Interindividual-intergroup discontinuity in the domain of correspondent outcomes: The roles of relativistic concern, perceived categorization, and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.

Most prior research on the tendency for groups to be less cooperative than individuals (the interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect) has used the Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG). Experiment 1 examined the discontinuity effect with 3 additional matrices: Chicken, Leader, and Battle of the Sexes (BOS). Unlike the PDG, these matrices are characterized by correspondence of outcomes. The discontinuity effect was significant for the PDG and Chicken matrices only. With the BOS and Leader matrices, both individuals and groups pursued outcome maximization through coordinated turn taking. Despite the lesser competitiveness, sets of interacting participants in the BOS and Leader conditions did perceive that they were 2 groups. Experiment 2 examined the discontinuity effect in 2 Chicken matrices with varying outcomes associated with mutual competition. Consistent with the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, the discontinuity effect was eliminated for the matrix in which mutual competition was associated with very low outcomes. Although concern for relative in-group standing gave rise to intergroup competition even in the domain of correspondent outcomes, such concern was constrained to the extent that it interfered with outcome maximization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of level of cooperative choice by the other player on choices in a prisoner's dilemma game. Part II.

This study tests whether very high (or very low) cooperation by the other, sequential change in level of cooperation by the other, and degree of S's "flexible ethicality" will influence level of cooperative choice by 40 male and 40 female human Ss. The design is a mixed analysis of variance type with 3 independent and 2 nonindependent sources of variance. The main findings were that cooperative choice is influenced by a very high level of cooperation by the other, but even more by a sequence of low to high cooperation by the other. Flexible ethicality influences choice but in a complex association with sex and sequence. Essentially, then, communication is possible through reiteration of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Groupdrink: The effects of alcohol on intergroup competitiveness.

Alcohol is often consumed in group settings. The present article examines the effect of alcohol on intergroup competitiveness through the use of a prisoner's dilemma game. One hundred fifty-eight college students participated in the study, either individually or as a member of a 4-person experimental single-sex group. Participants consumed either alcohol (1.13 g ethanol/kg body weight) or a placebo. Results show no effect of alcohol on cooperative choice within individuals. However, groups were significantly less cooperative after consuming alcohol than they were after consuming a placebo. In addition, after consuming alcohol, groups were less cooperative than were individuals. Results are discussed in terms of the way alcohol may affect focus of attention on group-level cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cooperation in social dilemmas: Free riding may be thwarted by second-order reward rather than by punishment.

Cooperation among nonrelatives can be puzzling because cooperation often involves incurring costs to confer benefits on unrelated others. Punishment of noncooperators can sustain otherwise fragile cooperation, but the provision of punishment suffers from a second-order free-riding problem because nonpunishers can free ride on the benefits from costly punishment provided by others. One suggested solution to this problem is second-order punishment of nonpunishers; more generally, the threat or promise of higher order sanctions might maintain the lower order sanctions that enforce cooperation in collective action problems. Here the authors report on 3 experiments testing people's willingness to provide second-order sanctions by having participants play a cooperative game with opportunities to punish and reward each other. The authors found that people supported those who rewarded cooperators either by rewarding them or by punishing nonrewarders, but people did not support those who punished noncooperators--they did not reward punishers or punish nonpunishers. Furthermore, people did not approve of punishers more than they did nonpunishers, even when nonpunishers were clearly unwilling to use sanctions to support cooperation. The results suggest that people will much more readily support positive sanctions than they will support negative sanctions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Diminished cooperativeness of psychopaths in a prisoner's dilemma game yields higher rewards.

Maladaptive social behavior is one of the defining characteristics of psychopathic personality disorder. Nevertheless, maladaptive social behavior has only rarely been observed among psychopaths in experimentally controlled situations. The authors assessed the behavior of criminal psychopaths from high-security psychiatric hospitals in a computer simulation of a social dilemma situation. The psychopaths showed a markedly higher proneness to competitive (i.e., noncooperative) behavior than did healthy adults from the general population. The odds ratio between defection and being a psychopath was estimated at 7.86 in the sample. The probability to choose selfish instead of cooperative behavior was significantly linked to the following subscales of the Psychopathy Personality Inventory-Revised (S. O. Lilienfeld & M. R. Widows, 2005): rebellious nonconformity, Machiavellian egocentricity, and the total score. On average, the psychopathic participants accumulated higher gain and more strongly exploited their counterpart than did the healthy participants. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Native Mind: Biological Categorization and Reasoning in Development and Across Cultures.

This article describes cross-cultural and developmental research on folk biology: that is, the study of how people conceptualize living kinds. The combination of a conceptual module for biology and cross-cultural comparison brings a new perspective to theories of categorization and reasoning. From the standpoint of cognitive psychology, the authors find that results gathered from standard populations in industrialized societies often fail to generalize to humanity at large. For example, similarity-driven typicality and diversity effects either are not found or pattern differently when one moves beyond undergraduates. From the perspective of folk biology, standard populations may yield misleading results because they represent examples of especially impoverished experience with nature. Certain phenomena are robust across populations, consistent with notions of a core module. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Team negotiation and perceptions of trustworthiness: The whole versus the sum of the parts.

In a team negotiation context, the authors empirically explored how judgments of team-level trust are derived from individual-level trust. Basing their argument on both the negativity bias and the discontinuity effect, the authors posit that people will focus most on the least trustworthy individual member of a team when making judgments about collective team-level trust. Findings from two studies demonstrate that perceptions of team trust are indeed lower than the average ratings of individual trust and are statistically equivalent to the least trusted member. In addition, compared with average individual trust levels, perceptions of collective team trust were found to be more predictive of (a) impasse rates in distributive negotiations and (b) the level of joint gain in integrative negotiations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Facial dynamics as indicators of trustworthiness and cooperative behavior.

Detecting cooperative partners in situations that have financial stakes is crucial to successful social exchange. The authors tested whether humans are sensitive to subtle facial dynamics of counterparts when deciding whether to trust and cooperate. Participants played a 2-person trust game before which the facial dynamics of the other player were manipulated using brief (     

A new consequence of Simpson's paradox: Stable cooperation in one-shot prisoner's dilemma from populations of individualistic learners.

Theories of choice in economics typically assume that interacting agents act individualistically and maximize their own utility. Specifically, game theory proposes that rational players should defect in one-shot prisoners' dilemmas (PD). Defection also appears to be the inevitable outcome for agents who learn by reinforcement of past choices, because whatever the other player does, defection leads to greater reinforcement on each trial. In a computer simulation and 4 experiments, the authors show that, apparently paradoxically, when players' choices are correlated by an exogenous factor (here, the cooperativeness of the specific PD chosen), people obtain greater average reinforcement for cooperating, which can sustain cooperation. This effect arises from a well-known statistical paradox, Simpson's paradox. The authors speculate that this effect may be relevant to aspects of real-world human cooperative behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Promoting cooperation and trust in "noisy" situations: The power of generosity.

The authors present an interdependence theoretical framework and advance the argument that generosity serves the important purpose of communicating trust, which is assumed to be of utmost importance to coping with incidents of negative noise (i.e., when the other every now and then behaves less cooperatively than intended). Using a new social dilemma task (the parcel delivery paradigm), it was hypothesized that incidents of negative noise would exert detrimental effects on trust and trust-related judgments and experiences, as well as cooperation, and that relative to tit for tat and self-regarding strategies (stingy or unconditionally cooperative strategies), other-regarding strategies (i.e., unconditional cooperation and generosity) would be more effective at reducing such as detrimental effects. Results from 2 studies provided strong support for these hypotheses, suggesting that the power of generosity is underestimated in the extant literature, especially in its ability to maintain or build trust, which is essential for coping with noise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of unilateral promise and value of rewards upon cooperation and trust.

2 experiments, utilizing a 2-person, non-zero-sum game were reported. The first experiment investigated the effect of unilateral promise (enforceable or unenforceable) upon cooperation and trust. Ss receiving an enforceable promise were found to be reliably more cooperative than Ss receiving no promise. Ss under both promise conditions rated the promisor as more trustworthy than did Ss under the no-promise condition. The second experiment, investigating the effect of the value of matrix entries (imaginary versus actual rewards) upon collaboration, cooperation, and trust, found no reliable differences on any of the dependent variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of level of cooperative choice by the other player on choices in a prisoner's dilemma game: Part I.

In a Prisoner's Dilemma type game, Ss (male and female students) were asked to make repeated choice between 2 alternatives, R and B, where R is presumably the cooperative and B the competitive choice. While believing that they were playing persons of the same sex, Ss actually played a simulated partner who, for ? of the group, chose 83% random R and, for the other ?, 83% random B for 30 trials. Thereafter for 60 trials, the simulated partner chose according to a strategy of 83% matching, 17% mismatching the choices of S. The purpose of this procedure was to determine the effects of initial level of simulated cooperation on S's own level of cooperation. The results failed to demonstrate that the level of simulated cooperation employed functioned to determine choice by S. Ss had been stratified according to a test of character which failed to predict choice. However, a 2nd scoring formula employed on this test did significantly distinguish the amount of R choice emitted by S and deserves further examination. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Feeling and Believing: The Influence of Emotion on Trust.

The authors report results from 5 experiments that describe the influence of emotional states on trust. They found that incidental emotions significantly influence trust in unrelated settings. Happiness and gratitude--emotions with positive valence--increase trust, and anger--an emotion with negative valence--decreases trust. Specifically, they found that emotions characterized by other-person control (anger and gratitude) and weak control appraisals (happiness) influence trust significantly more than emotions characterized by personal control (pride and guilt) or situational control (sadness). These findings suggest that emotions are more likely to be misattributed when the appraisals of the emotion are consistent with the judgment task than when the appraisals of the emotion are inconsistent with the judgment task. Emotions do not influence trust when individuals are aware of the source of their emotions or when individuals are very familiar with the trustee. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of positive mood on trust in interpersonal and intergroup interactions.

Although the trust development literature has been characterized overwhelmingly by rationality-based models, the current research attempts to explain how affect can influence this process. To better understand how and why affect would influence trust development, 5 experiments were conducted to examine the effects of positive mood on people’s tendencies to trust and distrust others. Consistent with theory, which argues that positive mood promotes schema reliance, the relationship between positive mood and trust was influenced by the presence of cues that indicated whether the other party was trustworthy or untrustworthy. Across 5 studies, trusting behaviors (Experiments 1–3) and perceptions of trustworthiness (Experiments 4 and 5) were found to be influenced by cues associated with trust or distrust. Specifically, when available cues about the other party promoted trust, people in a positive mood increased their trust; when cues promoted distrust, people in a positive mood decreased their trust. The data support the expectation that affect can influence trust development, although the relationship is more complex than main effect predictions of mood-congruency models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trust that binds: The impact of collective felt trust on organizational performance.

The impact of employees' collective perceptions of being trusted by management was examined with a longitudinal study involving 88 retail stores. Drawing on the appropriateness framework (March, 1994; Weber, Kopelman, & Messick, 2004), the authors develop and test a model showing that when employees in an organization perceive they are trusted by management, increases in the presence of responsibility norms, as well as in the sales performance and customer service performance of the organization, are observed. Moreover, the relationship between perceptions of being trusted and sales performance is fully mediated by responsibility norms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trust in management as a buffer of the relationships between overload and strain.

This study examined the role of trust in management as a moderating factor in work overload's impact on personal strain (i.e., burnout, psychological strain, and work's interference with family). Participants were 94 employees of an accounting firm responding to a survey. The results were supportive of all study propositions. Both work overload and trust in management had the expected negative and positive main effects on the outcomes variables, respectively. The impact of work overload on the outcome variables was moderated by employees' trust in management. The significance of these results and areas of future research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of trust in authority and procedural fairness on cooperation.

The present research examined the effect of procedural fairness and trust in an authority on people's willingness to cooperate with the authority across a wide range of social situations. Prior research has shown that the presence of information about whether an authority can be trusted moderates the effect of procedural fairness. If no trust information is available, procedural fairness influences people's reactions. This is not the case when information about the trustworthiness of the authority is present. In the present article, it is argued that information about whether the authority can or cannot be trusted may also moderate the effect of procedural fairness in predicting levels of cooperation. Assuming that the use of fair procedures by authorities that cannot be trusted is less influential than is the enactment of procedures by trustworthy authorities, it is predicted that trust in authority moderates the influence of procedural fairness on cooperation in such a way that procedural fairness has a positive effect on cooperation primarily when trust in authority is high. Results from 4 studies (2 experimental studies and 2 field studies) provide supportive evidence for this interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thirty-Something Categorization Results Explained: Selective Attention, Eyetracking, and Models of Category Learning.

An eyetracking study testing D. L. Medin and M. M. Schaffer's (1978) 5-4 category structure was conducted. Over 30 studies have shown that the exemplar-based generalized context model (GCM) usually provides a better quantitative account of 5-4 learning data as compared with the prototype model. However, J. D. Smith and J. P. Minda (2000) argued that the GCM is a psychologically implausible account of 5-4 learning because it implies suboptimal attention weights. To test this claim, the authors recorded undergraduates' eye movements while the students learned the 5-4 category structure. Eye fixations matched the attention weights estimated by the GCM but not those of the prototype model. This result confirms that the GCM is a realistic model of the processes involved in learning the 5-4 structure and that learners do not always optimize attention, as commonly supposed. The conditions under which learners are likely to optimize attention during category learning are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trust in the face of conflict: The role of managerial trustworthy behavior and organizational context.

The authors explored the role of attributions in shaping employees' trust in their managers in the context of negative events. The authors examined how 2 forms of managerial trustworthy behavior (open communication and demonstrating concern for employees) and organizational policies relate to attributions, trust in the manager, and organizational citizenship behavior. Participants were 115 credit union employees who responded to a critical incident regarding a disagreement with their managers. As hypothesized, trustworthy behavior was negatively related to attributions of personal responsibility for negative encounters, and this relationship was stronger when human resource policies were perceived as unfair. Managerial trustworthy behavior was also positively related to trust in the manager and organizational citizenship behavior. Personal attributions partially mediated the relationship between trustworthy behavior and trust. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)