Socialization
Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups
Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher Chabris, Alexander Pentland, Nada Hashmi & Thomas Malone
Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor - often called "general intelligence" - emerges from the correlations among people's performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of "collective intelligence" exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 individuals, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group's performance on a wide variety of tasks. This "c factor" is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.
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Warding Off the Evil Eye: When the Fear of Being Envied Increases Prosocial Behavior
Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg & Rik Pieters
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The fear of being envied makes people act prosocially, in an attempt to ward off the potentially destructive effects of envy. In three experiments, people who were in a superior position and could be envied were more likely than control participants to give time-consuming advice to a potentially envious person or to help a potentially envious person pick up erasers she had accidentally scattered. However, helping behavior increased only if envy was likely to be malicious rather than benign. People who were better off did not increase their helping behavior toward people in general, but increased their helping only toward the potentially envious. This finding is consistent with the idea that the better off act more prosocially as an appeasement strategy. The fear of being envied serves useful group functions, because it triggers prosocial behavior that is likely to dampen the potentially destructive effects of envy and simultaneously helps to improve the situation of people who are worse off.
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Conservatism is good for you: Cultural conservatism protects self-esteem in older adults
Alain Van Hiel & Lieven Brebels
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research explores whether adhering to cultural conservative beliefs elevates self-esteem in older people. In a sample of 311 retired persons it was found that conservatism was positively related to self-esteem, and that this relationship was especially strong in the oldest age group. Statistical control for narcissism did not undermine this moderation effect between age and conservatism on self-esteem. In the discussion, we argue that conservatism among older people seems to go together with a focus on putting personal history in social-cultural context.
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The Physiology of Moral Sentiments
Paul Zak
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Adam Smith made a persuasive case that "moral sentiments" are the foundation of ethical behaviors in his 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This view is still controversial as philosophers debate the extent of human morality. One type of moral behavior, assisting a stranger, has been shown by economists to be quite common in the laboratory and outside it. This paper presents the Empathy-Generosity-Punishment model that reveals the criticality of moral sentiments in producing prosocial behaviors. The model's predictions are tested causally in three neuroeconomics experiments that directly intervene in the human brain to "turn up" and "turn down" moral sentiments. This approach provides direct evidence on the brain mechanisms that produce prosociality using a brain circuit called HOME (Human Oxytocin-Mediated Empathy). By characterizing the HOME circuit, I identify situations in which moral sentiments will be engaged or disengaged. Using this information, applications to health and welfare policies, organizational and institutional design, economic development, and happiness are presented.
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Inequality at Work: The Effect of Peer Salaries on Job Satisfaction
David Card, Alexandre Mas, Enrico Moretti & Emmanuel Saez
NBER Working Paper, September 2010
Abstract:
Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.
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Oxytocin Selectively Improves Empathic Accuracy
Jennifer Bartz et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
"We found that normal variance in baseline social-cognitive competence moderates the effects of oxytocin; specifically, oxytocin improved empathic accuracy only for less socially proficient individuals. These findings constitute evidence against the popular view that oxytocin acts as a universal prosocial enhancer that can render all people social-cognitive experts. Instead, oxytocin appears to play a more nuanced role in social cognition, and helps only some people."
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Leadership, Cheap Talk and Really Cheap Talk
David Levy, Kail Padgitt, Sandra Peart, Daniel Houser & Erte Xiao
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research offers compelling evidence that leaders suffice to effect efficiency-enhancements on cooperation, yet the source of this effect remains unclear. To investigate whether leadership effects can be attributed exclusively to the common information that leaders provide to a group, irrespective of the source of that information, we design a public goods game in which non-binding contribution suggestions originate with either a human or computer leader. We find that group members' decisions are significantly influenced by human leaders' non-binding contribution suggestions, both when the leader is elected as well as when the leader is randomly chosen. A leader's suggestion becomes an upper bound for group member's contributions. Identical suggestions do not impact the group members' decisions when they originate with a computer, thus supporting to the view that information provided by human leaders is uniquely able to establish welfare-enhancing norms.
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Treating Equals Unequally: Incentives in Teams, Workers' Motivation, and Production Technology
Sebastian Goerg, Sebastian Kube & Ro'i Zultan
Journal of Labor Economics, October 2010, Pages 747-772
Abstract:
The importance of fair and equal treatment of workers is at the heart of the debate in organizational management. In this regard, we study how reward schemes and production technologies affect effort provision in teams. Our experimental results demonstrate that unequal rewards can potentially increase productivity by facilitating coordination and that the effect strongly interacts with the exact shape of the production function. Taken together, our data highlight the relevance of the production function for organization construction and suggest that equal treatment of equals is neither a necessary nor a sufficient prerequisite for eliciting high performance in teams.
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Does Perceived Unfairness Affect Charitable Giving? Evidence from the Dictator Game
Matthew Rousu & Sara Baublitz
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use a modified version of the dictator game to study whether perceived unfairness affects giving. To earn money, dictators first had to take a test. Our treatment group had participants taking tests of different difficulty levels while the control group had all participants taking a test of the same difficulty level. We found that participants who were in an environment where everyone faced the same challenge to earn money were less generous than participants in an environment where some people had an advantage while others had a disadvantage.
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John Hollenbeck, Aleksander Ellis, Stephen Humphrey, Adela Garza & Daniel Ilgen
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study tested predictions derived from Structural Adaptation Theory (SAT) on the longitudinal effects of centralizing and decentralizing decision-making structures in teams. Results from 93 four-person teams working on a command and control simulation generally supported SAT, documenting that it was more difficult for teams to adapt to a centralized decision-making structure after formerly working within in a decentralized structure, than it was to adapt in the alternative direction. The negative effects of centralized shifts were mediated by efficiency and adaptability, in the sense that former decentralized teams experienced the negative aspects of centralization (lack of adaptability), but not the positive aspects (efficiency). The dangers of employing structural reconfiguration to solve certain problems in teams are discussed, especially if these changes are based upon expectations generalized from cross-sectional research that did not directly observe teams that experienced true structural change.
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Serotonin selectively influences moral judgment and behavior through effects on harm aversion
Molly Crockett, Luke Clark, Marc Hauser & Trevor Robbins
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Aversive emotional reactions to real or imagined social harms infuse moral judgment and motivate prosocial behavior. Here, we show that the neurotransmitter serotonin directly alters both moral judgment and behavior through increasing subjects' aversion to personally harming others. We enhanced serotonin in healthy volunteers with citalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) and contrasted its effects with both a pharmacological control treatment and a placebo on tests of moral judgment and behavior. We measured the drugs' effects on moral judgment in a set of moral 'dilemmas' pitting utilitarian outcomes (e.g., saving five lives) against highly aversive harmful actions (e.g., killing an innocent person). Enhancing serotonin made subjects more likely to judge harmful actions as forbidden, but only in cases where harms were emotionally salient. This harm-avoidant bias after citalopram was also evident in behavior during the ultimatum game, in which subjects decide to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Rejecting unfair offers enforces a fairness norm but also harms the other player financially. Enhancing serotonin made subjects less likely to reject unfair offers. Furthermore, the prosocial effects of citalopram varied as a function of trait empathy. Individuals high in trait empathy showed stronger effects of citalopram on moral judgment and behavior than individuals low in trait empathy. Together, these findings provide unique evidence that serotonin could promote prosocial behavior by enhancing harm aversion, a prosocial sentiment that directly affects both moral judgment and moral behavior.
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Disentangling the Sources of Pro-socially Motivated Effort: A Field Experiment
Mirco Tonin & Michael Vlassopoulos
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of workers'pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: warm glow altruism and pure altruism. We employ an experimental design that first measures the level of effort exerted by student workers on a data entry task in an environment that elicits purely selfish behavior and we compare it to effort exerted in an environment that also induces warm glow altruism. We then compare the latter to effort exerted in an environment where both types of altruistic preferences are elicited. We find evidence that women increase effort due to warm glow altruism while we do not find any additional impact due to pure altruism. On the other hand, men in our sample are not responsive to any of the treatments.
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Ariel Malka, Christopher Soto, Adam Cohen & Dale Miller
Journal of Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examines the hypothesis that religiosity has two competing psychological influences on the social welfare attitudes of contemporary Americans. On the one hand religiosity promotes a culturally based conservative identity which in turn promotes opposition to federal social welfare provision. On the other hand religiosity promotes a prosocial value orientation which in turn promotes support of federal social welfare provision. Across two national samples and one sample of business employees reliable support for this competing pathways model was obtained. We argue that research testing influences of non-political individual differences on political preferences should consider the possibility of competing influences that are rooted in a combination of personality processes and contextual-discursive surroundings.
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A within-subject analysis of other-regarding preferences
Mariana Blanco, Dirk Engelmann & Hans Theo Normann
Games and Economic Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
We assess the predictive power of a model of other-regarding preferences - inequality aversion - using a within-subjects design. We run four different experiments (ultimatum game, dictator game, sequential-move prisoners' dilemma and public-good game) with the same sample of subjects. We elicit two parameters of inequality aversion to test several hypotheses across games. We find that within-subject tests can differ markedly from aggregate-level analyses. Inequality-aversion has predictive power at the aggregate level but performs less well at the individual level. The model seems to capture various behavioral motives in different games but the correlation of these motives is low within subjects.
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The cross-generation transmission of oxytocin in humans
Ruth Feldman, Ilanit Gordon & Orna Zagoory-Sharon
Hormones and Behavior, September 2010, Pages 669-676
Abstract:
Animal studies demonstrated that the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT), implicated in bond formation across mammalian species, is transmitted from mother to young through mechanisms of early social experiences; however, no research has addressed the cross-generation transmission of OT in humans. Fifty-five parents (36 mothers and 19 fathers) engaged in a 15-min interaction with their infants. Baseline plasma OT was sampled from parents and salivary OT was sampled from parents and infants before and after play and analyzed with ELISA methods. Interactions were micro-coded for parent and child's socio-affective behavior. Parent and infant's salivary OT was individually stable across assessments and showed an increase from pre- to post-interaction. Significant correlations emerged between parental and infant OT at both assessments and higher OT levels in parent and child were related to greater affect synchrony and infant social engagement. Parent-infant affect synchrony moderated the relations between parental and infant OT and the associations between OT in parent and child were stronger under conditions of high affect synchrony. Results demonstrate consistency in the neuroendocrine system supporting bond formation in humans and other mammals and underscore the role of early experience in shaping the cross-generation transmission of social affiliation in humans.