We can work this out
Lasse Laustsen & Michael Bang Petersen
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research demonstrates that the physical traits of leaders and political candidates influence election outcomes and that subjects favor functionally different physical traits in leaders when their social groups face problems related to war and peace, respectively. Previous research has interpreted these effects as evidence of a problem-sensitive and distinct psychology of followership. In two studies, we extend this research by demonstrating that preferences for physical traits in leaders’ faces arise from an integration of both contextual and individual differences related to perceptions of social conflict and that these effects relate only to leader choices. Theoretically, we argue that increased preferences for facial dominance in leaders reflect increased needs for enforced coordinated action when one’s group is seen to face threats from other coordinated groups rather than from random natural events. Empirically, we show that preferences for dominant-looking leaders are a function of (1) contextual primes of group-based threats rather than nature-based threats and (2) political ideology (a core measure of perceptions of group-based conflict) such that, across contexts, conservatives prefer dominant-looking leaders more than liberals. For the first time, we demonstrate that the effects of these contextual and individual differences are non-existent when subjects are asked to choose a friend instead of a leader: irrespective of ideology and context, people strongly prefer non-dominant friends. This finding adds significantly to the results of past research and provides evidence of the existence of a distinct psychology of followership that produces leader preferences that are independent of preferences for other social partners.
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Coming Back to Edmonton: Competing with Former Employers and Colleagues
Thorsten Grohsjean, Pascal Kober & Leon Zucchini
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing on human and social capital theory, research on employee mobility has discussed the benefits and drawbacks of hiring employees from rival firms. To explain the performance implications of employee mobility, the literature has focused on what moving individuals can do, but has ignored what they are willing to do. However, to fully understand what individuals will actually do at the new firm, we need to understand both. We argue that what individuals are willing to do depends on their collective and relational identity. When competing against a former employer, individuals experience a conflict in their collective identity as they identify with both organizations but can only increase the welfare of one. To reduce the conflict, individuals strengthen their identification with the new organization and de-identify with the former by competing harder against the former organization. At the relational level, individuals can still identify with their ex-colleagues without harming the welfare of the new organization by competing harder with non-former colleagues but behaving less competitively towards former colleagues. We analyze data from the National Hockey League and find strong support for our hypotheses.
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Perceiving Others’ Feelings: The Importance of Personality and Social Structure
Gary Sherman et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research has explored the relationship between social hierarchy and empathic accuracy — the ability to accurately infer other people’s mental states. In the current research, we tested the hypothesis that, regardless of one’s personal level of status and power, simply believing that social inequality is natural and morally acceptable (e.g., endorsing social dominance orientation, or SDO) would be negatively associated with empathic accuracy. In a sample of managers, a group for whom empathic accuracy is a valuable skill, empathic accuracy was lower for managers who possessed structural power and also for managers who endorsed social dominance, regardless of their structural power. Moreover, men were less empathically accurate than women, a relationship that may be explained by men’s higher SDO and greater structural power. These findings suggest that for empathic abilities, it matters just as much what you think about social hierarchies as it does where you stand within them.
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Wim De Neys, Astrid Hopfensitz & Jean-François Bonnefon
Journal of Economic Psychology, April 2015, Pages 17–22
Abstract:
People can (to some extent) detect trustworthiness from the facial features of social partners, and populations which underperform at this task are at a greater risk of abuse. Here we focus on situations in which adolescents make a decision whether to trust an unknown adult. Adolescents aged 13-18 (N = 540) played a trust game, in which they made decisions whether to trust unknown adults based on their picture. We show that trusting decisions become increasingly accurate with age, from a small effect size at age 13 to an effect size 2.5 times larger at age 18. We consider the implications of this result for the development of prosociality and the possible mechanisms underlying the development of trustworthiness detection from faces.
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Cooperate without looking: Why we care what people think and not just what they do
Moshe Hoffman, Erez Yoeli & Martin Nowak
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10 February 2015, Pages 1727–1732
Abstract:
Evolutionary game theory typically focuses on actions but ignores motives. Here, we introduce a model that takes into account the motive behind the action. A crucial question is why do we trust people more who cooperate without calculating the costs? We propose a game theory model to explain this phenomenon. One player has the option to “look” at the costs of cooperation, and the other player chooses whether to continue the interaction. If it is occasionally very costly for player 1 to cooperate, but defection is harmful for player 2, then cooperation without looking is a subgame perfect equilibrium. This behavior also emerges in population-based processes of learning or evolution. Our theory illuminates a number of key phenomena of human interactions: authentic altruism, why people cooperate intuitively, one-shot cooperation, why friends do not keep track of favors, why we admire principled people, Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, taboos, and love.
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Tandem anchoring: Informational and politeness effects of range offers in social exchange
Daniel Ames & Malia Mason
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, February 2015, Pages 254-274
Abstract:
We examined whether and why range offers (e.g., “I want $7,200 to $7,600 for my car”) matter in negotiations. A selective-attention account predicts that motivated and skeptical offer-recipients focus overwhelmingly on the attractive endpoint (i.e., a buyer would hear, in effect, “I want $7,200”). In contrast, we propose a tandem anchoring account, arguing that offer-recipients are often influenced by both endpoints as they judge the offer-maker’s reservation price (i.e., bottom line) as well as how polite they believe an extreme (nonaccommodating) counteroffer would be. In 5 studies, featuring scripted negotiation scenarios and live dyadic negotiations, we find that certain range offers yield improved settlement terms for offer-makers without relational costs, whereas others may yield relationship benefits without deal costs. We clarify the types of range offers that evoke these benefits and identify boundaries to their impact, including range width and extremity. In addition, our studies reveal evidence consistent with 2 proposed mechanisms, one involving an informational effect (both endpoints of range offers can be taken as signals of an offer-maker’s reservation price) and another involving a politeness effect (range offers can make extreme counteroffers seem less polite). Our results have implications for models of negotiation behavior and outcomes and, more broadly, for the nature of social exchange.
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The Power to Oblige: Power, Gender, Negotiation Behaviors, and Their Consequences
Noa Nelson et al.
Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, February 2015, Pages 1–24
Abstract:
This study experimentally examined how power and gender affect negotiation behaviors and how those behaviors affect negotiated outcomes. One hundred and forty-six dyads, in four combinations of power and gender, negotiated compensation agreements. In line with gender stereotypes, male negotiators were more dominating and females more obliging and somewhat more compromising. However, partially challenging the common association of power and masculinity, high-power negotiators were less dominating and more collaborating, obliging and avoiding than their low-power opponents. Generally, feminine and high-power behaviors induced agreement while masculine and low-power behaviors enhanced distributive personal gain. The study also assessed patterns of behavioral reciprocity and used sophisticated analytic tools to control for dyadic interdependence. Therefore it helps to elucidate the negotiation process and the role that power and its interplay with gender play in it.
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Caitlin Ross, Jan Rychtář & Olav Rueppell
Journal of Theoretical Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social organization correlates with longevity across animal taxa. This correlation has been explained by selection for longevity by social evolution. The reverse causality is also conceivable but has not been sufficiently considered. We constructed a simple, spatially structured population model of asexually reproducing individuals to study the effect of temporal life history structuring on the evolution of cooperation. Individuals employed fixed strategies of cooperation or defection towards all neighbours in a basic Prisoner׳s Dilemma paradigm. Individuals aged and transitioned through different life history stages asynchronously without migration. An individual׳s death triggered a reproductive event by one immediate neighbour. The specific neighbour was chosen probabilistically according to the cumulative payoff from all local interactions. Varying the duration of pre-reproductive, reproductive, and post-reproductive life history stages, long-term simulations allowed a systematic evaluation of the influence of the duration of these specific life history stages. Our results revealed complex interactions among the effects of the three basic life history stages and the benefit to defect. Overall, a long post-reproductive stage promoted the evolution of cooperation, while a prolonged pre-reproductive stage has a negative effect. In general, the total length of life also increased the probability of the evolution of cooperation. Thus, our specific model suggests that the timing of life history transitions and total duration of life history stages may affect the evolution of cooperative behaviour. We conclude that the causation of the empirically observed association of life expectancy and sociality may be more complex than previously realized.
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Unilateral hand contractions produce motivational biases in social economic decision making
Katia Harlé & Alan Sanfey
Neuropsychology, January 2015, Pages 76-81
Objective: Unilateral hand contractions have been shown to induce relative activation of the contralateral hemisphere, which is in turn associated with distinct motivational states. Specifically, right hand contraction increases relative left activation and promotes an approach state, and left hand contractions promote relative right activation and withdrawal states. Using the same hand clenching technique, the present study extends this research to examine the incidental role of motivational tendency on interactive economic decision making.
Method: A total of 75 right-handed participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions, including withdrawal/left-hand contractions, approach/right-hand contractions, and control/no contraction. Participants completed 2 well-known economic tasks, namely the Ultimatum Game (UG), Dictator Game (DG).
Results: In the UG, we found that relative to individuals in the withdrawal condition, those in the approach (right-hand contraction) condition made higher monetary offers to human partners who could either accept or reject these offers. Moreover, those in the approach condition rejected significantly more unfair offers from human partners.
Conclusions: This study provides the first evidence that hemispheric activation, using unilateral muscle contractions, may play a causal role in biasing social economic decision making. Overall, there results suggest that greater relative left frontal activation promotes reward-maximizing strategies, consistent with an approach motivation, and relative right frontal activation may decrease such strategic tendencies.
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Medial prefrontal cortex reacts to unfairness if this damages the self: A tDCS study
Claudia Civai, Carlo Miniussi & Raffaella Rumiati
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Neural correlates of unfairness perception depend on who is the target of the unfair treatment (Civai et al., 2010; Corradi-Dell'Acqua et al., 2013). These previous findings suggest that the activation of medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is related to unfairness perception only when the subject of the measurement is also the person affected by the unfair treatment. We aim at demonstrating the specificity of MPFC involvement by employing transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a technique that induces cortical excitability changes in the targeted region. We employ a modified version of the Ultimatum Game (UG), in which responders play both for themselves (myself –MS- condition) and on behalf of an unknown third-party (TP condition), where they respond to unfairness without being the target of it. We find that the application of cathodal tDCS over MPFC decreases the probability of rejecting unfair offers in MS, but not in TP; conversely, the same stimulation increases the probability of rejecting fair offers in TP, but not in MS. We confirm the hypothesis that MPFC is specifically related to processing unfairness when the self is involved, and discuss possible explanations for the opposite effect of the stimulation in TP.
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Sinking Slowly: Diversity in Propensity to Trust Predicts Downward Trust Spirals in Small Groups
Amanda Ferguson & Randall Peterson
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the phenomenon of trust spirals in small groups. Drawing on literature on the spiral reinforcement of trust, we theorize that diversity in propensity to trust has affective and cognitive consequences related to trust (i.e., feelings of frustration and perceptions of low similarity), reducing the level of experienced intragroup trust early in a group’s development. Reduced experienced trust then fuels relationship conflict and lowers trust even further over time, ultimately having a negative effect on group performance. These ideas are tested using a sample of MBA student groups surveyed at 3 time periods over 4 months. Results confirm our hypothesis that diversity in propensity to trust is sufficient to trigger a downward trust spiral and poor performance in small groups.
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Hunter Gehlbach et al.
Computers in Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The process of social perspective taking holds tremendous promise as a means to facilitate conflict resolution. Despite rapidly accumulating knowledge about social perspective taking in general, scholars know little about how the type of social perspective taking affects outcomes of interest. This study tests whether different ways to “walk a mile in another’s shoes” cause different outcomes. By taking advantage of a computer-based simulation (where participants can learn about others by virtually walking around in the shoes of other characters), we assigned participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 842) to five different perspective taking treatments or a control condition. Results show that perspective takers who receive information about the other party foster more positive relationships and make greater concessions than participants who did not receive information about the other party. Furthermore, those who experientially learned about the other party’s perspective felt more positive about their relationships and made greater concessions during the negotiation than those who were simply provided information about the other party’s perspective. No differences were found between virtually and imaginatively taking the perspective of others. These findings suggest the importance of accounting for the type of social perspective taking in studying how this social-cognitive process may facilitate conflict resolution.