation revealed that framing the paywall in terms of financial necessity moderately increased support and willingness to pay. Framing the paywall in terms of a profit motive proved to be a noncompelling justification, sharply decreasing both support and willingness to pay. Results suggest that people react negatively to paying for previously free content, but change can be facilitated with compelling justifications that emphasize fairness.