Henk A. M. Wilke’s research while affiliated with Leiden University and other places

Same-sex groups were confronted with mathematically equivalent social dilemma games, framed as take-some or give-some games. For choice behaviour no difference between take-some and give-some games was observed. However, in take-some games subjects were more inclined to relinquish decision-making authority to a leader than in give-some games. Some rival interpretations of these data are offered.

In this chapter we give an overview of our research program in which we investigate how status affects the influence behavior of people in co-operative task groups. Based on expectation states theory (Berger, Wagner, & Zelditch, 1985) we investigated in which situations self-oriented or group-oriented motivations underlie influence differentials. The results of four laboratory experiments suggest that participants were only group-oriented when their relative status positions were unlikely to change. As soon as there was a possibility that status relations might change, the participants became self-oriented; they showed a greater reluctance to accept influence and tried to influence others more often. The implications of the results for expectation states theory and the literature on social influence are discussed.

In two experiments we compared contrasting findings on bad news transmission likelihood between literature on rumors and the MUM-effect in order to contribute to the development of a more general theory of news transmission. We argued that several contextual differences account for the contrasting findings between these research conditions. We predicted that fate similarity and fate uncertainty (both present in many rumor contexts and absent in most MUM-contexts) enhance the anticipated personal outcomes of bad news transmission for communicators and hence increase bad news transmission. Supporting our argument, we found that fate uncertainty and fate similarity each increased the likelihood of bad news transmission up to the level of good news transmission. Furthermore, these effects were mediated by communicators' anticipated personal outcomes of transmission. In addition, Experiment 2 demonstrated anticipated personal outcomes to be only an important motive for news transmission decisions in superficial relationships; for close relationships, experienced moral responsibility appeared to be the paramount motive for transmission.

The authors investigate the effect of power differences and associated expectations in social decision making. Using a modified ultimatum game, the authors show that allocators lower their offers to recipients when the power difference shifts in favor of the allocator. Remarkably, however, when recipients are completely powerless, offers increase. This effect is mediated by a change in framing of the situation: When the opponent is without power, feelings of social responsibility are evoked. On the recipient side, the authors show that recipients do not anticipate these higher outcomes resulting from powerlessness. They prefer more power over less, expecting higher outcomes when they are more powerful, especially when less power entails powerlessness. Results are discussed in relation to empathy gaps and social responsibility.

Studies that use the norm activation theory (Schwartz, 1977) to explain pro-environmental behavior often focus on personal norms and on two situational activators, i.e., awareness of need and situational responsibility (e.g., Vining & Ebreo, 1992). The theory's other situational activators, efficacy and ability, and its personality trait activators, awareness of consequences and denial of responsibility, are generally ignored. The current article reports on two studies - a mail survey among the general public (N = 345) and a laboratory experiment among university freshmen (N = 166)–that found that (1) inclusion of additional activators improved the norm activation theory's potential to explain pro-environmental behavior and (2) personal norms significantly mediated the impact of activators on pro-environmental behavior. Theoretical issues and issues concerning environmental management evoked by these results are discussed.

In this article, we study how the strength of outcome dependence, defined as the extent to which people's outcomes depend on authority's decisions, influences their reactions to voice or no-voice procedures. We suggest that in situations where people are strongly outcome dependent they assume that the authority may not consider their views, and therefore voice procedures exert less influence on people's procedure judgments than in situations where they are not strongly outcome dependent. Findings of two experiments corroborate this line of reasoning: In strongly outcome dependent situations, recipients' procedure judgments are influenced less strongly by voice versus no-voice procedures than in moderate or weak outcome dependent situations. Furthermore, these effects were found for both pre-decision voice (Experiment 1) and for post-decision voice (Experiment 2). It is concluded that strong outcome dependence decreases the value-expressive function of voice opportunities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Previous social dilemma research has shown that sanctioning defection may enhance cooperation. The authors argue that this finding may have resulted from restricting participants to two behaviors (cooperation and defection). In this article, the authors introduce the concept of a "social trilemma" (a social dilemma in which an alternative option to defect is present) and tested the effect of a sanction. The authors show that a sanction only increased cooperation and collective interests in the traditional social dilemma. In a social trilemma, the sanction failed because it caused some people to choose the alternative option to defect. Moreover, the results indicate that this was especially the case when people did not expect fellow group members to cooperate. In this case, the sanction even worked counterproductive because it decreased collective interests. It is concluded that allowing individuals to consider alternative options to defect can reveal the potential detrimental effects of sanctioning systems for the collective.

The authors focus on the effects an authority’s apparent inconsistency between persons on judgments of relational treatment and procedural justice following negative procedures (i.e., procedures that people commonly regard as unfair). In Experiment 1, participants responded most negatively following a procedure that denied them, but granted another participant, an opportunity to voice an opinion when the intergroup context raised suspicions of bias (i.e., when both the experimenter and another participant were outgroup members). In Experiment 2, participants responded most negatively when the experimenter had expressed biased attitudes in favor of another participant, but this effect occurred only following procedures that denied participants a voice opportunity. We conclude that authority’s biased attitudes help people to make sense of negative procedure information.

The value of personal norms (Schwartz, 1977) for proenvironmental behavior has been demonstrated in previous studies (e.g., Vining & Ebreo, 1992), but not in addition to the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen & Madden, 1986). In the present study, this combination was investigated by means of a mail survey among a sample of 305 Dutch citizens who were enlisted to participate in a behavioral change intervention program on environmentally relevant behavior. Personal norms appear to increase the proportion of explained variance in 5 intentions and 4 self-reported measures of performed environmentally relevant behaviors beyond that explained by three of the theory of planned behavior constructs (i.e., attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control). Issues evoked by these results are discussed.