Other-Regarding Behavior
Testosterone decreases trust in socially naïve humans
Peter Bos, David Terburg & Jack van Honk
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1 June 2010, Pages 9991-9995
Abstract:
Trust plays an important role in the formation and maintenance of human social relationships. But trusting others is associated with a cost, given the prevalence of cheaters and deceivers in human society. Recent research has shown that the peptide hormone oxytocin increases trust in humans. However, oxytocin also makes individuals susceptible to betrayal, because under influence of oxytocin, subjects perseverate in giving trust to others they know are untrustworthy. Testosterone, a steroid hormone associated with competition and dominance, is often viewed as an inhibitor of sociality, and may have antagonistic properties with oxytocin. The following experiment tests this possibility in a placebo-controlled, within-subjects design involving the administration of testosterone to 24 female subjects. We show that compared with the placebo, testosterone significantly decreases interpersonal trust, and, as further analyses established, this effect is determined by those who give trust easily. We suggest that testosterone adaptively increases social vigilance in these trusting individuals to better prepare them for competition over status and valued resources. In conclusion, our data provide unique insights into the hormonal regulation of human sociality by showing that testosterone downregulates interpersonal trust in an adaptive manner.
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Linking the perceived ability to influence others to subjective well-being: A need-based approach
Kristin Sommer & Martin Bourgeois
Social Influence, July 2010, Pages 220-244
Abstract:
Bourgeois, Sommer, and Bruno (2009) proposed that having an influence over others fulfills basic needs for belongingness, self-worth, control, accuracy, and meaning. Two studies solicited support for these ideas. Study 1 revealed that people high in the perceived ability to influence others reported higher levels of self-worth, control, and life meaning, and that fulfillment of these needs in turn enhanced subjective well-being. Study 2 established positive relationships between influence and belongingness, control and accuracy within the contexts of work and romantic relationships, and additionally found that meaning in these domains derived from the fulfillment of one or more of these needs. Results of path analyses provided support for models linking perceived influence to job and relationship satisfaction through increases in need fulfillment.
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The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans
Carsten De Dreu et al.
Science, 11 June 2010, Pages 1408-1411
Abstract:
Humans regulate intergroup conflict through parochial altruism; they self-sacrifice to contribute to in-group welfare and to aggress against competing out-groups. Parochial altruism has distinct survival functions, and the brain may have evolved to sustain and promote in-group cohesion and effectiveness and to ward off threatening out-groups. Here, we have linked oxytocin, a neuropeptide produced in the hypothalamus, to the regulation of intergroup conflict. In three experiments using double-blind placebo-controlled designs, male participants self-administered oxytocin or placebo and made decisions with financial consequences to themselves, their in-group, and a competing out-group. Results showed that oxytocin drives a "tend and defend" response in that it promoted in-group trust and cooperation, and defensive, but not offensive, aggression toward competing out-groups.
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Self-interested partner selection can lead to the emergence of fairness
Yen-Sheng Chiang
Evolution and Human Behavior, July 2010, Pages 265-270
Abstract:
The theory of biological markets and competitive altruism contends that competitive partner selection is favorable to the selection of prosocial behaviors in social evolution. The current study provides an empirical assessment of this theory based on a laboratory experiment with human subjects using the Ultimatum game. The experimental results show that more generous proposers and more tolerant responders are preferred as partners. This indicates that subjects tend to choose partners in a manner that coincides with their own interests. In competitive partner selection, partner preferences driven by self-interest nevertheless generate an assortative pairing structure that prompts players to behave fairly in the game. The study shows that a free market of partner selection, plus the type of partner preferences driven by self-interests, can facilitate the emergence of fairness in social exchange.
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The Attachment Paradox: How Can So Many of Us (the Insecure Ones) Have No Adaptive Advantages?
Tsachi Ein-Dor, Mario Mikulincer, Guy Doron & Phillip Shaver
Perspectives on Psychological Science, March 2010, Pages 123-141
Abstract:
Bowlby's (1969/1982) attachment theory has generated an enormous body of research and conceptual elaborations. Although attachment theory and research propose that attachment security provides a person with many adaptive advantages during all phases of the life cycle, numerous studies indicate that almost half of the human species can be classified as insecurely attached or insecure with respect to attachment. It seems odd that evolution left humans in this vulnerable position unless there are some advantages, under at least some conditions, to anxious and avoidant attachment styles. We argue that a social group containing members with different attachment patterns may be more conducive to survival than a homogeneous group of securely attached individuals. In making this argument, we extend the scope of attachment theory and research by considering a broader range of adaptive functions of insecure attachment strategies. We also present preliminary data to support our argument.
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A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior
Adam Grant & Francesca Gino
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, June 2010, Pages 946-955
Abstract:
Although research has established that receiving expressions of gratitude increases prosocial behavior, little is known about the psychological mechanisms that mediate this effect. We propose that gratitude expressions can enhance prosocial behavior through both agentic and communal mechanisms, such that when helpers are thanked for their efforts, they experience stronger feelings of self-efficacy and social worth, which motivate them to engage in prosocial behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2, receiving a brief written expression of gratitude motivated helpers to assist both the beneficiary who expressed gratitude and a different beneficiary. These effects of gratitude expressions were mediated by perceptions of social worth and not by self-efficacy or affect. In Experiment 3, we constructively replicated these effects in a field experiment: A manager's gratitude expression increased the number of calls made by university fundraisers, which was mediated by social worth but not self-efficacy. In Experiment 4, a different measure of social worth mediated the effects of an interpersonal gratitude expression. Our results support the communal perspective rather than the agentic perspective: Gratitude expressions increase prosocial behavior by enabling individuals to feel socially valued.
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Nicola Lacetera & Mario Macis
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
A number of experimental studies have documented that financial rewards discourage the performance of altruistic activities because they conflict with intrinsic altruistic motivations. However, it is unclear whether this is evidence of a generalized aversion to rewards or, rather, an aversion to receiving specific material prizes, such as cash.We conducted a randomized-controlled experiment, through a survey administered to 467 blood donors in an Italian town, and found that donors are not reluctant to receive compensation in general; a substantial share of respondents declared that they would stop being donors if given ten euros in cash, but we do not find such effects when a voucher of the same nominal value is offered instead. The aversion to direct cash payments is particularly marked among women, but does not emerge among individuals who have only recently become donors. All of our findings are robust to regression analyses. Implications for research and public policy are discussed.
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Fairness and the Development of Inequality Acceptance
Ingvild Almås, Alexander Cappelen, Erik Sørensen & Bertil Tungodden
Science, 28 May 2010, Pages 1176-1178
Abstract:
Fairness considerations fundamentally affect human behavior, but our understanding of the nature and development of people's fairness preferences is limited. The dictator game has been the standard experimental design for studying fairness preferences, but it only captures a situation where there is broad agreement that fairness requires equality. In real life, people often disagree on what is fair because they disagree on whether individual achievements, luck, and efficiency considerations of what maximizes total benefits can justify inequalities. We modified the dictator game to capture these features and studied how inequality acceptance develops in adolescence. We found that as children enter adolescence, they increasingly view inequalities reflecting differences in individual achievements, but not luck, as fair, whereas efficiency considerations mainly play a role in late adolescence.
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Inductive Game Theory and the Dynamics of Animal Conflict
Simon DeDeo, David Krakauer & Jessica Flack
PLoS Computational Biology, May 2010, e1000782
Abstract:
Conflict destabilizes social interactions and impedes cooperation at multiple scales of biological organization. Of fundamental interest are the causes of turbulent periods of conflict. We analyze conflict dynamics in an monkey society model system. We develop a technique, Inductive Game Theory, to extract directly from time-series data the decision-making strategies used by individuals and groups. This technique uses Monte Carlo simulation to test alternative causal models of conflict dynamics. We find individuals base their decision to fight on memory of social factors, not on short timescale ecological resource competition. Furthermore, the social assessments on which these decisions are based are triadic (self in relation to another pair of individuals), not pairwise. We show that this triadic decision making causes long conflict cascades and that there is a high population cost of the large fights associated with these cascades. These results suggest that individual agency has been over-emphasized in the social evolution of complex aggregates, and that pair-wise formalisms are inadequate. An appreciation of the empirical foundations of the collective dynamics of conflict is a crucial step towards its effective management.
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Communication and collective action: Language and the evolution of human cooperation
Eric Alden Smith
Evolution and Human Behavior, July 2010, Pages 231-245
Abstract:
All social species face various "collective action problems" (CAPs) or "social dilemmas," meaning problems in achieving cooperating when the best move from a selfish point of view yields an inferior collective outcome. Compared to most other species, humans are very good at solving these challenges, suggesting that something rather peculiar about human sociality facilitates collective action. This article proposes that language - the uniquely human faculty of symbolic communication - fundamentally alters the possibilities for collective action. I explore these issues using simple game-theoretic models and empirical evidence (both ethnographic and experimental). I review several standard mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation - mutualism, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity and signaling - highlighting their limitations when it comes to explaining large-group cooperation, as well as the ways in which language helps overcome those limitations. Language facilitates complex coordination and is essential for establishing norms governing production efforts and distribution of collective goods that motivate people to cooperate voluntarily in large groups. Language also significantly lowers the cost of detecting and punishing "free riders," thus greatly enhancing the scope and power of standard conditional reciprocity. In addition, symbolic communication encourages new forms of collectively beneficial displays and reputation management - what evolutionists often term "signaling" and "indirect reciprocity." Thus, language reinforces existing forces that favor the evolution of cooperation, as well as creating new opportunities for collective action not available even to our closest primate relatives.
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Neural responses to faces reflect social personality traits
Celeste Cheung, Helena Rutherford, Linda Mayes & James McPartland
Social Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Faces are a developmentally primary and critically important source of social information, and they are processed differently from most other visual percepts. Studies of brain electrophysiology reveal a face-sensitive component, the N170, which is typically enhanced to faces relative to other stimuli. Research in social disabilities suggests that an atypical N170 response in this population may stem from decreased developmental exposure to faces secondary to reduced social interest. Here we examined the relationship between neural responses to faces and social personality characteristics in a normative sample. Participants were pre-screened to identify individuals scoring high on extraversion or introversion. Both groups were presented with upright and inverted face stimuli. An inversion effect, a marker of expertise for faces, was observed in people with high extraversion but not in those with high introversion. These findings suggest that, within typically developing populations, social attitudes are reflected in the neural correlates of face perception.
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The Blame Game: The Effect of Responsibility and Social Stigma on Empathy for Pain
Jean Decety, Stephanie Echols & Joshua Correll
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, May 2010, Pages 985-997
Abstract:
This investigation combined behavioral and functional neuroimaging measures to explore whether perception of pain is modulated by the target's stigmatized status and whether the target bore responsibility for that stigma. During fMRI scanning, participants were exposed to a series of short video clips featuring age-matched individuals experiencing pain who were (a) similar to the participant (healthy), (b) stigmatized but not responsible for their stigmatized condition (infected with AIDS as a result of an infected blood transfusion), or (c) stigmatized and responsible for their stigmatized condition (infected with AIDS as a result of intravenous drug use). Explicit pain and empathy ratings for the targets were obtained outside of the MRI environment, along with a variety of implicit and explicit measures of AIDS bias. Results showed that participants were significantly more sensitive to the pain of AIDS transfusion targets as compared with healthy and AIDS drug targets, as evidenced by significantly higher pain and empathy ratings during video evaluation and significantly greater hemodynamic activity in areas associated with pain processing (i.e., right anterior insula, anterior midcingulate cortex, periaqueductal gray). In contrast, significantly less activity was observed in the anterior midcingulate cortex for AIDS drug targets as compared with healthy controls. Further, behavioral differences between healthy and AIDS drug targets were moderated by the extent to which participants blamed AIDS drug individuals for their condition. Controlling for both explicit and implicit AIDS bias, the more participants blamed these targets, the less pain they attributed to them as compared with healthy controls. The present study reveals that empathic resonance is moderated early in information processing by a priori attitudes toward the target group.
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Understanding cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma game
Emmanuel Pothos, Gavin Perry, Philip Corr, Mervin Matthew & Jerome Busemeyer
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the standard one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma game, participants often choose to cooperate, when the optimal strategy is to defect. This puzzling finding has attracted considerable interest both in terms of possible computational frameworks for modeling human judgment, but also regarding the more general debate of human altruism. In this research, we ask how much of human behavior in this task can be explained by a putative bias for cooperative behavior and whether this, in turn, is influenced by personality. We compared performance on the standard task with performance on a matched neutral one; we manipulated the optimal strategy (defect or cooperate); and we manipulated the amount of payoff for responding optimally. Results revealed little evidence for a bias for cooperative behavior, but significant associations with the personality factors of Behavioural Activation System (BAS) Reward Responsivity and Agreeableness were found. These findings are discussed in terms of the attempt to explain judgment in one-shot, Prisoner's Dilemma tasks with statistical or probabilistic models.
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Do Ravens Show Consolation? Responses to Distressed Others
Orlaith Fraser & Thomas Bugnyar
PLoS ONE, May 2010, e10605
Background: Bystander affiliation (post-conflict affiliation from an uninvolved bystander to the conflict victim) may represent an expression of empathy in which the bystander consoles the victim to alleviate the victim's distress ("consolation"). However, alternative hypotheses for the function of bystander affiliation also exist. Determining whether ravens spontaneously offer consolation to distressed partners may not only help us to understand how animals deal with the costs of aggressive conflict, but may also play an important role in the empathy debate. Methodology/Principal findings: This study investigates the post-conflict behavior of ravens, applying the predictive framework for the function of bystander affiliation for the first time in a non-ape species. We found weak evidence for reconciliation (post-conflict affiliation between former opponents), but strong evidence for both bystander affiliation and solicited bystander affiliation (post-conflict affiliation from the victim to a bystander). Bystanders involved in both interactions were likely to share a valuable relationship with the victim. Bystander affiliation offered to the victim was more likely to occur after intense conflicts. Renewed aggression was less likely to occur after the victim solicited affiliation from a bystander. Conclusions/Significance: Our findings suggest that in ravens, bystanders may console victims with whom they share a valuable relationship, thus alleviating the victims' post-conflict distress. Conversely victims may affiliate with bystanders after a conflict in order to reduce the likelihood of renewed aggression. These results stress the importance of relationship quality in determining the occurrence and function of post-conflict interactions, and show that ravens may be sensitive to the emotions of others.
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Competing demands of prosociality and equity in monkeys
Sarah Brosnan, Daniel Houser, Kristin Leimgruber, Erte Xiao, Tianwen Chen & Frans de Waal
Evolution and Human Behavior, July 2010, Pages 279-288
Abstract:
Prosocial decisions may lead to unequal payoffs among group members. Although an aversion to inequity has been found in empirical studies of both human and nonhuman primates, the contexts previously studied typically do not involve a trade-off between prosociality and inequity. Here we investigate the apparent coexistence of these two factors, specifically the competing demands of prosociality and equity. We directly compare the responses of brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) among situations where prosocial preferences conflict with equality, using a paradigm comparable to other studies of cooperation and inequity in this species. By choosing to pull a tray towards themselves, subjects rewarded themselves and/or another in conditions in which the partner either received the same or different rewards, or the subject received no reward. In unequal payoff conditions, subjects could obtain equality by choosing not to pull in the tray, so that neither individual was rewarded. The monkeys showed prosocial preferences even in situations of moderate disadvantageous inequity, preferring to pull in the tray more often when a partner was present than absent. However, when the discrepancy between rewards increased, prosocial behavior ceased.
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Neural basis of extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation
Vani Mathur, Tokiko Harada, Trixie Lipke & Joan Chiao
NeuroImage, 15 July 2010, Pages 1468-1475
Abstract:
A central evolutionary challenge for social groups is uniting a heterogeneous set of individuals towards common goals. One means by which social groups form and endure is by endowing group members with extraordinary prosocial proclivities, such as ingroup love, towards other group members. Here we examined the neural basis of extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our results indicate that empathy for ingroup members is neurally distinct from empathy for humankind, more generally. People showed greater response within anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral insula when observing the suffering of others, but African-American individuals additionally recruit medial prefrontal cortex when observing the suffering of members of their own social group. Moreover, neural activity within medial prefrontal cortex in response to pain expressed by ingroup relative to outgroup members predicted greater empathy and altruistic motivation for one's ingroup, suggesting that neurocognitive processes associated with self identity underlie extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation for members of one's own social group. Taken together, our findings reveal distinct neural mechanisms of empathy and altruistic motivation in an intergroup context and may serve as a foundation for future research investigating the neural bases of intergroup prosociality, more broadly construed.