Pulling your weight
Pain as Social Glue: Shared Pain Increases Cooperation
Brock Bastian, Jolanda Jetten & Laura Ferris
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Even though painful experiences are employed within social rituals across the world, little is known about the social effects of pain. We examined the possibility that painful experiences can promote cooperation within social groups. In Experiments 1 and 2, we induced pain by asking some participants to insert their hands in ice water and to perform leg squats. In Experiment 3, we induced pain by asking some participants to eat a hot chili pepper. Participants performed these tasks in small groups. We found evidence for a causal link: Sharing painful experiences with other people, compared with a no-pain control treatment, promoted trusting interpersonal relationships by increasing perceived bonding among strangers (Experiment 1) and increased cooperation in an economic game (Experiments 2 and 3). Our findings shed light on the social effects of pain, demonstrating that shared pain may be an important trigger for group formation.
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Declines in Trust in Others and Confidence in Institutions Among American Adults and Late Adolescents, 1972–2012
Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell & Nathan Carter
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Between 1972 and 2012, Americans became significantly less trusting of each other and less confident in large institutions, such as the news media, business, religious organizations, the medical establishment, Congress, and the presidency. Levels of trust and confidence, key indicators of social capital, reached all-time or near-all-time lows in 2012 in the nationally representative General Social Survey of adults (1972–2012; N = 37,493) and the nationally representative Monitoring the Future survey of 12th graders (1976–2012; N = 101,633). Hierarchical modeling analyses separating the effects of time period, generation, and age show that this decline in social capital is primarily a time-period effect. Confidence in institutions is also influenced by generation, with Baby Boomers lowest. Trust was lowest when income inequality was high, and confidence in institutions was lowest when poverty rates were high. The prediction of a sustained revival in social capital after 2001 seems to have been premature.
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Amygdala Responsivity to High-Level Social Information from Unseen Faces
Jonathan Freeman et al.
Journal of Neuroscience, 6 August 2014, Pages 10573-10581
Abstract:
Previous research shows that the amygdala automatically responds to a face’s trustworthiness when a face is clearly visible. However, it is unclear whether the amygdala could evaluate such high-level facial information without a face being consciously perceived. Using a backward masking paradigm, we demonstrate in two functional neuroimaging experiments that the human amygdala is sensitive to subliminal variation in facial trustworthiness. Regions in the amygdala tracked how untrustworthy a face appeared (i.e., negative-linear responses) as well as the overall strength of a face’s trustworthiness signal (i.e., nonlinear responses), despite faces not being subjectively seen. This tracking was robust across blocked and event-related designs and both real and computer-generated faces. The findings demonstrate that the amygdala can be influenced by even high-level facial information before that information is consciously perceived, suggesting that the amygdala’s processing of social cues in the absence of awareness may be more extensive than previously described.
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Are Proactive Personalities Always Beneficial? Political Skill as a Moderator
Shuhua Sun & Hetty van Emmerik
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does proactive personality always enhance job success? The authors of this study draw on socioanalytic theory of personality and organizational political perspectives to study employees’ political skill in moderating the effects of proactive personality on supervisory ratings of employee task performance, helping behaviors, and learning behaviors. Multisource data from 225 subordinates and their 75 immediate supervisors reveal that proactive personality is associated negatively with supervisory evaluations when political skill is low, and the negative relationship disappears when political skill is high. Implications and future research directions are discussed.
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The Psychology of Coordination and Common Knowledge
Kyle Thomas et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum. We test whether people are sensitive to common knowledge when deciding whether to engage in risky coordination. Participants decided between working alone for a certain profit and working together for a potentially higher profit that they would receive only if their partner made the same choice. Results showed that more participants attempted risky coordination when they and their prospective partner had common knowledge of the payoffs (broadcast over a loudspeaker) than when they had only shared knowledge (conveyed to both by a messenger) or private knowledge (revealed to each partner separately). These results support the hypothesis that people represent common knowledge as a distinct cognitive category that licenses them to coordinate with others for mutual gain. We discuss how this hypothesis can provide a unified explanation for diverse phenomena in human social life, including recursive mentalizing, performative speech acts, public protests, hypocrisy, and self-conscious emotional expressions.
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The effect of social fragmentation on public good provision: An experimental study
Surajeet Chakravarty & Miguel Fonseca
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, December 2014, Pages 1–9
Abstract:
We study the role of social identity in determining the impact of social fragmentation on public good provision using laboratory experiments. We find that as long as there is some degree of social fragmentation, increasing it leads to lower public good provision by majority group members. This is mainly because the share of those in the majority group who contribute fully to the public good diminishes with social fragmentation, while the share of free-riders is unchanged. This suggests social identity preferences drive our result, as opposed to self-interest. Importantly, we find no difference in contribution between homogeneous and maximally-fragmented treatments, reinforcing our finding that majority groups contribute most in the presence of some diversity.
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Perceptions of leadership success from nonverbal cues communicated by orchestra conductors
Konstantin Tskhay, Honghao Xu & Nicholas Rule
Leadership Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research has suggested that people can extract information relevant to leadership from thin slices of behavior. Nearly all of this research has been conducted in the context of large organizations where the relationships between leaders and followers are relatively indirect, however. We therefore examined here whether participants could extract similar information about leadership success from contexts with direct leader–follower interactions: conductors of orchestras. We found that perceivers could accurately discern conductors' success from brief video clips and that perceptions of expressiveness and age formed the basis for this accuracy. Thus, the current work demonstrates that leadership success is perceptible from nonverbal cues not only for the leaders of large organizations, but also in the context of groups where leaders and followers must continually and dynamically interact to produce successful outcomes.
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The Effect of Status on Role-Taking Accuracy
Tony Love & Jenny Davis
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We conducted two experiments to test the effects of status on the relationship between gender and role-taking accuracy. Role-taking accuracy denotes the accuracy with which one can predict another’s behavior. In Study 1, we examine self-evaluative measures of role-taking accuracy and find they do not correlate with actual role-taking accuracy. In addition, women were more accurate role-takers than men, regardless of interaction history. In Study 2, we disentangle gender differences from status differences, hypothesizing that role-taking accuracy is structurally situated. To test this hypothesis, we examine variations in role-taking accuracy when interaction partners are assigned differential status. Results indicate that status differentials account for variations in role-taking accuracy, whereas gender and gender composition of the dyad do not.
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Examining Emotion Regulation in an Isolated Performance Team in Antarctica
Christopher Wagstaff & Neil Weston
Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the emotions experienced by a team of 12 military personnel during a 2-month Antarctic mountaineering expedition, the strategies these individuals used to manage these emotions, the perceived effectiveness of these strategies, and the impact of such strategies on team dynamics and performance. To address the research aims, participants completed daily diaries with standardized checklists throughout the expedition and took part in pre- and postexpedition semistructured interviews. The data showed that participants experienced a broad range of discrete emotions and reported similar frequency of use of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. Surprisingly, 2 maladaptive strategies, acceptance and expressive suppression, were rated as the most effective regulation strategies despite their use being correlated with negative intrapersonal and interpersonal outcomes. The results confirm the complex social nature of the emotion process and illuminate our understanding of emotional experiences in performance teams. The findings support the existence of affective linkages between team members and highlight the importance of emotional contagion and labor for intrapersonal and interpersonal outcomes.
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“I’d Only Let You Down”: Guilt Proneness and the Avoidance of Harmful Interdependence
Scott Wiltermuth & Taya Cohen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Five studies demonstrated that highly guilt-prone people may avoid forming interdependent partnerships with others whom they perceive to be more competent than themselves, as benefitting a partner less than the partner benefits one’s self could trigger feelings of guilt. Highly guilt-prone people who lacked expertise in a domain were less willing than were those low in guilt proneness who lacked expertise in that domain to create outcome–interdependent relationships with people who possessed domain-specific expertise. These highly guilt-prone people were more likely than others both to opt to be paid on their performance alone (Studies 1, 3, 4, and 5) and to opt to be paid on the basis of the average of their performance and that of others whose competence was more similar to their own (Studies 2 and 5). Guilt proneness did not predict people’s willingness to form outcome–interdependent relationships with potential partners who lacked domain-specific expertise (Studies 4 and 5). It also did not predict people’s willingness to form relationships when poor individual performance would not negatively affect partner outcomes (Study 4). Guilt proneness therefore predicts whether, and with whom, people develop interdependent relationships. The findings also demonstrate that highly guilt-prone people sacrifice financial gain out of concern about how their actions would influence others’ welfare. As such, the findings demonstrate a novel way in which guilt proneness limits free-riding and therefore reduces the incidence of potentially unethical behavior. Lastly, the findings demonstrate that people who lack competence may not always seek out competence in others when choosing partners.
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Ulrike Malmendier, Vera te Velde & Roberto Weber
Annual Review of Economics, 2014, Pages 849-874
Abstract:
Reciprocal behavior has been found to play a significant role in many economic domains, including labor supply, tax compliance, voting behavior, and fund-raising. What explains individuals’ tendency to respond to the kindness of others? Existing theories posit internal preferences for the welfare of others, inequality aversion, or utility from repaying others’ kindness. However, recent evidence on the determinants of (unilateral) sharing decisions suggests that external factors such as social pressure are equally important. So far, this second wave of social preference theories has had little spillover to two-sided reciprocity environments, in which one individual responds to the actions of another. We present a novel laboratory reciprocity experiment (the double-dictator game with sorting) and show that failure to account for external motives leads to a significant overestimation of internal motives such as fairness and altruism. The experimental data illustrate the importance of combining reduced-form and structural analyses to disentangle internal and external determinants of prosocial behavior.
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Be Nice if You Have to - The Neurobiological Roots of Strategic Fairness
Sabrina Strang et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social norms, such as treating others fairly regardless of kin relations, are essential for the functioning of human societies. Their existence may explain why humans, among all species, show unique patterns of pro-social behaviour (Sethi and Somanathan, 1996; Gintis, 2000; Ostrom, 2000; Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003; Gintis, 2003). The maintenance of social norms often depends on external enforcement, as in the absence of credible sanctioning mechanisms pro-social behaviour deteriorates quickly (Fehr and Gächter, 2000; Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004). This sanction-dependent pro-social behaviour suggests that humans strategically adapt their behaviour and act selfishly if possible but control selfish impulses if necessary. Recent studies point at the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in controlling selfish impulses (Wout et al., 2005; Knoch et al., 2006; Knoch et al., 2009; Ruff et al., 2013). We test, whether the DLPFC is indeed involved in the control of selfish impulses as well as the strategic acquisition of this control mechanism. Using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, we provide evidence for the causal role of the right DLPFC in strategic fairness. Since the DLPFC is phylogenetically one of the latest developed neocortical regions (Fuster, 2001) this could explain why complex norm systems exist in humans but not in other social animals.
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Trusting Others: The Polarization Effect of Need for Closure
Sinem Acar-Burkay, Bob Fennis & Luk Warlop
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Because trust-related issues inherently involve uncertainty, we expected individuals’ social-cognitive motivation to manage uncertainty — which is captured by their need for closure — to influence their level of trust in others. Through the results of 6 studies, we showed that higher need for closure was related to more polarized trust judgments (i.e., low trust in distant others and high trust in close others) in the case of both chronic and situational need for closure. Moreover, participants with high need for closure did not revise their level of trust when they received feedback about the trustees’ actual trustworthiness, whereas participants with low need for closure did. Overall, our findings indicate that polarized (either high or low, as opposed to moderate) and persistent levels of trust may serve people’s seizing and freezing needs for achieving cognitive closure.
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When choosing to be almost certain of winning can be better than choosing to win with certainty
Avichai Snir
European Journal of Political Economy, December 2014, Pages 135–146
Abstract:
Participants in dictator games often contribute significant sums to unknown beneficiaries. This has been interpreted as suggesting that participants like to be perceived as generous even in anonymous situations. We show that when participants choose the probabilities with which they contribute, they tend to bias the probabilities in their favor without respect to whether others know only the outcomes or also the probabilities assigned. These results, together with the results of ultimatum games with similar frameworks suggest that participants that choose probabilities make self-oriented choices even when others are likely to blame them rather than the random mechanism for the outcomes.
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Oxytocin Tempers Calculated Greed but not Impulsive Defense in Predator-Prey Contests
Carsten De Dreu et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Human cooperation and competition is modulated by oxytocin, a hypothalamic neuropeptide that functions as both hormone and neurotransmitter. Oxytocin's functions can be captured in two explanatory yet largely contradictory frameworks: the fear-dampening (FD) hypothesis that oxytocin has anxiolytic effects and reduces fear-motivated action; and the social approach/avoidance (SAA) hypothesis that oxytocin increases cooperative approach and facilitates protection against aversive stimuli and threat. We tested derivations from both frameworks in a novel predator-prey contest game. Healthy males given oxytocin or placebo invested as predator to win their prey's endowment, or as prey to protect their endowment against predation. Neural activity was registered using 3T-MRI. In prey, (fear-motivated) investments were fast and conditioned on the amygdala. Inconsistent with FD, oxytocin did not modulate neural and behavioral responding in prey. In predators, (greed-motivated) investments were slower, and conditioned on the superior frontal gyrus. Consistent with SAA, oxytocin reduced predator investment, time to decide, and activation in superior frontal gyrus. Thus, whereas oxytocin does not incapacitate the impulsive ability to protect and defend oneself, it lowers the greedy and more calculated appetite for coming out ahead.
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Dynamic adjustments of cognitive control during economic decision making
Alexander Soutschek & Torsten Schubert
Acta Psychologica, October 2014, Pages 42–46
Abstract:
Decision making in the Ultimatum game requires the resolution of conflicts between economic self-interest and fairness intuitions. Since cognitive control processes play an important role in conflict resolution, the present study examined how control processes that are triggered by conflicts between fairness and self-interest in unfair offers affect subsequent decisions in the Ultimatum game. Our results revealed that more unfair offers were accepted following previously unfair, compared to previously fair offers. Interestingly, the magnitude of this conflict adaptation effect correlated with the individual subjects' focus on economic self-interest. We concluded that conflicts between fairness and self-interest trigger cognitive control processes, which reinforce the focus on the current task goal.
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Jeremy Jamieson, Piercarlo Valdesolo & Brett Peters
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2014, Pages 221–227
Abstract:
Research has accumulated on the impact of intragroup conflict on group outcomes, but little is known about the effects of dissent on the individuals who provide it. Here, we examined how being the agent and target of dissent impacted physiological responses and psychological needs. Groups of three (a participant and two confederates) completed a marketing task. Participants were assigned to an agent of dissent, target of dissent, or inclusion control role. Agents of dissent exhibited an approach-motivated cardiovascular profile: low vascular resistance and rapid sympathetic recovery. Conversely, targets displayed avoidance responses: vasoconstriction. Role assignment also impacted basic psychological needs. Targets experienced threats to all fundamental needs, but agents only exhibited threats to belonging and self-esteem (not control or meaningful existence) needs. Taken together, agents and targets of dissent responded vastly differently in this group performance context. Implications for health and performance are discussed.
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Trust, reciprocity, and a preference for economic freedom: Experimental evidence
Bryan McCannon
Journal of Institutional Economics, September 2014, Pages 451-470
Abstract:
Do those who prefer economic freedom behave differently than those who prefer government intervention? Experiments of the Dictator and Trust games are studied. A survey elicits preference for private solutions to potential market failures. Trust and reciprocation are highest for those who score both high and low on the assessment. In the Dictator Game, there is a strong inverse relationship between one's preference for economic freedom and giving. Thus, the results can be interpreted as those with a strong preference for government intervention altruistically give, while those with a preference for economic freedom give primarily in response to wealth-generating investments.