Work it out
Community Social Capital and Entrepreneurship
Seok-Woo Kwon, Colleen Heflin & Martin Ruef
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The literature on social capital and entrepreneurship often explores individual benefits of social capital, such as the role of personal networks in promoting self-employment. In this article, we instead examine social capital’s public good aspects, arguing that the benefits of social trust and organization memberships accrue not just to the individual but to the community at large. We test these arguments using individual data from the 2000 Census that have been merged with two community surveys, the Social Capital Benchmark Survey and the General Social Survey. We find that individuals in communities with high levels of social trust are more likely to be self-employed compared to individuals in communities with lower levels of social trust. Additionally, membership in organizations connected to the larger community is associated with higher levels of self-employment, but membership in isolated organizations that lack connections to the larger community is associated with lower levels of self-employment. Further analysis suggests that the entrepreneurship-enhancing effects of community social capital are stronger for whites, native-born residents, and long-term community members than for minorities, immigrants, and recent entrants.
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Mitchell Hoffman & John Morgan
University of California Working Paper, October 2013
Abstract:
Levitt and List (2007) conjecture that selection pressures among business people will reduce or eliminate pro-social choices. While recent work comparing students with various adult populations often fails to find that adults are less pro-social, this evidence is not necessarily at odds with the selection hypothesis, which may be most relevant for behavior in cutthroat competitive industries. To examine the selection hypothesis, we compare students with two adult populations deliberately selected from two cutthroat internet industries --- domain trading and adult entertainment (pornography). Across a range of indicators, business people in these industries are more pro-social than students: they are more altruistic, trusting, trustworthy, and lying averse. They also respond differently to shame-based incentives. We offer a theory of reverse selection that can rationalize these findings.
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Tryptophan Promotes Interpersonal Trust
Lorenza Colzato et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
"Pharmacological studies in rats and humans suggest that the neurotransmitter serotonin (5-HT) plays a crucial role in promoting cooperative behavior...We tested whether mutual trust can be promoted by administering the food supplement L-tryptophan (TRP), the biochemical precursor of 5-HT. TRP is an essential amino acid contained in food such as fish, soybeans, eggs, and spinach...We investigated the link between TRP supplementation and interpersonal trust in 40 healthy adults exposed to an oral dose of either TRP or a neutral placebo...We then measured interpersonal trust by having each pair perform the Trust Game...As expected, participants transferred significantly more euros to their partners (whom they thought were trustees) in the TRP condition (M = €3.57, SD = €1.33) than in the placebo condition (M = €2.61, SD = €1.26), t(38) = 2.35, p = .024"
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Egocentrism Drives Misunderstanding in Conflict and Negotiation
John Chambers & Carsten De Dreu
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, March 2014, Pages 15–26
Abstract:
A key barrier to conflict resolution is that parties exaggerate the degree to which the other side’s interests oppose their own side’s interests. Here we examine egocentrism as a fundamental source of such biased conflict perceptions. We propose that parties rely on their own interests and priorities when estimating those of the other side, and ignore the other side’s true interests and priorities. Three experiments involving multi-issue negotiations provide strong evidence of such egocentric misperception. Participants judged their own important issues to be more important to their negotiation opponent, regardless of their opponent’s actual interests (Experiment 1). Furthermore, accuracy increased when attention was experimentally focused on the opponent’s interests rather than their own (Experiment 2), and perceptions of opponent’s interests were more closely related to own interests than to the opponent’s actual interests (Experiment 3). In the discussion, we highlight the broader implications of the egocentrism account for other areas of conflict.
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Targeted Social Mobilization in a Global Manhunt
Alex Rutherford et al.
PLoS ONE, September 2013
Abstract:
Social mobilization, the ability to mobilize large numbers of people via social networks to achieve highly distributed tasks, has received significant attention in recent times. This growing capability, facilitated by modern communication technology, is highly relevant to endeavors which require the search for individuals that possess rare information or skills, such as finding medical doctors during disasters, or searching for missing people. An open question remains, as to whether in time-critical situations, people are able to recruit in a targeted manner, or whether they resort to so-called blind search, recruiting as many acquaintances as possible via broadcast communication. To explore this question, we examine data from our recent success in the U.S. State Department's Tag Challenge, which required locating and photographing 5 target persons in 5 different cities in the United States and Europe – in under 12 hours – based only on a single mug-shot. We find that people are able to consistently route information in a targeted fashion even under increasing time pressure. We derive an analytical model for social-media fueled global mobilization and use it to quantify the extent to which people were targeting their peers during recruitment. Our model estimates that approximately 1 in 3 messages were of targeted fashion during the most time-sensitive period of the challenge. This is a novel observation at such short temporal scales, and calls for opportunities for devising viral incentive schemes that provide distance or time-sensitive rewards to approach the target geography more rapidly. This observation of ′12 hours of separation' between individuals has applications in multiple areas from emergency preparedness, to political mobilization.
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Pyrrhic victories: The need for social status drives costly competitive behavior
Wouter van den Bos et al.
Frontiers in Neuroscience, October 2013
Abstract:
Competitive behavior is commonly defined as the decision to maximize one's payoffs relative to others. We argue instead that competitive drive derives from a desire for social status. We make use of a multi-player auction task in which subjects knowingly incur financial losses for the sake of winning auctions. First, we show that overbidding is increased when the task includes members of a rival out-group, suggesting that social identity is an important mediator of competitiveness. In addition, we show that the extent that individuals are willing to incur losses is related to affective responses to social comparisons but not to monetary outcomes. Second, we show that basal levels of testosterone predict overbidding, and that this effect of testosterone is mediated by affective responses to social comparisons. Based on these findings, we argue that competitive behavior should be conceptualized in terms of social motivations as opposed to just relative monetary payoffs.
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Similarity increases altruistic punishment in humans
Thomas Mussweiler & Axel Ockenfels
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans are attracted to similar others. As a consequence, social networks are homogeneous in sociodemographic, intrapersonal, and other characteristics — a principle called homophily. Despite abundant evidence showing the importance of interpersonal similarity and homophily for human relationships, their behavioral correlates and cognitive foundations are poorly understood. Here, we show that perceived similarity substantially increases altruistic punishment, a key mechanism underlying human cooperation. We induced (dis)similarity perception by manipulating basic cognitive mechanisms in an economic cooperation game that included a punishment phase. We found that similarity-focused participants were more willing to punish others’ uncooperative behavior. This influence of similarity is not explained by group identity, which has the opposite effect on altruistic punishment. Our findings demonstrate that pure similarity promotes reciprocity in ways known to encourage cooperation. At the same time, the increased willingness to punish norm violations among similarity-focused participants provides a rationale for why similar people are more likely to build stable social relationships. Finally, our findings show that altruistic punishment is differentially involved in encouraging cooperation under pure similarity vs. in-group conditions.
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The development of egalitarianism, altruism, spite and parochialism in childhood and adolescence
Ernst Fehr, Daniela Glätzle-Rützler & Matthias Sutter
European Economic Review, November 2013, Pages 369–383
Abstract:
We study how the distribution of other-regarding preferences develops with age. Based on a set of allocation choices, we classify each of 717 subjects, aged 8 to 17 years, as either egalitarian, altruistic, or spiteful. We find a strong decrease in spitefulness with increasing age. Egalitarianism becomes less frequent, and altruism much more prominent, with age. Females are more frequently classified as egalitarian than males, and less often as altruistic. By varying the allocation recipient as either an in-group or an out-group member, we also study how parochialism develops with age. Parochialism emerges significantly in the teenage years.
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Oxytocin Decreases Accuracy in the Perception of Social Deception
Salomon Israel, Einav Hart & Eyal Winter
Psychological Science, forthcoming
"Forty min after self-administration of oxytocin or the placebo, subjects viewed four clips of the Friend or Foe? game show. Each clip depicted two contestants (counterbalanced for gender) engaging in nonbinding discussions prior to making decisions of 'friend' (cooperation) or 'foe' (defection)...Rather than improving subjects’ inferences about others’ mental states, oxytocin impeded accurate assessments of trustworthiness in risky social exchanges. Oxytocin decreased prediction accuracy but did not increase predictions of cooperative behavior in general."
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Bruno Lambert, Carolyn Declerck & Christophe Boone
Psychoneuroendocrinology, February 2014, Pages 60–68
Abstract:
Previous research on the relation between oxytocin and trustworthiness evaluations has yielded inconsistent results. The current study reports an experiment using artificial faces which allows manipulating the dimension of trustworthiness without changing factors like emotions or face symmetry. We investigate whether (1) oxytocin increases the average trustworthiness evaluation of faces (level effect), and/or whether (2) oxytocin improves the discriminatory ability of trustworthiness perception so that people become more accurate in distinguishing faces that vary along a gradient of trustworthiness. In a double blind oxytocin/placebo experiment (N = 106) participants conducted two judgment tasks. First they evaluated the trustworthiness of a series of pictures of artificially generated faces, neutral in the trustworthiness dimension. Next they compared neutral faces with artificially generated faces that were manipulated to vary in trustworthiness. The results indicate that oxytocin (relative to a placebo) does not affect the evaluation of trustworthiness in the first task. However, in the second task, misclassification of untrustworthy faces as trustworthy occurred significantly less in the oxytocin group. Furthermore, oxytocin improved the discriminatory ability of untrustworthy, but not trustworthy faces. We conclude that oxytocin does not increase trustworthiness judgments on average, but that it helps people to more accurately recognize an untrustworthy face.
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Evan Polman, Monique Pollmann & Andrew Poehlman
PLoS ONE, November 2013
Abstract:
Although the name-letter-effect has been demonstrated reliably in choice contexts, recent research has called into question the existence of the name-letter-effect–the tendency among people to make choices that bear remarkable similarity with the letters in their own name. In this paper, we propose a connection between the name-letter-effect and interpersonal, group-level behavior that has not been previously captured in the literature. Specifically, we suggest that sharing initials with other group members promotes positive feelings toward those group members that in turn affect group outcomes. Using both field and laboratory studies, we found that sharing initials with group members cause groups to perform better by demonstrating greater performance, collective efficacy, adaptive conflict, and accuracy (on a hidden-profile task). Although many studies have investigated the effects of member similarity on various outcomes, our research demonstrates how minimal a degree of similarity among members is sufficient to influence quality of group outcomes.
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Narcissism and Negotiation: Economic Gain and Interpersonal Loss
Sun Park et al.
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, November/December 2013, Pages 569-574
Abstract:
Successful negotiation involves satisfying two seemingly contradictory goals: maximizing personal gain while forming a positive interpersonal relationship with negotiation counterparts. We hypothesized that individuals high on narcissism would gain economically but loose interpersonally in a negotiation. Seventy MBA students engaged in a negotiation simulation, completed a measure of narcissism, reported their emotional states, evaluated their negotiation counterparts' emotional states, and evaluated how much they trusted and liked their counterparts. Consistent with the hypothesis, results revealed that in negotiations, narcissistic personality characteristics can lead to economic gain but are accompanied by interpersonal loss.
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Reputation Formation and the Evolution of Cooperation in Anonymous Online Markets
Andreas Diekmann et al.
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Theoretical propositions stressing the importance of trust, reciprocity, and reputation for cooperation in social exchange relations are deeply rooted in classical sociological thought. Today’s online markets provide a unique opportunity to test these theories using unobtrusive data. Our study investigates the mechanisms promoting cooperation in an online-auction market where most transactions can be conceived as one-time-only exchanges. We first give a systematic account of the theoretical arguments explaining the process of cooperative transactions. Then, using a large dataset comprising 14,627 mobile phone auctions and 339,517 DVD auctions, we test key hypotheses about the effects of traders’ reputations on auction outcomes and traders’ motives for leaving feedback. Our statistical analyses show that sellers with better reputations have higher sales and obtain higher prices. Furthermore, we observe a high rate of participation in the feedback system, which is largely consistent with strong reciprocity — a predisposition to unconditionally reward (or punish) one’s interaction partner’s cooperation (or defection) — and altruism — a predisposition to increase one’s own utility by elevating an interaction partner’s utility. Our study demonstrates how strong reciprocity and altruism can mitigate the free-rider problem in the feedback system to create reputational incentives for mutually beneficial online trade.
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Cooperators and reciprocators: A within-subject analysis of pro-social behavior
Aurelie Dariel & Nikos Nikiforakis
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
We perform a within-subject analysis of pro-social behavior in the public-good and gift-exchange game. We find that participants classified as cooperators in the public-good game tend to reciprocate higher wages in the gift-exchange game with higher levels of effort. Non-cooperators do not exhibit such tendency. Both types offer similar wages.
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The gift of advice: Communication in a bilateral gift exchange game
David Cooper & John Lightle
Experimental Economics, December 2013, Pages 443-477
Abstract:
We augment a standard bilateral gift exchange game so employees can send messages at the same time as choosing an effort level. Employee effort (controlling for wages) is unaffected by allowing messages, but wages dramatically increase. Messages affect wages because employees give managers advice to set higher wages, usually explaining that this will result in higher effort. This advice prompts managers to try higher wages, helping them learn that raising wages increases their payoffs. In a follow-up experiment, we directly provide managers with additional information about the relationship between wages and effort. This too causes wages to increase, but to a lesser extent than allowing messages. Our results highlight the critical role of learning in generating gains from positive gift exchange.
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Don’t Grin When You Win: The Social Costs of Positive Emotion Expression in Performance Situations
Elise Kalokerinos et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
People who express positive emotion usually have better social outcomes than people who do not, and suppressing the expression of emotions can have interpersonal costs. Nevertheless, social convention suggests that there are situations in which people should suppress the expression of positive emotions, such as when trying to appear humble in victory. The present research tested whether there are interpersonal costs to expressing positive emotions when winning. In Experiment 1, inexpressive winners were evaluated more positively and rated as lower in hubristic — but not authentic — pride compared with expressive winners. Experiment 2 confirmed that inexpressive winners were perceived as using expressive suppression to downregulate their positive emotion expression. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of Experiment 1, and also found that people were more interested in forming a friendship with inexpressive winners than expressive winners. The effects were mediated by the perception that the inexpressive winner tried to protect the loser’s feelings. This research is the first to identify social costs of expressing positive emotion, and highlights the importance of understanding the situational context when determining optimal emotion regulation strategies.
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The cost of cowardice: Punitive sentiments towards free riders in Turkana raids
Sarah Mathew & Robert Boyd
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Models indicate that large-scale cooperation can be sustained by indirect reciprocity or direct punishment, but the relative importance of these mechanisms is unresolved. Unlike direct punishment, indirect sanctions can be meted out without cost to the sanctioner, but direct punishment is advantageous when the scale of cooperation exceeds the network size of individuals. It is of great interest to assess the importance of these mechanisms in small-scale acephalous groups in which people have lived for most of our evolutionary history. Here we evaluate sentiments towards free riders in combat among the Turkana, an acephalous nomadic pastoral society in East Africa who periodically mobilize for cattle-raids against neighboring ethnic groups. Using vignette studies, we probed participants’ motivation to sanction fictitious warriors who were cowards or deserters in a raid and compared it respectively to their reactions to an unskilled warrior or a warrior who turns back due to illness. Our results indicate that the Turkana are motivated to impose both indirect and direct sanctions on cowards consistent with indirect reciprocity and punishment models of cooperation. Our findings imply that both these mechanisms have shaped human cooperative psychology, and sheds light on how prestate societies solve the collective action problem in warfare.
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Initial Impressions Determine Behaviours: Morality Predicts the Willingness to Help Newcomers
Stefano Pagliaro et al.
Journal of Business Ethics, September 2013, Pages 37-44
Abstract:
Prior research has demonstrated the impact of morality (vs. competence) information for impression formation. This study examines behavioral implications of people’s initial impressions based on information about their morality vs. competence in a workplace. School teachers and employees (N = 79) were asked to form an impression of a new school manager (i.e. a prospective boss), who was presented as High vs. Low in Morality and High vs. Low in Competence. Results showed that morality information rather than competence information determined initial emotional responses to the new manager, which mediated willingness to help the newcomer adjust in task and social contexts. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications and future research directions are outlined.