We can do it
Michael Kraus & Wendy Berry Mendes
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social rank in human and nonhuman animals is signaled by a variety of behaviors and phenotypes. In this research, we examined whether a sartorial manipulation of social class would engender class-consistent behavior and physiology during dyadic interactions. Male participants donned clothing that signaled either upper-class (business-suit) or lower-class (sweatpants) rank prior to engaging in a modified negotiation task with another participant unaware of the clothing manipulation. Wearing upper-class, compared to lower-class, clothing induced dominance - measured in terms of negotiation profits and concessions, and testosterone levels - in participants. Upper-class clothing also elicited increased vigilance in perceivers of these symbols: Relative to perceiving lower-class symbols, perceiving upper-class symbols increased vagal withdrawal, reduced perceptions of social power, and catalyzed physiological contagion such that perceivers' sympathetic nervous system activation followed that of the upper-class target. Discussion focuses on the dyadic process of social class signaling within social interactions.
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Gender differences in trust dynamics: Women trust more than men following a trust violation
Michael Haselhuhn et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2015, Pages 104-109
Abstract:
Despite the importance of trust for efficient social and organizational functioning, transgressions that betray trust are common. We know little about the personal characteristics that affect the extent to which transgressions actually harm trust. In this research, we examine how gender moderates responses to trust violations. Across three studies, we demonstrate that following a violation, women are both less likely to lose trust and more likely to restore trust in a transgressor than men. Women care more about maintaining relationships than men, and this greater relational investment mediates the relationship between gender and trust dynamics.
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Lisa Stickney & Deanna Geddes
Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, November 2014, Pages 243-264
Abstract:
In two studies, we examine the relationship of positive and negative trait affectivity (PA/NA), organizational commitment, and emotional exhaustion with organizational member anger. Utilizing the dual threshold model (DTM) constructs of expressed and suppressed anger (Geddes & Callister, 2007), we find employees with high organizational commitment express anger to relevant others, that is, to management or to those responsible for the anger-provoking situation. In contrast, emotionally exhausted employees and those with high NA tend to suppress their anger, venting only to uninvolved parties or remaining silent. Findings also indicate a positive relationship with PA and anger expression - a connection rarely considered or examined in anger research. Further, expressed anger was predictive of perceived improvement with problematic situations, while suppressed anger forms led to perceptions that the situation at work deteriorated.
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Peter McGraw, Caleb Warren & Christina Kan
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although complaints document dissatisfaction, some are also humorous. The article introduces the concept of humorous complaining and draws on the benign violation theory - which proposes that humor arises from things that seem simultaneously wrong yet okay - to examine how being humorous helps and hinders complainers. Six studies, which use social media and online reviews as stimuli, show that humorous complaints benefit people who want to warn, entertain, and make a favorable impression on others. Further, in contrast to the belief that humor is beneficial but consistent with the benign violation theory, humor makes complaints seem more positive (by making an expression of dissatisfaction seem okay), but makes praise seem more negative (by making an expression of satisfaction seem wrong in some way). Finally, a benign violation approach perspective also reveals that complaining humorously has costs. Because being humorous suggests that a dissatisfying situation is okay, humorous complaints are less likely to elicit redress or sympathy from others than nonhumorous complaints.
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A Field Experiment on Search Costs and the Formation of Scientific Collaborations
Kevin Boudreau et al.
Harvard Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
Scientists typically self-organize into teams, matching with others to collaborate in the production of new knowledge. We present the results of a field experiment conducted at Harvard Medical School to understand the extent to which search costs affect matching among scientific collaborators. We generated exogenous variation in search costs for pairs of potential collaborators by randomly assigning individuals to 90-minute structured information-sharing sessions as part of a grant funding opportunity for biomedical researchers. We estimate that the treatment increases the baseline probability of grant co-application of a given pair of researchers by 75% (increasing the likelihood of a pair collaborating from 0.16 percent to 0.28 percent), with effects higher among those in the same specialization. The findings indicate that matching between scientists is subject to considerable frictions, even in the case of geographically-proximate scientists working in the same institutional context with ample access to common information and funding opportunities.
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Competition vs. Communication: An Experimental Study on Restoring Trust
Vivian Lei, David Masclet & Filip Vesely
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Trust is fragile. It is hard to build but easy to destroy. In this paper, we explore the fragility of trust in a stylized laboratory environment. We ask whether transgression outside a direct send-and-return relationship destroys trust and, if so, whether a competition against outsiders or an apology for misdeeds helps restore it. We find that transgression significantly reduces trust and that the broken trust can be greatly restored by group competition. Communication via an apology, impersonal or not, has an insignificant impact. By contrast, offering explanations for misbehavior is as effective as group competition.
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The primacy of agency over competence in status perception
Antonin Carrier et al.
Social Psychology, Fall 2014, Pages 347-356
Abstract:
A great deal of recent work has found that two fundamental dimensions underlie social judgment. The most common labels used to denote these dimensions are agency versus communion, and competence versus warmth. The present work aimed to disentangle agency understood as the motivation to promote the self from competence understood as ability, and to address their distinctive role in status perception. In Studies 1 and 2, participants were presented with a high- versus low-status target and asked to rate this target on agency, competence and warmth. In Study 3, participants were presented with an agentic, competent, and warm target and asked to rate their social status. Overall, our findings indicated that agency and competence operate as distinct dimensions in social judgment, and that agency is more related to social status than competence.
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Jeremy Cone & David Rand
Yale Working Paper, October 2014
Abstract:
What makes people willing to pay costs to benefit others? Does such cooperation require effortful self-control, or do automatic, intuitive processes favor cooperation? Time pressure has been shown to increase cooperative behavior in Public Goods Games, implying a predisposition towards cooperation. Consistent with the hypothesis that this predisposition results from the fact that cooperation is typically advantageous outside the lab, it has further been shown that the time pressure effect is undermined by prior experience playing lab games (where selfishness is the more advantageous strategy). Furthermore, a recent study (Rand, Newman, & Wurzbacher, 2014) has found that time pressure increases cooperation even in a game framed as a competition, suggesting that the time pressure effect is not the result of social norm compliance. Here, we successfully replicate this study's findings, again observing a positive effect of time pressure on cooperation in a competitively framed game, but not when using the standard cooperative framing. These results suggest that participants' intuitions favor cooperation rather than norm compliance, and also that simply changing the framing of the Public Goods Game is enough to make it appear novel to participants and thus to restore the time pressure effect.
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Social Context and the Dynamics of Cooperative Choice
David Rand, George Newman & Owen Wurzbacher
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent work using decontextualized economic games suggests that cooperation is a dynamic decision-making process: Automatic responses typically support cooperation on average, while deliberation leads to increased selfishness. Here, we performed two studies examining how these temporal effects generalize to games with richer social context cues. Study 1 found that time pressure increased cooperation to a similar extent in games played with in-group members and out-group members. Study 2 found that time pressure increased cooperation to a similar extent in games described as competitions and games described as collaborations. These results show that previous positive effects of time pressure on cooperation are not unique to neutrally framed games devoid of social context and are not driven by implicit assumptions of shared group membership or cooperative norms. In doing so, our findings provide further insight into the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision making.
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Stefano Livi et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
The role of need for cognitive closure (NFCC, Kruglanski, 2004) in the transmission of a group norm is examined in three studies carried out in both experimental and natural settings. It was hypothesized that for persons high in NFCC a greater resistance to change is produced both via the urgency tendency of newcomers and the permanence tendency of old-timers; accordingly, groups composed of high need for closure individuals should exhibit greater cultural stability than groups composed of low NFCC. The first study investigated that hypothesis in a natural setting where young adults rated their health behavior and that of their parents. Consistent with our hypothesis, results of a moderated regression analysis showed that for participants high (vs. low) in dispositional NFCC the relation between parents' and offspring behavior is stronger, implying normative continuity. The remaining two studies applied Jacobs and Campbell's (1961) paradigm wherein group norms are induced and transmitted across generations of a laboratory microculture. In the first study, NFCC was induced by means of environmental noise whereas in the second study it was varied via group composition, consisting of participants with High vs. Low scores on the NFCC Scale. Results of both studies confirmed the hypothesis that cultures under high need for closure show a greater normative stability across generations. Moreover, the experimental studies clarify that the observed, need for closure based, stability was promoted by newcomers' greater tendency to seize to the group norms in condition of high (versus low) NFCC.
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Punishment and the potency of group selection
Richard Povey
Journal of Evolutionary Economics, September 2014, Pages 799-816
Abstract:
It is known that altruism can be sustained in an evolving population by a process of group selection. There is also existing research on the role that punishment can play in inducing selfish agents to behave more co-operatively or in preventing selfish agents from evolving, and the limitations upon this mechanism. This paper embeds a simple model of a punishment system within an indirect cultural evolution framework. The use of punishment is shown to reduce the potency of the group selection mechanism, and thus the level of evolved altruism. This presents a novel reason why the use of punishment may have negative dynamic welfare implications.
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Miguel Dos Santos & Claus Wedekind
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cooperation among unrelated individuals can arise if decisions to help others can be based on reputation. While working for dyadic interactions, reputation-use in social dilemmas involving many individuals (e.g. public goods games) becomes increasingly difficult as groups become larger and errors more frequent. Reputation is therefore believed to have played a minor role for the evolution of cooperation in collective action dilemmas such as those faced by early humans. Here, we show in computer simulations that a reputation system based on punitive actions can overcome these problems and, compared to reputation system based on generous actions, (i) is more likely to lead to the evolution of cooperation in sizable groups, (ii) more effectively sustains cooperation within larger groups, and (iii) is more robust to errors in reputation assessment. Punishment and punishment reputation could therefore have played crucial roles in the evolution of cooperation within larger groups of humans.