Meeting of the minds
Groups Make Better Self-Interested Decisions
Gary Charness & Matthias Sutter
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012, Pages 157-176
Abstract:
In this paper, we describe what economists have learned about differences between group and individual decision-making. This literature is still young, and in this paper, we will mostly draw on experimental work (mainly in the laboratory) that has compared individual decision-making to group decision-making, and to individual decision-making in situations with salient group membership. The bottom line emerging from economic research on group decision-making is that groups are more likely to make choices that follow standard game-theoretic predictions, while individuals are more likely to be influenced by biases, cognitive limitations, and social considerations. In this sense, groups are generally less "behavioral" than individuals. An immediate implication of this result is that individual decisions in isolation cannot necessarily be assumed to be good predictors of the decisions made by groups. More broadly, the evidence casts doubts on traditional approaches that model economic behavior as if individuals were making decisions in isolation.
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Edward Lazear, Kathryn Shaw & Christopher Stanton
NBER Working Paper, August 2012
Abstract:
Do supervisors enhance productivity? Arguably, the most important relationship in the firm is between worker and supervisor. The supervisor may hire, fire, assign work, instruct, motivate and reward workers. Models of incentives and productivity build at least some subset of these functions in explicitly, but because of lack of data, little work exists that demonstrates the importance of bosses and the channels through which their productivity enhancing effects operate. As more data become available, it is possible to examine the effects of people and practices on productivity. Using a company-based data set on the productivity of technology-based services workers, supervisor effects are estimated and found to be large. Three findings stand out. First, the choice of boss matters. There is substantial variation in boss quality as measured by the effect on worker productivity. Replacing a boss who is in the lower 10% of boss quality with one who is in the upper 10% of boss quality increases a team's total output by about the same amount as would adding one worker to a nine member team.
Using a normalization, this implies that the average boss is about 1.75 times as productive as the average worker. Second, boss's primary activity is teaching skills that persist. Third, efficient assignment allocates the better bosses to the better workers because good bosses increase the productivity of high quality workers by more than that of low quality workers.
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On the evolutionary origins of the egalitarian syndrome
Sergey Gavrilets
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 28 August 2012, Pages 14069-14074
Abstract:
The evolutionary emergence of the egalitarian syndrome is one of the most intriguing unsolved puzzles related to the origins of modern humans. Standard explanations and models for cooperation and altruism - reciprocity, kin and group selection, and punishment - are not directly applicable to the emergence of egalitarian behavior in hierarchically organized groups that characterized the social life of our ancestors. Here I study an evolutionary model of group-living individuals competing for resources and reproductive success. In the model, the differences in fighting abilities lead to the emergence of hierarchies where stronger individuals take away resources from weaker individuals and, as a result, have higher reproductive success. First, I show that the logic of within-group competition implies under rather general conditions that each individual benefits if the transfer of the resource from a weaker group member to a stronger one is prevented. This effect is especially strong in small groups. Then I demonstrate that this effect can result in the evolution of a particular, genetically controlled psychology causing individuals to interfere in a bully-victim conflict on the side of the victim. A necessary condition is a high efficiency of coalitions in conflicts against the bullies. The egalitarian drive leads to a dramatic reduction in within-group inequality. Simultaneously it creates the conditions for the emergence of inequity aversion, empathy, compassion, and egalitarian moral values via the internalization of behavioral rules imposed by natural selection. It also promotes widespread cooperation via coalition formation.
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Sharing the joke: The size of natural laughter groups
Guillaume Dezecache & R.I.M. Dunbar
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies suggest that laughter plays an important role in social bonding. Human communities are much larger than those of other primates and hence require more time to be devoted to social maintenance activities. Yet, there is an upper limit on the amount of time that can be dedicated to social demands, and, in nonhuman primates, this sets an upper limit on social group size. It has been suggested that laughter provides the additional bonding capacity in humans by allowing an increase in the size of the "grooming group." In this study of freely forming laughter groups, we show that laughter allows a threefold increase in the number of bonds that can be "groomed" at the same time. This would enable a very significant increase in the size of community that could be bonded.
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Corinne Bendersky & Neha Parikh Shah
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We advance previous research that has associated extraversion with high status and neuroticism with low status in newly-formed task groups by examining how variations in personality affect status changes over time. By building on research that emphasizes the dark sides of extraversion and the bright sides of neuroticism, we challenge the persistence of extraverts' advantage and neurotics' disadvantage in task group status hierarchies. In a field and an experimental study, we find that extraversion is associated with status losses and disappointing expectations for contributions to group tasks and neuroticism is associated with status gains due to surpassing expectations for group-task contributions. Whereas personality may inform status expectations through perceptions of competence when groups first form, as group members work together interdependently over time, actual contributions to the group's task are an important basis for reallocating status.
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Crowdsourcing Predictors of Behavioral Outcomes
J.C. Bongard et al.
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, forthcoming
Abstract:
Generating models from large data sets - and determining which subsets of data to mine - is becoming increasingly automated. However, choosing what data to collect in the first place requires human intuition or experience, usually supplied by a domain expert. This paper describes a new approach to machine science which demonstrates for the first time that nondomain experts can collectively formulate features and provide values for those features such that they are predictive of some behavioral outcome of interest. This was accomplished by building a Web platform in which human groups interact to both respond to questions likely to help predict a behavioral outcome and pose new questions to their peers. This results in a dynamically growing online survey, but the result of this cooperative behavior also leads to models that can predict the user's outcomes based on their responses to the user-generated survey questions. Here, we describe two Web-based experiments that instantiate this approach: The first site led to models that can predict users' monthly electric energy consumption, and the other led to models that can predict users' body mass index. As exponential increases in content are often observed in successful online collaborative communities, the proposed methodology may, in the future, lead to similar exponential rises in discovery and insight into the causal factors of behavioral outcomes.
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No third-party punishment in chimpanzees
Katrin Riedl et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 September 2012, Pages 14824-14829
Abstract:
Punishment can help maintain cooperation by deterring free-riding and cheating. Of particular importance in large-scale human societies is third-party punishment in which individuals punish a transgressor or norm violator even when they themselves are not affected. Nonhuman primates and other animals aggress against conspecifics with some regularity, but it is unclear whether this is ever aimed at punishing others for noncooperation, and whether third-party punishment occurs at all. Here we report an experimental study in which one of humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), could punish an individual who stole food. Dominants retaliated when their own food was stolen, but they did not punish when the food of third-parties was stolen, even when the victim was related to them. Third-party punishment as a means of enforcing cooperation, as humans do, might therefore be a derived trait in the human lineage.
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Cristina Matthews, Gareth Roberts & Christine Caldwell
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Formal models of cultural evolution have illustrated circumstances under which behavioral traits that have no inherent advantage over others can undergo positive selection pressure. One situation in which this may occur is when the behavior functions as a social marker, and there is pressure to identify oneself as a member of a particular group. Our aim in the current study was to determine whether participants organized into subpopulations could effectively exploit variation in a completely novel behavior to advertise themselves as belonging to a particular subpopulation, such that discrimination between in-group and out-group members was possible and subpopulations exhibited increasing distinctiveness. Eighty participants took part, organized into four subpopulations, each composed of five four-member generations. They each completed a tower-building task, used in previous experimental studies of cultural evolution. An incentive payment structure was imposed with the aim of motivating participants to advertise themselves as belonging to a particular subpopulation and to distinguish in-group members from members of other subpopulations. The first generation were exposed to photographs of randomly assigned "seed" towers, and later generations were exposed to photographs of the towers built by the members of the previous generation of their own subpopulation. Participants were able to discriminate towers built by in-group members of the same generation, from towers built by out-group members. Over generations, tower designs evolved such that they were increasingly identifiable as belonging to a particular subpopulation. Arbitrary traits which had no prior advantage became associated with group membership, providing empirical support for theoretical models.
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Pseudocompetition among groups increases human cooperation in a public-goods game
Maxwell Burton-Chellew & Stuart West
Animal Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
Economic games are often used in an attempt to reveal the underlying preferences or motivations that govern human behaviour. However, this approach relies on the implicit assumption that individuals are rational and fully aware of the consequences of their decisions. We examined behaviour in a standard economic game that is often used to measure social preferences: the public-goods game. We found that giving information to individuals about the relative success of their group led to (1) significantly higher levels of cooperation and (2) emotional responses to group success. This is despite the fact that group success had no effect on the payoffs in our game, and so knowledge of group success should not influence the behaviour of rational players. Consequently, these results suggest that cues of group competition have an automatic or unconscious effect on human behaviour that can induce increased within-group cooperation. More generally, this framing effect emphasizes the potential problem with drawing biological conclusions from the quantitative comparison of cooperation levels in economic games with the predictions of theory. Instead, our results emphasize the advantage of testing theory by qualitatively comparing behaviour across treatments, and with regard to expected adaptations and expected ontogeny.
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High and mighty: Height increases authority in professional refereeing
Gert Stulp et al.
Evolutionary Psychology, August 2012, Pages 588-601
Abstract:
Throughout the animal kingdom, larger males are more likely to attain social dominance. Several lines of evidence suggest that this relationship extends to humans, as height is positively related to dominance, status and authority. We hypothesized that height is also a determinant of authority in professional refereeing. According to the International Football Association Board, FIFA, football ("soccer") referees have full authority to enforce the laws of the game and should use their body language to show authority and to help control the match. We show that height is indeed positively related to authority status: referees were taller than their assistants (who merely have an advisory role) in both a national (French League) and an international (World Cup 2010) tournament. Furthermore, using data from the German League, we found that height was positively associated with authoritative behavior. Taller referees were better able to maintain control of the game by giving fewer fouls, thereby increasing the "flow of the game". Referee height was also positively associated with perceived referee competence, as taller referees were assigned to matches in which the visiting team had a higher ranking. Thus, height appears to be positively related to authority in professional refereeing.
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Task-switching costs promote the evolution of division of labor and shifts in individuality
Heather Goldsby et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 21 August 2012, Pages 13686-13691
Abstract:
From microbes to humans, the success of many organisms is achieved by dividing tasks among specialized group members. The evolution of such division of labor strategies is an important aspect of the major transitions in evolution. As such, identifying specific evolutionary pressures that give rise to group-level division of labor has become a topic of major interest among biologists. To overcome the challenges associated with studying this topic in natural systems, we use actively evolving populations of digital organisms, which provide a unique perspective on the de novo evolution of division of labor in an open-ended system. We provide experimental results that address a fundamental question regarding these selective pressures: Does the ability to improve group efficiency through the reduction of task-switching costs promote the evolution of division of labor? Our results demonstrate that as task-switching costs rise, groups increasingly evolve division of labor strategies. We analyze the mechanisms by which organisms coordinate their roles and discover strategies with striking biological parallels, including communication, spatial patterning, and task-partitioning behaviors. In many cases, under high task-switching costs, individuals cease to be able to perform tasks in isolation, instead requiring the context of other group members. The simultaneous loss of functionality at a lower level and emergence of new functionality at a higher level indicates that task-switching costs may drive both the evolution of division of labor and also the loss of lower-level autonomy, which are both key components of major transitions in evolution.
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Mikael Persson, Peter Esaiasson & Mikael Gilljam
European Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In democratic theory, two frequently occurring ideas are that deliberation and direct voting in referendums can increase perceived legitimacy of democratic procedures. To evaluate this claim, we conducted a controlled field experiment in which 215 high school students participated by being subject to a decision on a collective issue. The decision was made either by direct voting or as a non-voting procedure (decision made by the teacher). Additionally, we manipulated the opportunities for deliberation prior to the decision. Our primary finding is that both voting and deliberation significantly increase perceived legitimacy compared with a procedure in which these components are absent. However, applying both voting and deliberation does not yield significantly higher perceived legitimacy than applying voting without deliberation. We also found that perceived influence in the decision-making process mediates the effect of both voting and deliberation, whereas the epistemic quality of the decision, which is heavily emphasized in deliberative democratic theory, gained no support as a mediator.
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Peter Esaiasson, Mikael Gilljam & Mikael Persson
European Journal of Political Research, October 2012, Pages 785-808
Abstract:
How can democracies satisfy citizens' demands for legitimate decision making? This article reports findings from a randomised field experiment designed to mimic decision making in large-scale democracies. Natural collectives of individuals with a shared history and future (high school classes) were studied. They were asked to make a decision about how to spend a sum of money under arrangements imposed by the researchers and distributed randomly across classes. Within this setting, empirical support for three ideas about legitimacy enhancing decision-making arrangements is tested: participatory constitution-making; personal involvement in the decision-making process; and fairness in the implementation of arrangements. Throughout the analyses it was found that personal involvement is the main factor generating legitimacy beliefs.
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The Power of We: Evidence for Group-Based Control
Immo Fritsche et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Membership in social groups may restore people's sense of global control when personal control is questioned. Therefore, ethnocentric tendencies might be increased as a consequence of personal control threat. Testing hypotheses derived from a novel model of group-based control in five experiments, we show that making lack of personal control salient increased ingroup bias and pro-organizational behavior (Studies 1-5). These effects were independent of parallel effects of uncertainty (Study 2) and most pronounced for highly identified group members (Study 3). Studies 4 and 5 lend support to the assumption that perceiving the ingroup as a unitary actor is critical for symbolic control restoration: Threat to collective homogeneity and agency catalyzed the effect personal control threat had on ingroup support and defense. These findings complement previous research on motivated intergroup behavior and socio-cognitive strategies to cope with deficits in personal control.
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Self-uncertainty and Support for Autocratic Leadership
David Rast, Michael Hogg & Steffen Giessner
Self and Identity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Building on uncertainty-identity theory and the social identity theory of leadership we hypothesized that self-uncertainty would be associated with greater support for autocratic leaders, and less support for non-autocratic leaders. We surveyed organizational employees (N = 215); assessing the effect of self-uncertainty and how autocratic they perceived their organizational leader to be on measures of leader support. As predicted, less self-uncertain participants were more supportive of a non-autocratic than autocratic leader, whereas the opposite was the case for more self-uncertain participants - they were more supportive of an autocratic than non-autocratic leader. The effect was mediated by perceived group prototypicality of the leader. Implications for uncertainty-identity theory and for a wider analysis of the role of uncertainty in leadership are discussed.
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Nadira Faulmüller et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two experiments, we provide evidence for a fundamental discussion asymmetry, namely, preference-consistent information sharing. Despite being in a dyadic situation requiring open information exchange and being given no incentive to do so, participants communicated more information that supported their individually preferred decision alternative than information that contradicted it. Preference-consistent information sharing was not caused by biased recall and occurred in written as well as in face-to-face communication. Moreover, we tested whether preference-consistent information sharing was influenced by statements by bogus discussion partners indicating that they held a congruent versus incongruent preference to the participants' preference and that they understood versus did not understand the participants' preference. We found that when partners stated that they understood the participants' preference, subsequent preference-consistent information sharing was considerably reduced. This indicates that a motivation to be understood by others might be an important driving force underlying preference-consistent information sharing.
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Naïve Theories of Social Groups
Marjorie Rhodes
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four studies examined children's (ages 3-10, Total N = 235) naïve theories of social groups, in particular, their expectations about how group memberships constrain social interactions. After introduction to novel groups of people, preschoolers (ages 3-5) reliably expected agents from one group to harm members of the other group (rather than members of their own) but expected agents to help members of both groups equally often. Preschoolers expected between-group harm across multiple ways of defining social groups. Older children (ages 6-10) reliably expected agents to harm members of the other group and to help members of their own. Implications for the development of social cognition are discussed.
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Do prediction markets produce well calibrated probability forecasts?
Lionel Page & Robert Clemen
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper presents new theoretical and empirical evidence on the forecasting ability of prediction markets. We develop a model that predicts that the time until expiration of a prediction market should negatively affect the accuracy of prices as a forecasting tool in the direction of a `favourite/longshot bias.' That is, high-likelihood events are underpriced, and low-likelihood events are over-priced. We confirm this result using a large dataset of prediction market transaction prices. Prediction markets are reasonably well calibrated when time to expiration is relatively short, but prices are significantly biased for events farther in the future. When time value of money is considered, the miscalibration can be exploited to earn excess returns only when the trader has a relatively low discount rate.
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Kimberly Rios, Christian Wheeler & Dale Miller
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2012, Pages 1300-1309
Abstract:
The present studies tested whether people, particularly those who are most vulnerable to self-threats as indicated by low implicit self-esteem, adopt and express minority opinions to compensate for self-uncertainty. In Studies 1 through 3, low implicit self-esteem participants who were made to feel uncertain about themselves as individuals (versus uncertain about a self-irrelevant issue in Study 1, certain about themselves in Study 2, or uncertain about their group memberships in Study 3) expressed more disagreement with others' opinions. Additionally, Study 3 directly demonstrated that this effect is specific to minority opinions and does not emerge on majority opinions. In Study 4, the relation between self-uncertainty and disagreement with others' opinions was strongest among participants with both low implicit and high explicit self-esteem, who respond to self-threats in particularly defensive ways.
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When Diversity in Training Improves Dyadic Problem Solving
Matthew Canham, Jennifer Wiley & Richard Mayer
Applied Cognitive Psychology, May/June 2012, Pages 421-430
Abstract:
Students learned how to solve binomial probability problems from either a procedurally based lesson or a conceptually based lesson and then worked in distributed pairs by using a computer-based chat environment. Cognitively homogeneous dyads (i.e. both members received the same lesson) performed more accurately on standard problems, whereas cognitively diverse dyads (i.e. each member received a different lesson) performed more accurately on transfer problems. The cognitively homogeneous dyads perceived a greater sense of common ground with their partner, but spent a greater proportion of their time communicating about low-level details (e.g. message verification) whereas the cognitively diverse dyads spent a greater proportion of their time on high-level discussion (e.g. solution development). Results help to clarify that common training leads to more positive perceptions of collaboration, but only improves performance on problems that are highly similar to those experienced during training, whereas diverse training improves the ability of a dyad to perform well in new situations.
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Cooperation and assortativity with dynamic partner updating
Jing Wang, Siddharth Suri & Duncan Watts
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 4 September 2012, Pages
14363-14368
Abstract:
The natural tendency for humans to make and break relationships is thought to facilitate the emergence of cooperation. In particular, allowing conditional cooperators to choose with whom they interact is believed to reinforce the rewards accruing to mutual cooperation while simultaneously excluding defectors. Here we report on a series of human subjects experiments in which groups of 24 participants played an iterated prisoner's dilemma game where, critically, they were also allowed to propose and delete links to players of their own choosing at some variable rate. Over a wide variety of parameter settings and initial conditions, we found that dynamic partner updating significantly increased the level of cooperation, the average payoffs to players, and the assortativity between cooperators. Even relatively slow update rates were sufficient to produce large effects, while subsequent increases to the update rate had progressively smaller, but still positive, effects. For standard prisoner's dilemma payoffs, we also found that assortativity resulted predominantly from cooperators avoiding defectors, not by severing ties with defecting partners, and that cooperation correspondingly suffered. Finally, by modifying the payoffs to satisfy two novel conditions, we found that cooperators did punish defectors by severing ties, leading to higher levels of cooperation that persisted for longer.