In it together
Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: Evidence from the Micro-Context
Peter Thisted Dinesen & Kim Mannemar Sønderskov
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We argue that residential exposure to ethnic diversity reduces social trust. Previous within-country analyses of the relationship between contextual ethnic diversity and trust have been conducted at higher levels of aggregation, thus ignoring substantial variation in actual exposure to ethnic diversity. In contrast, we analyze how ethnic diversity of the immediate micro-context — where interethnic exposure is inevitable — affects trust. We do this using Danish survey data linked with register-based data, which enables us to obtain precise measures of the ethnic diversity of each individual’s residential surroundings. We focus on contextual diversity within a radius of 80 meters of a given individual, but we also compare the effect in the micro-context to the impact of diversity in more aggregate contexts. Our results show that ethnic diversity in the micro-context affects trust negatively, whereas the effect vanishes in larger contextual units. This supports the conjecture that interethnic exposure underlies the negative relationship between ethnic diversity in residential contexts and social trust.
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Dopamine Modulates Egalitarian Behavior in Humans
Ignacio Sáez et al.
Current Biology, 30 March 2015, Pages 912–919
Abstract:
Egalitarian motives form a powerful force in promoting prosocial behavior and enabling large-scale cooperation in the human species. At the neural level, there is substantial, albeit correlational, evidence suggesting a link between dopamine and such behavior. However, important questions remain about the specific role of dopamine in setting or modulating behavioral sensitivity to prosocial concerns. Here, using a combination of pharmacological tools and economic games, we provide critical evidence for a causal involvement of dopamine in human egalitarian tendencies. Specifically, using the brain penetrant catechol-O-methyl transferase (COMT) inhibitor tolcapone, we investigated the causal relationship between dopaminergic mechanisms and two prosocial concerns at the core of a number of widely used economic games: (1) the extent to which individuals directly value the material payoffs of others, i.e., generosity, and (2) the extent to which they are averse to differences between their own payoffs and those of others, i.e., inequity. We found that dopaminergic augmentation via COMT inhibition increased egalitarian tendencies in participants who played an extended version of the dictator game. Strikingly, computational modeling of choice behavior revealed that tolcapone exerted selective effects on inequity aversion, and not on other computational components such as the extent to which individuals directly value the material payoffs of others. Together, these data shed light on the causal relationship between neurochemical systems and human prosocial behavior and have potential implications for our understanding of the complex array of social impairments accompanying neuropsychiatric disorders involving dopaminergic dysregulation.
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Power and Legitimacy Influence Conformity
Nicholas Hays & Noah Goldstein
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2015, Pages 17–26
Abstract:
Although prior research indicates that power and hierarchy illegitimacy independently decrease conformity to social norms, we demonstrate that the two interact. In five studies, we find that legitimate power decreases conformity, whereas illegitimate power increases conformity. We conducted Study 1 in a business organization and found that power was negatively related to employees’ conformity with organizational values when the power hierarchy was seen as legitimate, but positively related to conformity when the hierarchy was seen as illegitimate. In Study 2, we manipulated power and legitimacy via a recall task and found the same pattern of effects. Study 3 replicates this finding by manipulating role-based power and legitimacy and examining conformity to norms ostensibly established by others in the context of the study. In Study 4, we find that these effects are driven by increases in conformity among those who are in a state of legitimate powerlessness or illegitimate power. Finally, Study 5 demonstrates that legitimacy moderates the experience of power in part because of its effect on hierarchy stability. Our studies suggest that attributes of a power hierarchy, such as its legitimacy, can be as important in determining behavior as one’s hierarchical position.
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Leader emergence through interpersonal neural synchronization
Jing Jiang et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 7 April 2015, Pages 4274–4279
Abstract:
The neural mechanism of leader emergence is not well understood. This study investigated (i) whether interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) plays an important role in leader emergence, and (ii) whether INS and leader emergence are associated with the frequency or the quality of communications. Eleven three-member groups were asked to perform a leaderless group discussion (LGD) task, and their brain activities were recorded via functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based hyperscanning. Video recordings of the discussions were coded for leadership and communication. Results showed that the INS for the leader–follower (LF) pairs was higher than that for the follower–follower (FF) pairs in the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), an area important for social mentalizing. Although communication frequency was higher for the LF pairs than for the FF pairs, the frequency of leader-initiated and follower-initiated communication did not differ significantly. Moreover, INS for the LF pairs was significantly higher during leader-initiated communication than during follower-initiated communications. In addition, INS for the LF pairs during leader-initiated communication was significantly correlated with the leaders’ communication skills and competence, but not their communication frequency. Finally, leadership could be successfully predicted based on INS as well as communication frequency early during the LGD (before half a minute into the task). In sum, this study found that leader emergence was characterized by high-level neural synchronization between the leader and followers and that the quality, rather than the frequency, of communications was associated with synchronization. These results suggest that leaders emerge because they are able to say the right things at the right time.
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The monetary value of social capital
Johannes Orlowski & Pamela Wicker
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, August 2015, Pages 26–36
Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to estimate the monetary value of social capital by considering its multidimensional nature. Four dimensions are conceptualized: Interpersonal trust, institutional trust, trustworthiness, and participation in civil society (formal and informal). The monetary value is obtained by including social capital in a well-being function and estimating the shadow price of social capital. The empirical analysis is based on data from the European Values Survey covering 45 European countries. A generalized ordered response model is estimated to account for possible heterogeneity of social capital indicators among the ten different subjective well-being levels. The results show that on average a one standard deviation increase in interpersonal trust (people's fairness) is worth an extra € 7,913 per year in terms of foregone income, the same increase in institutional trust is worth € 7,405, and the same increase in the importance of family is worth € 7,312. The findings indicate that social capital has significant monetary value to individuals. This should be considered when designing government policies aiming at e.g., labor market mobility that are accompanied by a decreasing social capital stock that, in turn, may negatively affect economic and political development.
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"Ingroup love" and "outgroup hate" in intergroup conflict between natural groups
Ori Weisel & Robert Böhm
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We report on two studies investigating the motivations (“ingroup love” and “outgroup hate”) underlying individual participation in intergroup conflict between natural groups (fans of football clubs, supporters of political parties), by employing the Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma Maximizing-Difference game (IPD-MD). In this game group members can contribute to the ingroup (at a personal cost) and benefit ingroup members with or without harming members of an outgroup. Additionally, we devised a novel version of the IPD-MD in which the choice is between benefiting ingroup members with or without helping members of the outgroup. Our results show an overall reluctance to display outgroup hate by actively harming outgroup members, except when the outgroup was morality-based. More enmity between groups induced more outgroup hate only when it was operationalized as refraining from help.
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Isabel Pinto, José Marques & Dario Paez
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Based on subjective group dynamics theory (SGDT; e.g., Marques, Paez, & Abrams, 1998), we examine the effects of a group’s ability to effectively control its deviant members on participants’ ingroup identification. In Studies 1 and 2 (N = 79 and N = 173) participants were informed that the ingroup (vs. outgroup) dealt with deviant occurrences in an effective (vs. ineffective) way. As predicted, induced ingroup effectiveness generated higher ingroup identification, trust in the ingroup’s social control system, and more positive emotional climate, whereas induced ingroup ineffectiveness generated more negative emotional climate or anomie and weaker ingroup identification as compared to outgroup conditions. In Study 3 (N = 115), perceived ingroup effectiveness predicted ingroup identification, via emotional climate, ingroup anomie, confidence in the group’s social control system, and ingroup emotions. We discuss the results in light of SGDT and the role of perceived ingroup social control in promoting ingroup identification.
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Sandy Schumann & Olivier Klein
European Journal of Social Psychology, April 2015, Pages 308–322
Abstract:
Anecdotes of past social movements suggest that Internet-enabled technologies, especially social media platforms, can facilitate collective actions. Recently, however, it has been argued that the participatory Internet encourages low-cost and low-risk activism — slacktivism — which may have detrimental consequences for groups that aim to achieve a collective purpose. More precisely, low-threshold digital practices such as signing online petitions or “liking” the Facebook page of a group are thought to derail subsequent engagement offline. We assessed this postulation in three experiments (N = 76, N = 59, and N = 48) and showed that so-called slacktivist actions indeed reduce the willingness to join a panel discussion and demonstration as well as the likelihood to sign a petition. This demobilizing effect was mediated by the satisfaction of group-enhancing motives; members considered low-threshold online collective actions as a substantial contribution to the group's success. The findings highlight that behavior that is belittled as slacktivism addresses needs that pertain to individuals' sense of group membership. Rather than hedonistic motives or personal interests, concerns for the ingroup's welfare and viability influenced the decision to join future collective actions offline.
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When Treatments are Tweets: A Network Mobilization Experiment over Twitter
Alexander Coppock, Andrew Guess & John Ternovski
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study rigorously compares the effectiveness of online mobilization appeals via two randomized field experiments conducted over the social microblogging service Twitter. In the process, we demonstrate a methodological innovation designed to capture social effects by exogenously inducing network behavior. In both experiments, we find that direct, private messages to followers of a nonprofit advocacy organization’s Twitter account are highly effective at increasing support for an online petition. Surprisingly, public tweets have no effect at all. We additionally randomize the private messages to prime subjects with either a “follower” or an “organizer” identity but find no evidence that this affects the likelihood of signing the petition. Finally, in the second experiment, followers of subjects induced to tweet a link to the petition are more likely to sign it — evidence of a campaign gone “viral.” In presenting these results, we contribute to a nascent body of experimental literature exploring political behavior in online social media.
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Sports at Work: Anticipated and Persistent Correlates of Participation in High School Athletics
Kevin Kniffin, Brian Wansink & Mitsuru Shimizu
Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, May 2015, Pages 217-230
Abstract:
Do former high school athletes make better employees than nonathletes? Two studies examine how participation in competitive youth sports appears to be relevant for early-career job prospects as well as late-in-life outcomes. In the short run, Study 1 shows that people expect former student-athletes to display significantly more leadership, self-confidence, and self-respect than those who were active outside of sports — such as being in the band or on the yearbook staff. In the long run, Study 2 uses biodata to discover that men who participated in varsity-level high school sports an average of 60 years earlier appeared to demonstrate higher levels of leadership and enjoyed higher-status careers. Surprisingly, these ex-athletes also exhibited more prosocial behavior than nonathletes — they more frequently volunteered time and donated to charity. These findings open a wide range of possibilities regarding how one’s participation in competitive youth sports might influence the development of important skills and values beyond simply signaling the specific traits examined here. Moreover, this contributes to theoretical debates about the traits of students involved in competitive athletics, and it highlights the need for closer attention to the relevance of sports in the workplace and beyond — including late-in-life charitable giving and voluntarism.
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Björn Lindström & Andreas Olsson
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many nonhuman animals preferentially copy the actions of others when the environment contains predation risk or other types of danger. In humans, the role of social learning in avoidance of danger is still unknown, despite the fundamental importance of social learning for complex social behaviors. Critically, many social behaviors, such as cooperation and adherence to religious taboos, are maintained by threat of punishment. However, the psychological mechanisms allowing threat of punishment to generate such behaviors, even when actual punishment is rare or absent, are largely unknown. To address this, we used both computer simulations and behavioral experiments. First, we constructed a model where simulated agents interacted under threat of punishment and showed that mechanisms’ (a) tendency to copy the actions of others through social learning, together with (b) the rewarding properties of avoiding a threatening punishment, could explain the emergence, maintenance, and transmission of large-scale behavioral traditions, both when punishment is common and when it is rare or nonexistent. To provide empirical support for our model, including the 2 mechanisms, we conducted 4 experiments, showing that humans, if threatened with punishment, are exceptionally prone to copy and transmit the behavior observed in others. Our results show that humans, similar to many nonhuman animals, use social learning if the environment is perceived as dangerous. We provide a novel psychological and computational basis for a range of human behaviors characterized by the threat of punishment, such as the adherence to cultural norms and religious taboos.
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Alexandre Pascual et al.
Social Influence, Summer 2015, Pages 149-156
Abstract:
The “but you are free” (BYAF) technique is a verbal compliance procedure which solicits people to comply with a request by telling them that they are free to accept or to refuse the request. This technique is based on the semantic evocation of freedom. In two studies, we explored another operationalization of this paradigm: the word “liberty” or a “Statue of Liberty” picture on the experimenter's clothes. The data showed that the word liberty printed on a t-shirt produced the BYAF effect whereas the Statue of Liberty picture did not. These results provide some evidence consistent with using reactance and commitment theories to explain the paradigm, contrary to other theoretical interpretations proposed in the literature such as politeness and reciprocity theories.
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Dual-Hormone Changes Are Related to Bargaining Performance
Pranjal Mehta et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two studies show that endogenous testosterone and cortisol changes interactively track bargaining outcomes. In a face-to-face competitive negotiation (Study 1) and a laboratory-based bargaining game (Study 2), testosterone rises were related to greater earnings and high relationship quality only if cortisol dropped. If cortisol rose, testosterone rises were related to lower earnings and poor relationship quality. Conflict between financial and social goals was associated with the financially costly hormone profile, whereas the absence of such conflict was associated with the financially adaptive hormone profile. The findings suggest that when cortisol decreases, rising testosterone is implicated in adaptive bargaining behavior that maximizes earnings and relationship quality. But when cortisol increases, rising testosterone is related to conflict between social and financial motives, lower earnings, and lower relationship quality. These results imply that there are “bright” and “dark” sides to rising testosterone in economic social interactions that depend on fluctuations in cortisol.
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Bradley Owens & David Hekman
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using data from 607 subjects organized in 161 teams (84 laboratory teams and 77 organizational field teams), we examined how leader humility influences team interaction patterns, emergent states, and team performance. We developed and tested a theoretical model arguing that when leaders behave humbly, followers emulate their humble behaviors, creating a shared interpersonal team process (collective humility). This collective humility in turn creates a team emergent state focused on progressively striving toward achieving the team's highest potential (collective promotion focus), which ultimately enhances team performance. We tested our model across three studies wherein we manipulated leader humility to test the social contagion hypothesis (Study 1), examined the impact of humility on team processes and performance in a longitudinal team simulation (Study 2), and tested the full model in a multistage field study in a health services context (Study 3). The findings from these lab and field studies collectively supported our theoretical model, demonstrating that leader behavior can spread via social contagion to followers, producing an emergent state that ultimately affects team performance. Our findings contribute to the leadership literature by suggesting the need for leaders to lead by example, and showing precisely how a specific set of leader behaviors influence team performance, which may provide a useful template for future leadership research on a wide variety of leader behaviors.
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Damage to the insula is associated with abnormal interpersonal trust
Amy Belfi, Timothy Koscik & Daniel Tranel
Neuropsychologia, May 2015, Pages 165–172
Abstract:
Reciprocal trust is a crucial component of cooperative, mutually beneficial social relationships. Previous research using tasks that require judging and developing interpersonal trust has suggested that the insula may be an important brain region underlying these processes (King-Casas et al., 2008). Here, using a neuropsychological approach, we investigated the role of the insula in reciprocal trust during the Trust Game (TG), an interpersonal economic exchange. Consistent with previous research, we found that neurologically normal adults reciprocate trust in kind, i.e., they increase trust in response to increases from their partners, and decrease trust in response to decreases. In contrast, individuals with damage to the insula displayed abnormal expressions of trust. Specifically, these individuals behaved benevolently (expressing misplaced trust) when playing the role of investor, and malevolently (violating their partner's trust) when playing the role of the trustee. Our findings lend further support to the idea that the insula is important for expressing normal interpersonal trust, perhaps because the insula helps to recognize risk during decision-making and to identify social norm violations.
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Qingguo Ma et al.
Frontiers in Neuroscience, March 2015
Abstract:
To investigate the time course of the neural processing of facial attractiveness and its influence on fairness consideration during social interactions, event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded from 21 male subjects performing a two-person Ultimatum Game (UG). During this bargaining game, the male subjects played responders who decided whether to accept offers from female proposers, whose facial images (grouped as “attractive” and “unattractive”) were presented prior to the offer presentation. The behavioral data demonstrated that the acceptance ratio increased with the fairness level of the offers and, more importantly, the subjects were more likely to accept unfair offers when presented with the attractive-face condition compared with the unattractive-face condition. The reaction times (RTs) for five offers (1:9, 2:8, 3:7, 4:6, and 5:5) in the unattractive-face condition were not significantly different. In contrast, the subjects reacted slower to the attractive proposers' unfair offers and quicker to fair offers. The ERP analysis of the face presentation demonstrated a decreased early negativity (N2) and enhanced late positive potentials (LPPs) elicited by the attractive faces compared with the unattractive faces. In addition, the feedback-related negativity (FRN) in response to an offer presentation was not significantly different for the unfair (1:9 and 2:8) and fair (4:6 and 5:5) offers in the attractive-face condition. However, the unfair offers generated larger FRNs compared with the fair offers in the unattractive-face condition (consistent with prior studies). A similar effect was identified for P300. The present study demonstrated an undermining effect of proposer facial attractiveness on responder consideration of offer fairness during the UG.