Work something out
Agreement Attraction and Impasse Aversion: Reasons for Selecting a Poor Deal Over No Deal at All
Ece Tuncel et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the present studies, we examined the positive value of agreement and the negative value of impasse. Participants chose to give up real value and sacrifice economic efficiency in order to attain an agreement outcome and avoid an impasse outcome. A personally disadvantageous option was selected significantly more often when it was labeled "Agreement" rather than "Option A," and a personally advantageous option was avoided significantly more often when it was labeled "Impasse" rather than "Option B." In a face-to-face negotiation, a substantial proportion of individuals reached an agreement that was inferior to their best alternative to agreement. We showed that the appeal of agreement and the aversion to impasse both contribute to this effect, yet the aversion to impasse is the stronger of the two motivations. These findings have important implications for negotiators.
---------------------
Peter Belmi & Jeffrey Pfeffer
Academy of Management Discoveries, June 2015, Pages 36-57
Abstract:
Why are employee loyalty and effort sometimes not reciprocated by employers? Five experimental studies tested the hypothesis that people feel less obligated to reciprocate in an organizational as contrasted with a personal context. Studies 1A and 1B showed that participants felt less obligated to reciprocate the favors of others when they imagined themselves in an organizational rather than a personal context, in part because they were less likely to think that people's motives for helping were genuine and reflected the other's true character. Study 2 demonstrated that in an organizational context, individuals were more calculative, deciding to reciprocate or not depending on the favor-doer's anticipated future usefulness. Studies 3 and 4 extended these results using two different behavioral measures of reciprocating. The findings suggest that the norm of reciprocity may be weaker in organizational contexts in part because such settings elicit more contextual rather than personal attributions and more calculative and future-oriented decision frames.
---------------------
Social Working Memory Training Improves Perspective-Taking Accuracy
Meghan Meyer & Matthew Lieberman
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the importance of perspective taking for navigating the social world, even healthy adults frequently misinterpret what other people think and feel. Yet, to date, no research examines whether perspective-taking accuracy can be improved among healthy adult samples. Building off of work suggesting that social working memory (SWM) capacity (i.e., the ability to maintain and manipulate social cognitive information in mind) predicts perspective-taking skills, we developed a novel SWM training intervention to test the hypothesis that SWM training improves perspective-taking accuracy. Participants were randomly assigned to complete 12 days of either SWM training or nonsocial, "cognitive working memory" (CWM) training (active control condition). Perspective-taking accuracy was assessed pre- and posttraining. SWM training significantly increased perspective-taking accuracy and these improvements significantly surpassed improvements made by participants who underwent CWM training. SWM training therefore may be an efficient route toward improved perspective-taking accuracy.
---------------------
Vasopressin increases human risky cooperative behavior
Claudia Brunnlieb et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The history of humankind is an epic of cooperation, which is ubiquitous across societies and increasing in scale. Much human cooperation occurs where it is risky to cooperate for mutual benefit because successful cooperation depends on a sufficient level of cooperation by others. Here we show that arginine vasopressin (AVP), a neuropeptide that mediates complex mammalian social behaviors such as pair bonding, social recognition and aggression causally increases humans' willingness to engage in risky, mutually beneficial cooperation. In two double-blind experiments, male participants received either AVP or placebo intranasally and made decisions with financial consequences in the "Stag hunt" cooperation game. AVP increases humans' willingness to cooperate. That increase is not due to an increase in the general willingness to bear risks or to altruistically help others. Using functional brain imaging, we show that, when subjects make the risky Stag choice, AVP down-regulates the BOLD signal in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), a risk-integration region, and increases the left dlPFC functional connectivity with the ventral pallidum, an AVP receptor-rich region previously associated with AVP-mediated social reward processing in mammals. These findings show a previously unidentified causal role for AVP in social approach behavior in humans, as established by animal research.
---------------------
Fairness, One's Source of Income, and Others' Decisions: An Ultimatum Game Experiment
Kangoh Lee & Quazi Shahriar
Managerial and Decision Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In an ultimatum game experiment, this paper studies the effects of the proposer's source of income, earned income and unearned income, on the responder's decision to accept or reject the proposer's offer. The results show that as the earned-income fraction increases, the responder tends to accept a lower offer. The results have implications for other types of behavior such as the demand for redistribution.
---------------------
Sarah Doyle et al.
Academy of Management Discoveries, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the role of status distance (i.e., the magnitude of status differences between coworkers) in understanding interpersonal helping in organizations. Results from an experiment and a field study show a curvilinear relationship between status distance and helping, with less help provided to those at relatively small and large status distances from oneself, and relatively more help offered to those at moderate status distances. While prior work on status differences has primarily considered status ordinally (i.e., rank ordering of individuals), or in terms of direction (i.e., whether someone is higher or lower status), the current work takes a more exacting look at status differences, providing insights into the relationship between status and helping that would have been overlooked if relying solely on the traditional ordinal approach to social hierarchy. These findings offer an empirical basis and theoretical motivation to consider status distance as a critical variable in future work examining the effects of status differences on interpersonal dynamics. Importantly, this work also offers a relevant and timely perspective for managers debating the costs and benefits of various hierarchical arrangements in organizations.
---------------------
No Space for Others? On the Increase of Students' Self-Focus When Prodded to Think About Many Others
Jens Hellmann, Marijke Hannah Adelt & Regina Jucks
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the present experiment, participants read about the presence of many versus few others in typical student-life situations. They subsequently wrote an essay about their perspectives on learning in groups. Using the program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to analyze these essays signified that participants who read prompts that involved many (vs. few) other students used more first-person singular pronouns and fewer words related to others. We interpret this increase in self-focus as a consequence of induced social crowding.
---------------------
Looking Under the Hood of Third-Party Punishment Reveals Design for Personal Benefit
Max Krasnow et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Third-party intervention, such as when a crowd stops a mugger, is common. Yet it seems irrational because it has real costs but may provide no personal benefits. In a laboratory analogue, the third-party-punishment game, third parties ("punishers") will often spend real money to anonymously punish bad behavior directed at other people. A common explanation is that third-party punishment exists to maintain a cooperative society. We tested a different explanation: Third-party punishment results from a deterrence psychology for defending personal interests. Because humans evolved in small-scale, face-to-face social worlds, the mind infers that mistreatment of a third party predicts later mistreatment of oneself. We showed that when punishers do not have information about how they personally will be treated, they infer that mistreatment of other people predicts mistreatment of themselves, and these inferences predict punishment. But when information about personal mistreatment is available, it drives punishment. This suggests that humans' punitive psychology evolved to defend personal interests.
---------------------
Michael Stagnaro, Antonio Arechar & David Rand
Yale Working Paper, January 2016
Abstract:
What makes people willing to pay costs to help others, and to punish others' selfishness? And why does the extent of such behaviors vary markedly across cultures? To shed light on these questions, we explore the role of formal institutions in shaping individuals' prosociality and punishment. In Study 1 (N=707), we found that the quality of the institutions that participants were exposed to in daily life was positively associated with giving in a Dictator Game, but had little relationship with punishment in a Third-Party Punishment Game. In Study 2 (N=516), we investigated causality by experimentally manipulating institutional quality using a centralized punishment institution applied to a repeated Public Goods Game. Consistent with Study 1's correlational results, we found that high institutional quality led to significantly more prosociality in a subsequent Dictator Game, but did not have a significant overall effect on subsequent punishment. Thus we present convergent evidence that the quality of institutions one is exposed to "spills over" to affect subsequent prosociality, but not punishment. These findings support a theory of social heuristics, suggest boundary conditions on spillover effects of cooperation, and demonstrate the power of effective institutions for instilling habits of virtue and creating cultures of cooperation.
---------------------
Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments
Maxwell Burton-Chellew, Claire El Mouden & Stuart West
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2 February 2016, Pages 1291-1296
Abstract:
Economic experiments are often used to study if humans altruistically value the welfare of others. A canonical result from public-good games is that humans vary in how they value the welfare of others, dividing into fair-minded conditional cooperators, who match the cooperation of others, and selfish noncooperators. However, an alternative explanation for the data are that individuals vary in their understanding of how to maximize income, with misunderstanding leading to the appearance of cooperation. We show that (i) individuals divide into the same behavioral types when playing with computers, whom they cannot be concerned with the welfare of; (ii) behavior across games with computers and humans is correlated and can be explained by variation in understanding of how to maximize income; (iii) misunderstanding correlates with higher levels of cooperation; and (iv) standard control questions do not guarantee understanding. These results cast doubt on certain experimental methods and demonstrate that a common assumption in behavioral economics experiments, that choices reveal motivations, will not necessarily hold.