Teaming up
When Two Become One: The Role of Oxytocin in Interpersonal Coordination and Cooperation
Maayan Arueti et al.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, September 2013, Pages 1418-1427
Abstract:
Cooperation involves intentional coordinated acts performed to achieve potentially positive outcomes. Here we present a novel explanatory model of cooperation, which focuses on the role of the oxytocinergic system in promoting interpersonal coordination and synchrony. Cooperation was assessed using a novel computerized drawing task that may be performed individually or cooperatively by two participants who coordinate their actions. Using a within-subject crossover design, 42 participants performed the task alone and with a partner following the administration of placebo and oxytocin 1 week apart. The data indicate that following placebo administration, participants performed better alone than in pairs. Yet, the administration of oxytocin improved paired performance up to the level of individual performance. This effect depended on the personality traits of cooperativeness or competitiveness. It is concluded that oxytocin may play a key role in enhancing social synchrony and coordination of behaviors required for cooperation.
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Cooperation in criminal organizations: Kinship and violence as credible commitments
Paolo Campana & Federico Varese
Rationality and Society, August 2013, Pages 263-289
Abstract:
The paper argues that kinship ties and sharing information on violent acts can be interpreted as forms of ‘hostage-taking' likely to increase cooperation among co-offenders. The paper tests this hypothesis among members of two criminal groups, a Camorra clan based just outside Naples, and a Russian Mafia group that moved to Rome in the mid-1990s. The data consist of the transcripts of phone intercepts conducted on both groups by the Italian police over several months. After turning the data into a series of network matrices, we use Multivariate Quadratic Assignment Procedure to test the hypothesis. We conclude that the likelihood of cooperation is higher among members who have shared information about violent acts. Violence has a stronger effect than kinship in predicting tie formation and thus cooperation. When non-kinship-based mechanisms fostering cooperation exist, criminal groups are likely to resort to them.
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iPosture: The Size of Electronic Consumer Devices Affects Our Behavior
Maarten Bos & Amy Cuddy
Harvard Working Paper, May 2013
Abstract:
We examined whether incidental body posture, prompted by working on electronic devices of different sizes, affects power-related behaviors. Grounded in research showing that adopting expansive body postures increases psychological power, we hypothesized that working on larger devices, which forces people to physically expand, causes users to behave more assertively. Participants were randomly assigned to interact with one of four electronic devices that varied in size: an iPod Touch, an iPad, a MacBook Pro (laptop computer), or an iMac (desktop computer). As hypothesized, compared to participants working on larger devices (e.g., an iMac), participants who worked on smaller devices (e.g., an iPad) behaved less assertively - waiting longer to interrupt an experimenter who had made them wait, or not interrupting at all.
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The Remarkable Robustness of the First-Offer Effect: Across Culture, Power, and Issues
Brian Gunia et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The first-offer effect demonstrates that negotiators achieve better outcomes when making the first offer than when receiving it. The evidence, however, primarily derives from studies of Westerners without systematic power differences negotiating over one issue - contexts that may amplify the first-offer effect. Thus, the present research explored the effect across cultures, among negotiators varying in power, and in negotiations involving single and multiple issues. The first two studies showed that the first-offer effect remains remarkably robust across cultures and multi-issue negotiations. The final two studies demonstrated that low-power negotiators benefit from making the first offer across single- and multi-issue negotiations. The second and fourth studies used multi-issue negotiations with distributive, integrative, and compatible issues, allowing us to show that first offers operate through the distributive, not the integrative or compatible issues. Overall, these results reveal that moving first can benefit negotiators across many organizational and personal situations.
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From Glue to Gasoline: How Competition Turns Perspective Takers Unethical
Jason Pierce et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Perspective taking is often the glue that binds people together. However, we propose that in competitive contexts, perspective taking is akin to adding gasoline to a fire: It inflames already-aroused competitive impulses and leads people to protect themselves from the potentially insidious actions of their competitors. Overall, we suggest that perspective taking functions as a relational amplifier. In cooperative contexts, it creates the foundation for prosocial impulses, but in competitive contexts, it triggers hypercompetition, leading people to prophylactically engage in unethical behavior to prevent themselves from being exploited. The experiments reported here establish that perspective taking interacts with the relational context - cooperative or competitive - to predict unethical behavior, from using insidious negotiation tactics to materially deceiving one's partner to cheating on an anagram task. In the context of competition, perspective taking can pervert the age-old axiom "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" into "do unto others as you think they will try to do unto you."
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Oliver Sheldon, David Dunning & Daniel Ames
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the importance of self-awareness for managerial success, many organizational members hold overly optimistic views of their expertise and performance - a phenomenon particularly prevalent among those least skilled in a given domain. We examined whether this same pattern extends to appraisals of emotional intelligence (EI), a critical managerial competency. We also examined why this overoptimism tends to survive explicit feedback about performance. Across 3 studies involving professional students, we found that the least skilled had limited insight into deficits in their performance. Moreover, when given concrete feedback, low performers disparaged either the accuracy or the relevance of that feedback, depending on how expediently they could do so. Consequently, they expressed more reluctance than top performers to pursue various paths to self-improvement, including purchasing a book on EI or paying for professional coaching. Paradoxically, it was top performers who indicated a stronger desire to improve their EI following feedback.
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Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, recognize successful actions, but fail to imitate them
David Buttelmann et al.
Animal Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cultural transmission, by definition, involves some form of social learning. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates clearly engage in some forms of social learning enabling some types of cultural transmission, but there is controversy about whether they copy the actual bodily actions of demonstrators. In this study chimpanzees recognized when a human actor was using particular bodily actions that had led to successful problem solving in the past. But then when it was their turn to solve the problem, they did not reproduce the human actor's bodily actions themselves, even though they were clearly capable of producing the movements. These results help us identify more precisely key reasons for the differences in the social learning and cultural transmission of humans and other primates.
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Are Women More Attracted to Cooperation Than Men?
Peter Kuhn & Marie-Claire Villeval
NBER Working Paper, August 2013
Abstract:
We conduct a real-effort experiment where participants choose between individual compensation and team-based pay. In contrast to tournaments, which are often avoided by women, we find that women choose team-based pay at least as frequently as men in all our treatments and conditions, and significantly more often than men in a well-defined subset of those cases. Key factors explaining gender patterns in attraction to co-operative incentives across experimental conditions include women's more optimistic assessments of their prospective teammate's ability and men's greater responsiveness to efficiency gains associated with team production. Women also respond differently to alternative rules for team formation in a manner that is consistent with stronger inequity aversion.
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Face-Off: Facial Features and Strategic Choice
Dustin Tingley
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
I study experimentally a single-shot trust game where players have the opportunity to choose an avatar - a computer-generated face - to represent them. These avatars vary on several dimensions - trustworthiness, dominance, and threat - identified by previous work as influencing perceptions of those who view the faces (Todorov, Said, Engell, & Oosterhof, 2008). I take this previous work and ask whether subjects choose faces that are ex ante more trustworthy, whether selected avatars have an influence on strategy choices, and whether individuals who evaluate faces as more trustworthy are also more likely to trust others. Results indicate affirmative answers to all three questions. Additional experimental sessions used randomly assigned avatars. This design allows me to compare behavior when everyone knows avatars are self-selected versus when everyone knows they are randomly assigned. Random assignment eliminated all three effects observed when subjects chose their avatars.
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Walk and Be Moved: How Walking Builds Social Movements
Brian Knudsen & Terry Clark
Urban Affairs Review, September 2013, Pages 627-651
Abstract:
Recent scholarship recognizes the city's role as "civitas" - a "space of active democratic citizenship" and "full human realization" based on open and free encounter and exchange with difference. The current research emerges from and fills a need within this perspective by examining how local urban contexts undergird and bolster social movement organizations (SMOs). Our theory elaborates and linear regressions assess the relationships between four urban form variables and SMOs. In addition, our theory also examines how urban walking mediates the relationships between these local contextual traits and SMOs. Drawing primarily from the ZIP Code Business Patterns and U.S. Census, we generate a data set of approximately 30,000 cases, permitting regression analyses that distinguish strong direct effects of density, connectivity, housing age diversity, and walking on the incidence of SMOs. Sobel tests indicate that for density and connectivity, walking mediates the relationships with SMOs in a way consistent with the mechanisms of the hypotheses.
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Sanctions that Signal: An Experiment
Roberto Galbiati, Karl Schlag & Joël van der Weele
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
The introduction of sanctions provides incentives for more pro-social behavior, but may also be a signal that non-cooperation is prevalent. In an experimental minimum-effort coordination game we investigate the effects of the information contained in the choice to sanction. We compare the effect of sanctions that are introduced exogenously by the experimenter to that of sanctions which have been actively chosen by a subject who has superior information about the previous effort of the other players. We find that cooperative subjects perceive actively chosen sanctions as a negative signal which significantly reduces the effect of sanctions.
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Nathaniel Ratcliff & Theresa Vescio
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2013, Pages 978-983
Abstract:
Sometimes a group's best interest is served when powerful people relinquish power, but little theory or empirical research has investigated when and by whom power is willingly given-up. Using a simulated, online team competition, two studies demonstrated that people who were dispositionally high in interdependent self-construals were more likely to relinquish their position of leadership within a group when they perceived that their leadership performance on the task was unambiguously poor versus good. However, when given the ability to attribute performance to others rather than the self, leader's level of interdependent self-construal did not significantly influence their decisions to relinquish power. Overall, these findings suggest that factors such as perceived leadership performance, interdependent self-construals, and ability to defer blame all converge when making decisions in regards to how much power should be relinquished.
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Marion Wittchen et al.
British Journal of Psychology, August 2013, Pages 320-338
Abstract:
Competition strongly affects individual effort and performance for both individuals and groups. Especially in work settings, these effort gains might come at the cost of individual well-being. The present study tested whether competition increases both effort (as indicated by task performance) and stress (in terms of cardiovascular reactivity and affective response), and whether this effect is further qualified by the type of competition (interindividual vs. intergroup), using a cognitive computer-based task and a 2 (Group: Yes, No) × 2 (Competition: Yes, No) × 2 (Gender) factorial design (N= 147). All participants either worked as a representative of a group or as an individual, and were offered performance-related incentives distributed in a lottery. In the competition conditions, participants were informed that they competed with someone else, and that only the winning person/team would take part in the lottery. Consistent with expectations, competition increased both individual effort and cardiovascular reactivity compared to non-competitive work. Moreover, for female participants, intergroup competition triggered increased effort and more positive affect than interindividual competition. Aside from documenting costly side-effects of competition in terms of stress, this study provides evidence for a stress-related explanation of effort gains during intergroup competition as compared to interindividual competition.