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Reciprocity Is Not Give and Take
Abstract
Unlike economic exchange, social exchange has no well-defined "value." It is based on the norm of reciprocity, in which giving and taking are to be repaid in equivalent measure. Although giving and taking are colloquially assumed to be equivalent actions, we demonstrate that they produce different patterns of reciprocity. In five experiments utilizing a dictator game, people reciprocated in like measure to apparently prosocial acts of giving, but reciprocated more selfishly to apparently antisocial acts of taking, even when the objective outcomes of the acts of giving and taking were identical. Additional results demonstrate that acts of giving in social exchanges are perceived as more generous than objectively identical acts of taking, that taking tends to escalate, and that the asymmetry in reciprocity is not due to gaining versus losing resources. Reciprocity appears to operate on an exchange rate that assigns value to the meaning of events, in a fashion that encourages prosocial exchanges.
... 2 them. The value of knowledge at work is inherently part of a social exchange process that is influenced by social norms, self and other perceptions, status and the behavioural expectations associated with these (Moser, 2017;Keysar et al., 2008;Cabrera & Cabrera, 2002). Based on these assumptions, it is hypothesised that social rewards such as recognition for team contributions are a stronger motivator for knowledge sharing behaviour than financial rewards. ...
While material rewards have received plenty of attention in the literature, intangible rewards such as receiving praise and verbal recognition for one’s work are still under-researched. This gap remains despite plenty of evidence on how important feeling included and valued is for work motivation (Rogers & Ashforth, 2017; Ellemers et al, 2013). The question of possible differences between material and immaterial rewards for work motivation is of special interest for knowledge workers (Gagné, 2009). If the rendered services and produced goods are knowledge-based rather than tangible, material products, it is much more difficult to put a monetary value against the products or services and the employee knowledge that underpins them. The value of knowledge at work is inherently part of a social exchange process that is influenced by social norms, self and other perceptions, status and the behavioural expectations associated with these (Moser, 2017; Keysar et al., 2008; Cabrera & Cabrera, 2002). Based on these assumptions, it is hypothesised that social rewards such as recognition for team contributions are a stronger motivator for knowledge sharing behaviour than financial rewards.
... In fact, the mere number of cooperative acts contributes to the strengthening of bonds and thus affective commitment (Holzwarth et al., 2021). Relying on reciprocity plays a significant role here because it allows individuals to engage and initiate resource exchanges between them without risking losses (Nowak, 2006), especially since individuals tend to reciprocate to those who have benefited them and punish those who engage in negative, selfish actions (Keysar et al., 2008). ...
Though people high in narcissism have high self-esteem and appear as charming, their long-term relationships are problematic due to their difficult interpersonal style, which suggests that maintaining sound exchange relationships with narcissists is difficult. Because work teams must rely on continuing and reliable exchange processes, narcissistic team members should be detrimental to their functioning. We investigated this hypothesis by collecting data from 110 work groups from various organizations and analyzing the association between narcissism-based group composition indices and team performance. Using Bayesian inference, the results show that narcissism in work groups is negatively related to interpersonal forms of citizenship behavior, but not to citizenship behaviors that target the organization. Furthermore, group task performance was also negatively affected by narcissism within the team.
... By directly comparing reciprocal punishment and reward within-subjects, we provide evidence of behavioural and neural asymmetries between these two domains, consistent with the scarce behavioural evidence suggesting asymmetries in reciprocation to kind and unkind behaviour [50,51]. To reconcile these asymmetries, we propose a novel interpretation of the functional roles of the rDLPFC and the mPFC in reciprocal fairness. ...
Reciprocal fairness, in the form of punishment and reward, is at the core of human societal order. Its underlying neural mechanisms are, however, not fully understood. We systemize suggestive evidence regarding the involvement of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in reciprocal fairness in three cognitive mechanisms ( cognitive control , domain-general and self-reference ). We test them and provide novel insights in a comprehensive behavioural experiment with non-invasive brain stimulation where participants can punish greedy actions and reward generous actions. Brain stimulation of either brain area decreases reward and punishment when reciprocation is costly but unexpectedly increases reward when it is non-costly. None of the hypothesized mechanisms fully accounts for the observed behaviour, and the asymmetric involvement of the investigated brain areas in punishment and reward suggests that different psychological mechanisms are underlying punishing selfishness and rewarding generosity. We propose that, for reciprocal punishment, the rDLPFC and the mPFC process self-relevant information, in terms of both personal cost and personal involvement; for reciprocal reward, these brain regions are involved in controlling selfish and pure reciprocity motives, while simultaneously promoting the enforcement of fairness norms. These insights bear importance for endeavours to build biologically plausible models of human behaviour.
... La debilidad en las interrelaciones positivas del phubbing tiene consecuencias significativas en la salud social y se relaciona con consecuencias más graves, como la depresión y la angustia (Wang et al., 2017). Además, en lo que respecta a la convivencia, se sabe que las personas que experimentan rechazo, en ocasiones responden con comportamientos de represalia como respuesta a ello (Keysar et al., 2008), reproduciendo el comportamiento de exclusión, e incluso, respondiendo con violencia y amenazas (Chotpitayasunondh & Douglas, 2018). Esto se observa en fenómenos como el ciberacoso, donde el acosado se transforma en ciberagresor para castigar a aquel que le ha acosado (Martínez-Monteagudo et al., 2019)verbal aggression, anger, and hostility. ...
Introducción: Las relaciones sociales se producen simultáneamente entre el entorno presencial y virtual y con mayor intensidad en tiempos de postpandemia. Con el uso de Internet han surgido nuevas conductas como el phubbing, que disminuyen la calidad de las relaciones y la convivencia, y cuyo impacto apenas ha sido estudiado en la adolescencia. Método: El objetivo de este estudio es conocer la incidencia y el impacto de esta nueva conducta en 379 adolescentes de 8 centros de Educación Secundaria de Aragón, así como analizar si su normalización neutraliza su efecto negativo mediante un análisis descriptivo incluyendo el test de ANOVA y de chi cuadrado. Resultados: Los resultados muestran que el phubbing es un fenómeno frecuente entre los adolescentes, alcanzando en las chicas mayores niveles de phubber (quién ejerce phubbing) y phubbee (quién lo recibe), incidiendo en ellas los efectos más negativos (sentimiento de exclusión), hecho que también aumenta con la edad. Además, el phubbing frecuente no disminuye el sentirse afectado negativamente por el hecho de que dicha conducta esté normalizada entre los adolescentes. Discusión: El presente estudio ofrece los primeros conocimientos sobre el impacto del phubbing en la salud emocional y relacional en la vida del alumnado adolescente según la edad y el género. Nuestros hallazgos revelan una importante novedad sobre este fenómeno, unas primeras evidencias de que la normalización de esta conducta no elimina los efectos negativos en la calidad de las relaciones personales y amplia el conocimiento sobre el phubbing.
... Similar effects were also found in the samples taken from 37 countries all over the world (Różycka-Tran, Boski, & Wojciszke, 2015). Many studies showed that negative reciprocity norms lead to conflict behavior, whereas positive reciprocity norms leads to stable social relation exchanges (Keysar, Converse, Wang, & Epley, 2008). The same, the conviction that social life is like a zero-sum game leads to a negative evaluation of social relations in organization. ...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediational role of relational psychological contract in social beliefs and work input attitude dependency. We analyzed data taken from employees (N = 258) in four different organizations operating in the Pomeranian market.
A mediation analysis showed a strongly mediating role of psychological contract in the negative relationship between perception of life as a zero-sum game (BZSG) and work input. The motivational effect of the relational psychological contract, that is the role of job security, interesting work, a career in the company, opportunities for promotion and other HRM practices prevail over the significance of personal beliefs, especially when these are negative. If the company lacks the appropriate HRM systems then day-to-day social exchanges can be crucial in modifying the social beliefs of the employee.
... Reciprocity theory also suggests that people reciprocate in two ways: positively (being, e.g., cooperative, empathetic) or negatively, by retaliating (being, e.g., aggressive, tough). Both forces can be quite strong, but negative reciprocity (i.e., "an eye for an eye" approach) is very deeply rooted in human nature (Aristotle 2004;Baumeister et al. 2001) and has been shown not only in social contexts (Keysar et al. 2008) but also in evolutionary psychology as a means for gene selection (Axelrod and Hamilton 1981). In our setting, with role reversal, negotiators offer concessions preemptively to generate positive reciprocal feelings. ...
The authors focus on repeated distributive negotiations to investigate how expectations of role reversal in future transactions (i.e., a buyer [seller] in one transaction is the seller [buyer] in the next transaction) affect behaviors in the current negotiation. They demonstrate that when negotiators expect a role reversal, they are likely to make more concessions and reach agreement more quickly in the current negotiation. The authors find that this effect is driven by negotiators' beliefs that they will be able to recover these concessions, because negotiators expect their counterparts to reciprocate in the later transaction when the parties reverse roles. However, when the two negotiations occur in different "accounting" periods (i.e., fiscal periods) or when the negotiating parties do not explicitly communicate their willingness to reverse roles in the future, role-reversal expectations do not affect concession making. Implications arise in both managerial and consumer contexts where the possibility of engaging in future negotiations-as well as reversing roles-exists.
Giving is a unique attribute of human sharing. In this review, we discuss evidence attesting to our species’ preparedness to recognize interactions based on this behavior. We show that infants and adults require minimal cues of resource transfer to relate the participants of a giving event in an interactive unit (A gives X to B) and that such an interpretation does not systematically generalize to superficially similar taking events, which may be interpreted in nonsocial terms (A takes X). We argue that this asymmetry, echoed in language, reveals the operations of a mechanism of event construction where participant roles are encoded only when they are crucial to rendering an action teleologically well-formed. We show that such a representation of giving allows people to monitor the direction (who gave to whom) and kind (what was given) of resource transfer within a dyad, suggesting that giving may be interpreted as indicative of a relationship based on long-term balance. As this research suggests, advancing the study of the prelinguistic representation of giving has implications for cognitive linguistics, by clarifying the relation between event participants and syntactic arguments, as well as social cognition, by identifying which kinds of relational inferences people draw from attending to acts of sharing.
This paper presents the first meta-analysis of the ‘Taking Game,’ a variant of the Dictator Game where participants take money from recipients instead of giving. Upon analyzing data from 39 experiments, which include 123 effect sizes and 7262 offers made by dictators, we discovered a significant framing effect: dictators are more generous in the Taking Game than in the Dictator Game (Cohen’s d = 0.26, p < 0.0001), leaving approximately 35.5 percent of the stakes to recipients in the former as opposed to 27.5 percent in the latter. The difference is higher when the participants have earned their endowment before sharing or when the recipient is a charity. Consistent with the standard literature on giving, we also find that participants take less from a charity than from a standard recipient, take less when payoffs are hypothetical, or when recipients have previously earned their endowment. We also find that women (non-students) take less than men (students). Finally, it appears that participants from non-OECD countries leave more money to recipients than participants from OECD countries.
Peer evaluations place organizational members in a dual role: they evaluate their peers and are being evaluated by their peers. We theorize that when evaluating their peers, they anticipate how their evaluations will be perceived and adjust their evaluations strategically to be evaluated more positively themselves when their peers assess them. Building on this overarching claim of role duality resulting in strategic peer evaluations, we focus on a dilemma that evaluating members face: they want to leverage their evaluations of peers to portray themselves as engaged and having high standards, but at the same time, they must be careful not to offend anyone as doing so may cause retaliation. We suggest that organizational members about to be evaluated resolve this dilemma by participating in more peer evaluations but carefully targeting which evaluations they participate in. We test our theory by analyzing peer evaluations on Wikipedia, supplemented by in-depth semistructured interviews. Our study informs research on peer evaluation and organizational design by revealing how being an evaluator and evaluated can make evaluations more strategic.
Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15302 .
Indirect reciprocity is widely recognized as a mechanism for explaining cooperation and can be divided into two sub-concepts: downstream and upstream reciprocity. Downstream reciprocity is supported by reputation; if someone sees you helping someone else, the person who sees this will think higher of you, and you will be more likely to be helped. Upstream reciprocity is helping someone because you are being helped by somebody else, which often happens in everyday life and experimental games. This paper focuses on the behavior of “take” and examines negative upstream reciprocity using an upstream reciprocity framework. The term “take” is defined as “to steal rather than give resources to others.” “If something is taken from you, do you take from others?” is an important extension for indirect reciprocity research; subsequently, this paper discusses experiments conducted on whether negative upstream reciprocity is chained and what causes it. The results demonstrated differences between positive and negative upstream reciprocity. In analyzing the data of nearly 600 participants to determine the extent to which negative upstream reciprocity is observed and the causes of negative upstream reciprocity, the study found that If individual A takes resources from individual B, then B is more likely to take resources from a third-party, individual C. Notably, some causes of positive upstream reciprocity were found to have no effect or the opposite effect on negative upstream reciprocity. The results also demonstrate that the first person to take can cause a chain reaction. This paper demonstrates the importance of the first person not taking from someone else and suggests the need to consider various behavioral options for future research on cooperation.
Introduction. Smartphones have changed the way people interact with each other in modern society. However, while they are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in human life, there is growing concern that they are often used at inappropriate times during social interactions. The article presents the results of a study of the phenomenon of «phubbing» as a dismissive attitude towards someone in a social environment, when the partner focuses on their mobile phone. Phubbing also significantly reduces the perceived quality of communication and satisfaction with relationships in a dyadic conversation. The article examines an attractive, although still limited, field of research that studies the phenomenon of phubbing in educational organizations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. The purpose of the study was to determine the gender characteristics of the manifestation of phubbing in cadets of educational institutions of higher education of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. Methodology, methods and techniques. A complex of empirical and mathematicalstatistical methods was used to analyze the manifestation of phubbing. Empirical data were obtained using the following methods: Phubbing Scale, consisting of 10 questions (Phubbing Scale, E. Karadağ, et al, 2015); four-factor Generic Scale of Phubbing (GSP), consisting of 15 questions, aimed at assessing the experience of exposure to phubbing. The following factors were identified as important: nomophobia, interpersonal conflict, self-isolation, recognition of the problem; Internet Addiction Test by Kimberly Young (Internet Addiction Test, IAT), translated and modified by V.A. Loskutova (Burova). Statistical processing of the research materials was performed using standard statistical procedures. Specialized application software packages «Excel» and «IBM SPSS Statistics 22.0» were used, providing the calculation of univariate statistics and comparative analysis. The study was conducted at the St. Petersburg University of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia in 2023, among the 1st – 4th year cadets. The sample consisted of 1,054 respondents aged from 17 to 26, the average age was 19.99 ± 1,495, of which 561 were male (53.2%) and 493 were female (46.8%). The results of the study. A comparative analysis of the manifestation of phubbing in male and female cadets showed significant gender differences in the factors «nomophobia» and «recognition of the problem». Based on the negative averages, it can be concluded that there is no phubbing among cadets, which is confirmed by the results of the empirical study. It was also found that male cadets are less prone to phone addiction and recognition of the problem of addiction than female cadets. When studying the gender characteristics of Internet addiction, no significant differences between the sexes were found. Scientific novelty. For the first time, a study of gender features of the manifestations of phubbing in students of educational organizations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia was conducted. As a result of the study, the socio-psychological symptoms of phubbing in the educational environment were clarified. Practical significance. The obtained research results can be used in the process of training and psychological support of cadets of educational institutions of higher education of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia.
Social interaction is a fundamental component of relationships; however, the key features of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) include marked and lifelong impairments in social interaction that adversely affects abilities to fulfil this essential relationship requirement. Despite the momentum of worldwide research on ASD, there is insufficient empirical study on adults with ASD and their relationships. This research examined the reported social interaction needs of adults when involved in neurodiverse relationships (relationships that include adults with ASD and neurotypical (NT) adults). The use of an advocacy/participatory approach allowed for a detailed investigation of the characteristics of participants’ interpersonal communication. It was identified that a pairing of incompatible social interaction needs caused a sequence of distinctive, competing, and intertwined interactions that formed into interwoven communication cycles. These cycles included compensatory and competing behaviours, which were specific to each group of participants. Prompting, prompt dependency and/or prompt avoidance occurred within a dynamic system.
The paper enhances micro-cognitive understandings of how organisational values can build internal reputation. Drawing-on a multi-method case study of a private hospital in Malaysia, we show the process of how values are internalised within organisations. We illustrate how different internal actors are important for embedding organisational values at various stages and show the interplay between them. We show leaders are important for role modelling and engaging, managers are important for embedding and reinforcing, and employees are important for empowering and reciprocating. We argue that in order for values to be internalised, leaders, managers and employees need to effectively create, communicate and enact those values. Rather than values being imposed by a single dominant internal actor, we show that they can be diffused by internal stakeholders at different hierarchical levels. We find that the internalisation of organisational values helps to form positive perceptions of the values and creates individual behaviours that correspond to those values. While the literature has focused on what dimensions and which stakeholders influence reputation building, we show how micro-cognitive processes build internal reputation from organisational values.
Humans frequently cooperate for collective benefit, even in one-shot social dilemmas. This provides a challenge for theories of cooperation. Two views focus on intuitions but offer conflicting explanations. The Social Heuristics Hypothesis argues that people with selfish preferences rely on cooperative intuitions and predicts that deliberation reduces cooperation. The Self-Control Account emphasizes control over selfish intuitions and is consistent with strong reciprocity—a preference for conditional cooperation in one-shot dilemmas. Here, we reconcile these explanations with each other as well as with strong reciprocity. We study one-shot cooperation across two main dilemma contexts, provision and maintenance, and show that cooperation is higher in provision than maintenance. Using time-limit manipulations, we experimentally study the cognitive processes underlying this robust result. Supporting the Self-Control Account, people are intuitively selfish in maintenance, with deliberation increasing cooperation. In contrast, consistent with the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, deliberation tends to increase the likelihood of free-riding in provision. Contextual differences between maintenance and provision are observed across additional measures: reaction time patterns of cooperation; social dilemma understanding; perceptions of social appropriateness; beliefs about others’ cooperation; and cooperation preferences. Despite these dilemma-specific asymmetries, we show that preferences, coupled with beliefs, successfully predict the high levels of cooperation in both maintenance and provision dilemmas. While the effects of intuitions are context-dependent and small, the widespread preference for strong reciprocity is the primary driver of one-shot cooperation. We advance the Contextualised Strong Reciprocity account as a unifying framework and consider its implications for research and policy.
Using data from a lab experiment carried out in Kenya, we show that while “legitimate” costs and costs imposed by corruption both deter investment, the latter is no more of a disincentive than the former. We interpret the evidence as consistent with the conclusion that our participants viewed corruption as just another cost of doing business. We also experimented with giving participants in some treatments information about the corruption expectations of participants in previous sessions and the actual extent of corruption in previous sessions. We find some evidence that the objective information actually increased investment without changing the participants’ own expectations regarding corruption. That result is compatible with the idea that revealing the level of corruption changes the descriptive norm and facilitates investment in a corrupt environment.
Using an experiment, we investigate whether job candidates' noncontractible effort promises increase their actual effort in the work relationship when the labor market is competitive. Due to promise-keeping preferences, individuals tend to keep promises even if doing so is costly. However, when promises can be made strategically to influence hiring decisions, it is unclear whether workers are less likely to keep their promises. We develop theory to predict that making effort promises matters even more when labor markets are competitive. We find workers promise higher effort levels when competing for a job than when they do not, but do not keep promises to a lesser extent although the costs of promise-keeping increase with the promise size, thereby increasing the total effort provided. The results enhance our understanding of the effects of worker-employer communication during hiring, particularly in a competitive setting in which such communication is most likely to occur.
This paper studies the effect of losing public health insurance eligibility on preventative care, self‐reported health, and emergency department use. I exploit the 2005 TennCare disenrollment in which 190,000 residents–mainly non‐elderly childless adults–lost public health insurance eligibility due to budget cuts. I use two surveys, the Behavioral Factor Surveillance System and the National Health Interview Survey, in a difference‐in‐difference methodology to study the effects of the reform. I find that the reform lead to a 4%–5% reduction in reporting having mammograms and breast exams. An increase of 20% in number of days with health incapacitation and no strong evidence of changes of emergency department visits (nor number of visits). I document margins of heterogeneity of the effects across demographic characteristics. Finally, I explore the margins of symmetry between gaining and losing public insurance by comparing estimates to those from the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansions.
The paper enhances micro-cognitive understandings of how organisational values can build internal reputation. Drawing-on a multi-method case study of a private hospital in Malaysia, we show the process of how values are internalised within organisations. We illustrate how different internal actors are important for embedding organisational values at various stages and show the interplay between them. We show leaders are important for role modelling and engaging, managers are important for embedding and reinforcing, and employees are important for empowering and reciprocating. We argue that in order for values to be internalised, leaders, managers and employees need to effectively create, communicate and enact those values. Rather than values being imposed by a single dominant internal actor, we show that they can be diffused by internal stakeholders at different hierarchical levels. We find that the internalisation of organisational values helps to form positive perceptions of the values and creates individual behaviours that correspond to those values. While the literature has focused on what dimensions and which stakeholders influence reputation building, we show how micro-cognitive processes build internal reputation from organisational values.
Reciprocity is a fundamental mechanism for sustained social relationships. Escalation-based theories suggest that reciprocity intensifies over time. In contrast, equity-based theories propose that people reciprocate behaviors in kind. We reconcile these conflicting perspectives by examining social exchanges across different cultural contexts. Using three complementary experiments, we investigate when, how, and why individuals in East Asian settings and those in North American settings differentially reciprocate positive versus negative behaviors over time. Study 1 demonstrated that in positively framed exchanges (i.e., giving) Americans escalated their reciprocity, but Singaporeans reciprocated in kind. However, in negatively framed exchanges (i.e., taking), Singaporeans escalated their reciprocity, but Americans reciprocated in kind. Study 2 replicated the results using Hong Kongers and showed that cultural differences in regulatory focus were associated with specific emotions (i.e., anxiety and happiness), which then escalated reciprocity. To establish causality, Study 3 manipulated regulatory focus within one culture and replicated the pattern of results.
If you are kind to me, I am likely to reciprocate and doing so feels fair. Many theories of social exchange assume that such reciprocity and fairness are well aligned with one another. We argue that this correspondence between reciprocity and fairness is restricted to interpersonal dyads and does not govern more complex multilateral interactions. When multiple people are involved, reciprocity leads to partiality, which may be seen as unfair by outsiders. We report seven studies, conducted with people from the United States, in which participants were asked to evaluate situations involving resource distribution in contexts such as economic games, government, and the workplace. Specifically, we find that equal resource distribution in multilateral interactions is seen as more fair than engaging in reciprocity. We also find that negative reciprocity is seen as more fair than positive reciprocity in these multilateral situations because positive reciprocity is perceived as based in favoritism. We rule out alternative explanations and demonstrate that there are contexts where favoritism is not viewed as unfair. These findings are important for theories of fairness and reciprocity as they demonstrate the central role of perceived partiality in the evaluation of multi‐party resource allocation.
The principle of direct reciprocity, or paying back specific individuals, is assumed to be a critical component of everyday social exchange and a key mechanism for the evolution of cooperation. Young children know the norm of reciprocity, but it is unclear whether they follow the norm for both positive and negative direct reciprocity or whether reciprocity is initially generalized. Across five experiments ( N = 330), we showed that children between 4 and 8 years of age engaged in negative direct reciprocity but generalized positive reciprocity, despite recalling benefactors. Children did not endorse the norm of positive direct reciprocity as applying to them until about 7 years of age (Study 4), but a short social-norm training enhanced this behavior in younger children (Study 5). Results suggest that negative direct reciprocity develops early, whereas positive reciprocity becomes targeted to other specific individuals only as children learn and adopt social norms.
Do people become greedier when interacting with others they perceive to be greedy? It has been speculated that greed contagion exits and may have influenced the 2008 financial collapse. We examined this possibility in four experimental studies using a common pool resource dilemma. Specifically, whether participants' second‐round (R2) withdrawal from the common pool was influenced (a) by their assessment of how greedy their opponents' first‐round (R1) withdrawal was, (b) by R1 opponents' reputation for being greedy, (c) by observing past behavior of others in unrelated interactions, and (d) when R1 opponents directly confronted them with an assessment of their own greediness of their R1 withdrawal. In addition, Study 2 examined R2 interactions involving new opponents. Taken together, results suggest that there is contagion of greed. However, the connection appears to be driven by participants adjusting to their opponent's actual behavior, not by their evaluation of the greediness of such behavior. It seems that perceptions of greed do not mediate future behavior and, thus, are not necessarily contagious, but norms of selfish behavior are. In this sense, greed perceptions appear to by epiphenomenal in that they are an incidental by‐product of the behavioral interaction. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest directions for further research.
The dictator game is a well-known task measuring prosocial preferences, in which one person divides a fixed amount of windfall money with a recipient. A key factor in real-world transfers of wealth is the concept of property ownership and consequently the related acts of giving and taking. Using a variation of the traditional dictator game (N = 256), we examined whether individual differences under different game frames corresponded with prosocial personality traits from the Big Five (politeness, compassion) and HEXACO (Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience) (honesty-humility, agreeableness) models. In the Big Five model, the effects of prosocial personality traits were generally stronger and more consistent for taking than for giving, in line with a “do-no-harm” explanation, whereby prosocial individuals felt less entitled to and less willing to infringe on the endowments of others. In contrast, HEXACO honesty-humility predicted allocations across both frames, consistent with its broad association with fair-mindedness, and providing further evidence of its role in allocations of wealth more generally. These findings highlight the utility of integrating personality psychology with behavioral economics, in which the discriminant validity across prosocial traits can shed light on the distinct motivations underpinning social decisions.
Bidirectional associations between being cyberbullied and cyberbullying others have been suggested, as well as bidirectional patterns of online prosocial behavior (reciprocity). However, so far, these relations have been studied as population-level associations, and it is not clear whether they also reflect within-person behavioral patterns. Therefore, this study aimed to disentangle between-person and within-person processes in online antisocial (cyberbullying) and prosocial behavior over time. Random intercept cross-lagged panel models were used to examine long-term within-person patterns of involvement in cyberbullying and online prosocial behavior. The findings showed no within-person effects between cyberbullying victimization and perpetration over time. In contrast, results did reveal significant within-person autoregressive effects of performing and receiving online prosocial behavior over time, and within-person cross-lagged effects between receiving online prosocial behavior and acting prosocially later on. These results indicate long-term positive, reinforcing spirals of prosocial exchanges, but no long-term negative spirals of cyberbullying perpetration and victimization.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate, through the lens of gift-giving theory, volunteers’ motivations for intending to stay with organizations.
Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 379 volunteers from 30 charitable organizations operating in Italy’s socio-healthcare service sector. Bootstrapped mediation analysis was used to test the hypothesized relationships.
Findings – Volunteers’ reciprocal attitudes and gift-giving intentions partially mediated the relationship between motives and intentions to stay.
Practical implications – Policy makers of charitable organizations are advised to be more responsive to behavioral signals revealing volunteers’ motivations, attitudes, and intentions. Managers should appropriately align organizational responsiveness with volunteers’ commitment through gift-giving exchange systems.
Originality/value – The findings reveal that reciprocity and gift-giving are significant organizational variables greatly influencing volunteers’ intentions to stay with organizations. Signaling theory is used to explain how volunteers’ attitudes are linked with organizational responsiveness. Furthermore, this study is the first to use an Italian setting to consider motives, reciprocity, and gift-giving as they relate to intentions to stay.
Recent research suggests that self-righteousness is bounded, arising more reliably in evaluations of immoral actions than in evaluations of moral actions. Here, we test four implications of this asymmetry in self-righteousness and the mechanism explaining it. We find that people are less likely to make negative character inferences from their own unethical behavior than from others’ unethical behavior (Experiment 1), believe they would feel worse after an unethical action than others (Experiment 2), and believe they are less capable of extreme unethical behavior than others (Experiment 3). We observe weaker self–other differences in evaluations of ethical actions. This occurs partly because people base evaluations of themselves on their own moral intentions, leading to predictable individual differences. People more likely to ascribe cynical motives to their own behavior exhibit a smaller asymmetry in self-righteousness (Experiment 4). Self-righteousness seems better characterized as feeling “less evil than thou” than feeling “holier than thou.”
Advancing a theoretical model to explain the negative effects of texting on romantic relationships, we suggest that constant texting leads partners to attend to their cell phones instead of communicating with their significant other (Pphubbing), reducing through two different processes the perceived quality of a romantic relationship. These processes are: (1) conflicts erupting between couples due to texting behavior; and (2) lack of intimacy, stemming from texting activities that displace focus on the romantic partner. To test the model we conducted a two-wave, representative panel survey, separated by one year. A cross-lagged analysis of the two-wave panel demonstrates that frequency of texting leads to lower levels of perceived quality in relationships. This relationship militates against the argument that individuals in unhappy relationships turn to the phone to avoid being together with the partner. Additionally, results support the proposed model suggesting that both mediators -lack of intimacy and conflicts- have negative effects on perceived relationship quality over time.
Significance
Does being elected to political office change an individual’s behavior? Some scholars and policymakers assert that elected officials are inherently different from nonpoliticians, whereas others argue that political institutions or the culture of politics inculcate certain behaviors. We identify the effect of holding office on behavior. We recruit in-office and out-of-office politicians in Zambia to participate in behavioral games that measure reciprocity, a behavioral trait that underpins various interactions in the political arena from bribery to lobbying to legislative bargaining. We find that holding elected office causes an increase in reciprocity. The policy implication of this finding is that political institutions, culture, and incentive structures can be designed to shape the behavior and choices of society’s leaders.
Two experiments with preschoolers (36 to 78 months) and 8-year-old children (Experiment 1, N = 173; Experiment 2, N = 132) investigated the development of children's resource distribution in dominance contexts. On the basis of the distributive justice literature, 2 opposite predictions were tested. Children could match resource allocation with the unequal social setting they observe and thus favor a dominant individual over a subordinate 1. Alternatively, children could choose to compensate the subordinate if they consider that the dominance asymmetry should be counteracted. Two experiments using a giving task (Experiment 1) and a taking task (Experiment 2) led to the same results. In both experiments, children took dominance into account when allocating resources. Moreover, their distributive decisions were similarly affected by age: Although 3- and 4-year-old children favored the dominant individual, 5-year-old children showed no preference and 8-year-old children strongly favored the subordinate. Several mechanisms accounting for this developmental pattern are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record
Smartphones allow people to connect with others from almost anywhere at any time. However, there is growing concern that smartphones may actually sometimes detract, rather than complement, social interactions. The term “phubbing” represents the act of snubbing someone in a social setting by concentrating on one’s phone instead of talking to the person directly. The current study was designed to examine some of the psychological antecedents and consequences of phubbing behavior. We examined the contributing roles of Internet addiction, fear of missing out, self-control, and smartphone addiction, and how the frequency of phubbing behavior and of being phubbed may both lead to the perception that phubbing is normative. The results revealed that Internet addiction, fear of missing out, and self-control predicted smartphone addiction, which in turn predicted the extent to which people phub. This path also predicted the extent to which people feel that phubbing is normative, both via (a) the extent to which people are phubbed themselves, and (b) independently. Further, gender moderated the relationship between the extent to which people are phubbed and their perception that phubbing is normative. The present findings suggest that phubbing is an important factor in modern communication that warrants further investigation.
Both restorative justice and resource theory focus attention on harmful interactions whose resolution sometimes requires the involvement of a third party. Ronald Cohen, in this chapter, reviews recent work in both traditions and underscores the importance of identifying and examining three issues that have escaped systematic attention. First, the nature of the central roles of victim, perpetrator, and “community” need to be clarified. Second, the complexities involved in shifting from a dyadic to a triadic social relation need to be addressed. And, third, the discursive dimension of status alignments and realignments needs to be analyzed. Cohen offers suggestions about why these issues are important and how they might be addressed.
People who are in powerful positions (e.g., government officials, employers, parents) often decide how to allocate goods to other people. Indeed, control over resources is precisely one of the things that confers power. This chapter provides a brief overview of distributive justice theory, which deals with fairness standards for allocating some limited resource. We next review relevant research on social power, or the ability to influence others in psychologically meaningful ways through the giving or withholding of rewards and punishments. We then present two experiments that examine the effects of power and a number of situational (e.g., ingroup–outgroup, priming notions of power or merit), demographic (e.g., gender), and attitude and personality variables (e.g., political orientation, communal orientation, merit orientation, work ethic, egalitarianism, collectivism, and empathy) on individuals’ allocation behavior in a resource distribution task. The experiments examine the allocation of two different resources: money (Experiment 1) and time on work assignments (Experiment 2). Across both experiments, the results indicate a strong norm of equality, which appears to trump other considerations, such as recipients’ apparent need, merit, or similarity to the allocator. The final section discusses the findings’ implications, such as whether this egalitarian norm can be overcome, and whether it is desirable to do so.
Recent research has found that even preschoolers give more resources to others who have previously given resources to them, but the psychological bases of this reciprocity are unknown. In our study, a puppet distributed resources between herself and a child by taking some from a pile in front of the child or else by giving some from a pile in front of herself. Although the resulting distributions were identical, three- and five-year-olds reciprocated less generously when the puppet had taken rather than given resources. This suggests that children’s judgments about resource distribution are more about the social intentions of the distributor and the social framing of the distributional act than about the amount of resources obtained. In order to rule out that the differences in the children’s reciprocal behavior were merely due to experiencing gains and losses, we conducted a follow-up study. Here, three- and-five year olds won or lost resources in a lottery draw and could then freely give or take resources to/from a puppet, respectively. In this study, they did not respond differently after winning vs. losing resources.
Introduction: Over the last decades, response rates XE "response rates" in market and social surveys have been declining continuously. Given that the response rate is one of the most critical methodological issues, a special conference aimed at professionals from the top agencies in market research was devoted to this topic in 2008. The conference title was: Where have all the respondents gone? All participants observed a serious loss in respondents' cooperation (AMA and SPSS 2008), although there was no agreement on which response rate level is still acceptable: governments demand 85 %, academics accept about 50 % for their publications, and for an average marketing study 20 % seems to be a good level. At the end of the conference, a discussion took place on how to engage with selected people and make them want to interact with interviewers. This discussion culminated in a call for investigating and working out the basics of how to interact with people in today's world. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012. All rights are reserved.
People regularly take prosocial actions, making individual sacrifices for the greater good. Similarly, people generally avoid causing harm to others. These twin desires to do good and avoid harm often align, but sometimes they can diverge, creating situations of moral conflict. Here, we examined this moral conflict using a modified dictator game. Participants chose how much money to allocate away from a recipient who was designated as an orphan, creating a sense of harm. This money was then reallocated to either the participant or a charity. People were strongly prosocial: they allocated more money away from the orphan for charity than for themselves. Furthermore, people left more money with the orphan when the harm was framed as a means (taking) than as a side effect (splitting). As is predicted by dual-process theories of moral decision making, response times were longer with the take action and were positively correlated with the amount taken from the orphan. We concluded that just as people take positive actions for the greater good, they are similarly more willing to cause harm when it benefits others rather than themselves.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to investigate how executives can rapidly gain employee acceptance for strategic change through reciprocal sensegiving. The author draw on a processual case study of a transformational European merger to study this question, highlighting the properties of reciprocity in making sense of urgent strategic change, then developing them through the lens of a gift exchange.
Design/methodology/approach
– The author draws on several qualitative methods to study sensegiving and sensemaking processes in Alpha and Beta from 2011 to 2014: insider-outsider team meetings at the beginning, mid-way and at the end of the merger integration process, ethnographic field notes during a four-month research internship, one focus group meeting with Alpha and Beta managers after the announcement of the redistribution of managerial positions, interviews with a carefully selected sample of top and middle managers, participant observation in key sensegiving meetings with top managers and “custodians,” triangulation with secondary data from the database Factiva, and finally follow-up insider corroboration of the findings by the research intern who took up a management position at Alpha in 2014.
Findings
– Likening executive and employee sensegiving to a gift-giving and gift-returning exchange, the author elucidates how executives induce employees to quickly “give in” to strategic change imperatives. the author single out the key third party role of custodians of reciprocity in the mechanism, using the metaphor of the Trojan horse to illustrate its executive use and point to the underexplored darker side of prosocial sensegiving dynamics.
Research limitations/implications
– Further research should clarify the long-term advantages and disadvantages of the mechanism. The Trojan horse mechanism possibly sacrifices long-term reciprocity for short-term purposes. Following the example of executives in this case study, use of the Trojan horse mechanism should be followed by attention to socio-political balance concerns, including new procedures that clarify the link between value creation aims and employees’ collective contribution. Without such a cohesion-building exercise, employees’ feelings of procedural injustice may build up, resulting in negative reciprocity in subsequent change projects.
Practical implications
– The work indicates that a leader’s visionary credentials are not the main source of her norm-shaping power in a project of urgent strategic change. Visionary credentials are welcomed by the dominant group of employees as long as they are framed as a symbolic management exercise that will not substantially impact socio-political balance. Substantively, employees make sense of the justice of urgent strategic change primarily through the lens of custodians and their “power from the past.”
Social implications
– All in all, executives should use the Trojan horse mechanism sparingly, in contexts of urgent strategic change and institutionalized employee behavior. Working with sources and voices of resistance from lower levels of management is more likely to yield symbiotic integration benefits.
Originality/value
– Applied to the problem of rapid strategic change in a non-crisis context, the Trojan horse mechanism is a solution to the question: how can executives avoid lengthy socio-political confrontations and quickly induce employee ownership of painful strategic changes?
This research documents the “friendly taking effect” in choosing consumption packages for the self and others: interpersonal closeness leads to a preference for a self-benefiting package when this package also offers greater total benefit to the self-other collective (studies 1-2). We propose that a friendly intention (i.e., concern for the total benefit) underlies the friendly taking effect; therefore, people both take more from and give more to a close (vs. distant) other when doing so offers greater benefits in total (study 3), and people are cognitively tuned in to (e.g., acquire, remember) information about the total benefit more when choosing a package for themselves and a close (vs. distant) other (study 4). Moreover, the importance people place on the total benefit mediates the impact of closeness on people’s preference for self-benefiting packages (study 5). We explore the boundary conditions (study 6) and implications for marketers of consumption packages (study 7).
Reputation systems that rely on voluntary feedback from traders are important in creating and sustaining trust in markets. Feedback nevertheless is a public good, and providing it is often costly. We combine theory with a laboratory experiment to study the effect of a seller precommitment mechanism: Sellers have an option to commit by providing a rebate to reduce the buyer's feedback reporting cost before making purchasing decisions. Our theory predicts that this mechanism induces noncooperative sellers to cooperate in the listed-price market. Using a buyer–seller trust game with a unilateral feedback scheme, we find that the seller's rebate decision has a significant impact on the buyer's purchasing decision via signaling the seller's cooperative type. More importantly, market efficiency under the precommitment mechanism increases with the probability that sellers will provide a rebate. Compared with the no rebate mechanism market, more efficient trades can be achieved when the sellers offer a rebate to the buyers in the market with the rebate mechanism, even when the rebate does not cover the full cost of feedback reporting.
Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1848 .
This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics.
This article reports findings from an interpretevist, qualitative study exploring the connections and dynamics of friendship among three groups of secondary school-aged young adults. Each group included an individual with autism or intellectual and developmental disabilities who had extensive or pervasive support needs, and at least one high school student without disabilities. Data were collected through naturalistic observation and semi-structured interviews of the friends in two public high schools and one after-school dance program. Data were analyzed inductively to examine how the students enacted their friendships on a daily basis and how they made meaning of their friendships practically and conceptually. The thematic findings included (a) excitement and motivation, (b) shared humor, (c) normalized supports, (d) mutual benefits, and (e) differing conceptions of friendships. Implications of the findings, including descriptors of friendship and a broader conceptualization of reciprocity, are discussed.
We find that dictator giving is higher in group environments, where the dictator and recipient share a common group affiliation, and the funds are group-owned, than in the benchmark individual environment, where the dictator and recipient do not share a group affiliation, and the funds are owned by the dictator. A move to the group environment from the individual environment involves two distinct shifts: one, a shift in affiliation, where the dictator gives to a group member, rather than just a randomly matched partner out of his own fund, and, two, a shift in ownership, where the dictator gives out of group-owned rather than personal funds, in either case to a group member. We implemented these two shifts through linguistic framing of instructions. Our results show that,although simple group framing does lead to a somewhat higher give rate, group framing combined with joint psychological ownership of the endowment leads to significantly higher average offers in the dictator game.
This article introduces a novel concept, Belief in a Zero-Sum Game (BZSG), proposed as
another belief dimension in the family of social axioms. We conceptualize BZSG as a belief
system about the antagonistic nature of social relations—that one person’s gain is possible only
at the expense of other persons. It appears on a level of personal convictions and as a cultural
worldview ideology. We found that persons or nations who believe in a zero-sum game engage
in win-lose social exchanges over limited resources. Psychometric evidence for the universality
of the BZSG scale in a large pancultural project of 37 nations is presented, where individual
and cultural-level predictors of BZSG were tested, followed by their multilevel analyses.
BZSG, which shows a conceptual and empirical affinity with societal cynicism, is moderated by
previously described cultural dimensions and by objective socio-economic indices.
Informed by social exchange theory, this study examines whether and how employees reciprocate to their organizations for the idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) they receive. Specifically, the authors examined whether i-deals (in scheduling flexibility and professional development) are related to employees’ flexible work role orientation, social networking behavior, and organizational trust over time. In turn, they hypothesized that these mediating variables would be positively related to employees’ use of constructive voice. Data were collected from 466 managers and professionals in the United States and China at three points in time over a 10-month period. The data analyses revealed that flexible work role orientation, social networking behavior, and organizational trust all mediated the relationship between i-deals and voice behavior. Furthermore, the mediating effects were generally stronger for professional development i-deals than for scheduling flexibility i-deals and were generally stronger in the China sample than in the U.S. sample. The article concludes with a discussion of the utility of social exchange theory as a framework for future research on i-deals and for guiding the implementation of i-deals in organizational settings.
One essential and increasingly emphasized area for sport managers to consider is relationship marketing (RM), with particular reference to relationship quality (RQ). Relationship quality is the overall assessment of relational strength and it is important to the study of RM because it provides a lens to view wide-ranging relational constructs and more precisely distinguish sport RM efforts. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the RQ construct of reciprocity on the outcome of attendance intention through the established relational mediators of trust and commitment. Several hypotheses were generated. Specifically, reciprocity will positively impact trust, commitment, and attendance intentions. Additionally, both trust and commitment were hypothesized to positively impact attendance intentions. Participants were 423 NCAA Division 1 student-subjects. Through CFA and bootstrap confidence interval (CI) the research hypotheses concerning the direct and mediated effects of reciprocity on sport consumer attendance intentions were supported.
The Thälmann Monument, conceived by the artist Lev Kerbel and erected in East Berlin's district of Prenzlauer Berg in 1986, was one of the only major political monuments in Berlin that the SED constituted as a special gift to the people of Berlin. Its dedication took on a highly theatrical character in which the SED staged the act of gift giving, suggesting that its intended memorial functions went beyond those of commemoration, education, and veneration; rather, the monument demands a more nuanced examination of the social relationships surrounding the dedicatory ritual. Rather than judge monuments according to a template of artistic, historical, or ethical criteria, this chapter explores how artistic objects accrue social value and provoke public attention and defence.
A great deal of psychological research has investigated the influence of perspective taking on individuals, indicating that perspective taking increases the extent to which people like, feel a sense of self-other overlap with, and help those whose perspective they take. However, previous investigations of the topic have been limited to the study of the perspective taker, rather than the individual whose perspective has been taken. The purpose of the current work is to begin to fill this large gap in the literature by examining the consequences of believing that another individual is taking one's perspective, a phenomenon we refer to as perceived perspective taking. Over a series of 6 experiments, we demonstrate that perceiving that one's perspective has been taken confers many of the same interpersonal benefits as taking another's perspective. Specifically, our data suggest that believing that another person has successfully taken one's perspective results in an increased liking for, a greater sense of self-other overlap with, and more help provided to that person. Consistent with predictions, we find that one's self-other overlap with the perspective taker and the amount of empathy one perceives the perspective taker to feel operate in tandem to mediate the link between perceived perspective taking and liking for the perspective taker. Further, a mediational path from perceived perspective taking to helping behavior through liking is supported. Future directions are discussed, along with implications for theory and application in domains such as intergroup relations, conflict resolution, and political campaigning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
Promises are social contracts that can be broken, kept, or exceeded. Breaking one's promise is evaluated more negatively than keeping one's promise. Does expending more effort to exceed a promise lead to equivalently more positive evaluations? Although linear in their outcomes, we expected an asymmetry in evaluations of broken, kept, and exceeded promises. Whereas breaking one's promise is obviously negative compared to keeping a promise, we predicted that exceeding one's promise would not be evaluated more positively than merely keeping a promise. Three sets of experiments involving hypothetical, recalled, and actual promises support these predictions. A final experiment suggests this asymmetry comes from overvaluing kept promises rather than undervaluing exceeded promises. We propse this pattern may reflect a general tendency in social systems to discourage selfishness and reward cooperation. Breaking one's promise is costly, but exceeding it does not appear worth the effort.
Despite the importance of reciprocity in many areas of social life, little is known about possible factors affecting it and its interplay with the self-interest motive to maximize one's own gains. In this study, we examined the role of cognitive control in reciprocal behavior to determine whether it is a deliberate and controlled act or whether the behavior is evoked automatically. In Experiment 1, depletion of cognitive control resources increased the rate of rejected unfair offers in the ultimatum game despite associated financial loss. In Experiments 2A and 2B, using 2 depletion manipulations, we extended these results and showed that depleted participants returned more money in response to highly trusting investments during the trust game. These results suggest that reciprocity considerations are actively suppressed when attempting to maximize one's own gains. When cognitive control is limited, this suppression becomes difficult, and consequently reciprocity considerations prevail. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
When people are the victims of greed or recipients of generosity, their first impulse is often to pay back that behavior in kind. What happens when people cannot reciprocate, but instead have the chance to be cruel or kind to someone entirely different-to pay it forward? In 5 experiments, participants received greedy, equal, or generous divisions of money or labor from an anonymous person and then divided additional resources with a new anonymous person. While equal treatment was paid forward in kind, greed was paid forward more than generosity. This asymmetry was driven by negative affect, such that a positive affect intervention disrupted the tendency to pay greed forward. Implications for models of generalized reciprocity are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
Many previous experiments document that behavior in multi-person settings responds to the name of the game and the labeling of strategies. With a few exceptions, these studies cannot tell whether frames affect preferences or beliefs. In three large experiments, we investigate whether social framing effects are also present in Dictator games. Since only one of the subjects makes a decision, the frame can affect behavior merely through preferences. In all the experiments, we find that behavior is insensitive to social framing. We discuss how to reconcile the absence of social framing effects in Dictator games with the presence of social framing effects in Ultimatum games.
For this text focused on the social psychology of justice, the authors have assembled the most current information relating to 5 major questions. These questions look specifically at how justice is defined, how it influences individuals' thoughts and actions and shapes their behavior, and when and why it matters. The underlying unifying theme is that individuals do care about issues of fairness in their interactions with others, with groups, and with institutions they support or oppose.
Using this theme as their guidepost, the authors explore research on relative deprivation, distributive justice, procedural justice, and retributive justice. Extensive use of examples drawn from contemporary culture make this book an informative and engaging collection of the most current thinking about topics such as diversity, gender, equal pay, personal satisfaction, 3rd-party dispute management, crime, cultural preservation, and scarcity theory.
This text will be a valuable source for advanced courses on social justice, interpersonal relations, negotiation, intergroup conflict, and group processes in social psychology, political science, sociology, and legal studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and salience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.
Physical conflicts tend to escalate. For example, as tit-for-tat exchanges between two children escalate, both will often assert that the other hit him or her harder. Here we show that, in such situations, both sides are reporting their true percept and that the escalation is a natural by-product of
This review covers recent developments in the social influence literature, focusing primarily on compliance and conformity research published between 1997 and 2002. The principles and processes underlying a target's susceptibility to outside influences are considered in light of three goals fundamental to rewarding human functioning. Specifically, targets are motivated to form accurate perceptions of reality and react accordingly, to develop and preserve meaningful social relationships, and to maintain a favorable self-concept. Consistent with the current movement in compliance and conformity research, this review emphasizes the ways in which these goals interact with external forces to engender social influence processes that are subtle, indirect, and outside of awareness.
Cooperation is needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization. Genomes, cells, multicellular organisms, social insects, and human society are all based on cooperation. Cooperation means that selfish replicators forgo some of their reproductive potential to help one another. But natural selection implies competition and therefore opposes cooperation unless a specific mechanism is at work. Here I discuss five mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. For each mechanism, a simple rule is derived that specifies whether natural selection can lead to cooperation.
Community standards of fairness for the setting of prices and wages were elicited by telephone surveys. In customer or labor markets it isacceptable for a firm to raise prices (or cut wages) when profits arethreatened, and to maintain prices when costs diminish. It is unfair toexploit shifts in demand by raising prices or cutting wages. Several market anomalies are explained by assuming that these standards of fairness influence the behavior of firms. Copyright 1986 by American Economic Association.
The manner in which the concept of reciprocity is implicated in functional theory is explored, enabling a reanalysis of the concepts of "survival" and "exploitation." The need to distinguish between the concepts of complementarity and reciprocity is stressed. Distinctions are also drawn between (1) reciprocity as a pattern of mutually contingent exchange of gratifications, (2) the existential or folk belief in reciprocity, and (3) the generalized moral norm of reciprocity. Reciprocity as a moral norm is analyzed; it is hypothesized that it is one of the universal "principal components" of moral codes. As Westermarck states, "To requite a benefit, or to be grateful to him who bestows it, is probably everywhere, at least under certain circumstances, regarded as a duty. This is a subject which in the present connection calls for special consideration." Ways in which the norm of reciprocity is implicated in the maintenance of stable social systems are examined.
Game theory attempts to dissect the rules by which humans interact. In his commentary, Wedekind discusses some new results
in a recent paper in
Nature
that suggest that some acts of altruism may not be so altruistic after all. A donation to a street musician or a beggar may
actually be an act of self-interest, if the giving can be observed by others and increases the donor's social status.
Retribution and revenge, two highly related concepts, are arguably the oldest, most basic and most pervasive justice reactions associated with human social life. While scholarship about retribution and revenge has tended to focus on criminal justice, empirical evidence indicates that retribution is important in other matters related to law. For example, medical malpractice, discrimination, and a panoply of civil lawsuits can be primarily fueled by a desire for retribution. Retributive motives can appear at the core of intractable business disputes and other commercial disagreements. In this article, Professor Vidmar develops a conceptual framework to study retribution as a psychological and social phenomenon. He explores a number of conceptual issues, including how a social science approach differs from legal and philosophical approaches. His discussion explores the sociological and psychological functions that punishment serves. Separate sections of the article discuss the cognitive dynamics of retribution and its emotional/behavioral aspects as well. The article raises important questions about retribution. Are reactions different if the justice is dispensed by the victim, by neutral authorities, or by "acts of fate" (or God)? What are the consequences when nothing happens to the perpetrator? How does excessive punishment of the offender or remorse affect retributive reactions? The author's insight raises important implications for legal and other settings in which punishment is administered.
Cooperation in organisms, whether bacteria or primates, has been a difficulty for evolutionary theory since Darwin. On the
assumption that interactions between pairs of individuals occur on a probabilistic basis, a model is developed based on the
concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Deductions from the model, and
the results of a computer tournament show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive
while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established. Potential applications
include specific aspects of territoriality, mating, and disease.
The "iterated prisoner's dilemma" is the most widely used model for the evolution of cooperation in biological societies. Here we show that a heterogeneous population consisting of simple strategies, whose behavior is totally specified by the outcome of the previous round, can lead to persistent periodic or highly irregular (chaotic) oscillations in the frequencies of the strategies and the overall level of cooperation. The levels of cooperation jump up and down in an apparently unpredictable fashion. Small recurrent and simultaneous invasion attempts (caused by mutation) can change the evolutionary dynamics from converging to an evolutionarily stable strategy to periodic oscillations and chaos. Evolution can be twisted away from defection, toward cooperation. Adding "generous tit-for-tat" greatly increases the overall level of cooperation and can lead to long periods of steady cooperation. Since May's paper [May, R. M. (1976) Nature (London) 261, 459-467], "simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics" have been found in many biological applications, but here we provide an example of a biologically relevant evolutionary game whose dynamics display deterministic chaos. The simulations bear some resemblance to the irregular cycles displayed by the frequencies of host genotypes and specialized parasites in evolutionary "arms races" [Hamilton, W. D., Axelrod, R. & Tanese, R. (1990) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 87, 3566-3573; Seger, J. (1988) Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London B 319, 541-555].
The defining feature of social dilemma situations is the inherent conflict faced by those involved: should one act in his or her own individual best interest or sacrifice a measure of one's personal payoff to help maximize the joint payoff of the group as a whole? In such dilemmas, those making individualistic and defecting choices are always at a competitive advantage relative to those who choose to cooperate. One seemingly inevitable consequence of the resulting resource allocation asymmetry is that it must challenge and threaten the cooperator's sense of fairness and justice, and it is the reaction of those caught in social dilemmas to this injustice and unfairness that is the focus of this article. We examine how justice processes-distributive justice, procedural justice, restorative justice, and retributive justice-operate in social dilemmas. Within this examination, we consider ideas from classic and contemporary conceptual analyses of justice to provide a broader context within which to understand social dilemmas and the roles that justice plays as people strive to ensure fair outcomes for themselves and for others. We conclude with the proposal of a 4-stage, sequential model of justice in social dilemmas that posits groups move between the types of justice concerns when unfair and unsatisfactory outcomes (e.g., inequitable resource allocations, violations of agreed-on allocation rules, intentional and egregious exploitation of the group) cause members to "recognize the necessity" for change to ensure fair and just outcomes for all.
Loss aversion occurs because people expect losses to have greater hedonic impact than gains of equal magnitude. In two studies, people predicted that losses in a gambling task would have greater hedonic impact than would gains of equal magnitude, but when people actually gambled, losses did not have as much of an emotional impact as they predicted. People overestimated the hedonic impact of losses because they underestimated their tendency to rationalize losses and overestimated their tendency to dwell on losses. The asymmetrical impact of losses and gains was thus more a property of affective forecasts than a property of affective experience.
Analysis of decision making under risk has been dominated by expected utility theory, which generally accounts for people's actions. Presents a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and argues that common forms of utility theory are not adequate, and proposes an alternative theory of choice under risk called prospect theory. In expected utility theory, utilities of outcomes are weighted by their probabilities. Considers results of responses to various hypothetical decision situations under risk and shows results that violate the tenets of expected utility theory. People overweight outcomes considered certain, relative to outcomes that are merely probable, a situation called the "certainty effect." This effect contributes to risk aversion in choices involving sure gains, and to risk seeking in choices involving sure losses. In choices where gains are replaced by losses, the pattern is called the "reflection effect." People discard components shared by all prospects under consideration, a tendency called the "isolation effect." Also shows that in choice situations, preferences may be altered by different representations of probabilities. Develops an alternative theory of individual decision making under risk, called prospect theory, developed for simple prospects with monetary outcomes and stated probabilities, in which value is given to gains and losses (i.e., changes in wealth or welfare) rather than to final assets, and probabilities are replaced by decision weights. The theory has two phases. The editing phase organizes and reformulates the options to simplify later evaluation and choice. The edited prospects are evaluated and the highest value prospect chosen. Discusses and models this theory, and offers directions for extending prospect theory are offered. (TNM)
Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effects of this uncertainty, a stochastic dynamic growth model with the public sector is examined. It is shown that deterministic excessive red tape and corruption deteriorate the growth potential through income redistribution and public sector inefficiencies. Most importantly, it is demonstrated that the increase in corruption via higher uncertainty exerts adverse effects on capital accumulation, thus leading to lower growth rates.
The origin of virtue: Human instincts and the evolution of cooperation
- R T Ridley
Ridley, R.T. (1971). The origin of virtue: Human instincts and the
evolution of cooperation. London: Penguin Books.
Resource theory of social exchange
- U G Foa
- E B Foa
Foa, U.G., & Foa, E.B. (1975). Resource theory of social exchange.
Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.