Can Centralized Sanctioning Promote Trust in Social Dilemmas? A Two-Level Trust Game with Incomplete Information

The problem of trust is a paradigmatic social dilemma. Previous literature has paid much academic attention on effects of peer punishment and altruistic third-party punishment on trust and human cooperation in dyadic interactions. However, the effects of centralized sanctioning institutions on decentralized reciprocity in hierarchical interactions remain to be further explored. This paper presents a formal two-level trust game with incomplete information which adds an authority as a strategic purposive actor into the traditional trust game. This model allows scholars to examine the problem of trust in more complex game theoretic configurations. The analysis demonstrates how the centralized institutions might change the dynamics of reciprocity between the trustor and the trustee. Findings suggest that the sequential equilibria of the newly proposed two-level model simultaneously include the risk of placing trust for the trustor and the temptation of short-term defection for the trustee. Moreover, they have shown that even a slight uncertainty about the type of the newly introduced authority might facilitate the establishment of trust and reciprocity in social dilemmas.     

Dishonesty invites costly third-party punishment

Third-party punishment for norm violators is an evolvable enforcer of social norms. The present study, involving two experiments, examined whether violations of honesty norms would induce costly third-party punishments. In both experiments, participants in the third-party role observed a protocol of the trust game, in which the trustee solicited the trustor to transfer his/her endowment by stating that the trustee would return x units from the total resource. Dishonesty was defined such that the trustee in fact returned fewer than x units. Participants were asked about their willingness to incur some cost to reduce the trustee's payoff. In Experiment 1, x was exactly half of the total resource. Participants were willing to incur more cost to punish the dishonest trustee than the trustee who allocated the resource unequally but had not sent the dishonest message. In Experiment 2, x was more than half of the total resource and the dishonest trustee allocated the total resource equally. Therefore, the dishonest trustee was not unfair in Experiment 2. Approximately half of the participants (16 of 30) punished the dishonest but fair trustee, while few participants (1 of 30) punished the fair trustee who had not sent the dishonest message. These experiments together demonstrated that participants were willing to incur some cost to punish honesty-norm violators, even when the participants themselves were not harmed by the norm violation.     

Interaction between valence of empathy and familiarity: is it difficult to empathize with the positive events of a stranger?

Background

Empathy in humans is thought to have evolved via social interactions caused by the formation of social groups. Considering the role of empathy within a social group, there might be a difference between emotional empathy for strangers and familiar others belonging to the same social group. In this study, we used the global field power (GFP) index to investigate empathic brain activity during observation of a cue indicating either a negative or positive image viewed by a stranger or close friend.

Methods

Sixteen healthy participants observed a partner performing an emotional gambling task displayed on a monitor. After the partner''s choice-response, a frowning or smiling face symbol was simultaneously presented to the participant’s monitor while a negative or positive emotional image was presented to the partner’s monitor. All participants observed a control condition (CT) showing a computer trial, a stranger-observation condition (SO) showing the trial of a stranger, and a friend-observation condition (FO) to observe the trial of a close friend. During these observations, participants’ event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to calculate GFP, and after the task, a subjective assessment of their feelings was measured.

Results

Positive emotion was significantly larger under the FO compared to the CT and the SO. Significantly larger negative emotion was found under the SO and FO compared to the CT. In response to a positive cue, significantly larger GFP during 300 to 600 ms was observed under the FO compared to the CT and SO. In response to a negative cue, significantly larger GFP was observed under the FO and SO compared to the CT. A significantly larger GFP under the SO was found in response to only a negative cue. Topographic map analysis suggested that these differences were related to frontal-occipital dynamics. GFP was significantly correlated with empathic trait.

Conclusion

These results revealed that familiarity with another person has different effects depending on the valence of empathy. Negative empathy, including the danger perception function, might easily occur even among strangers, whereas positive empathy related to nursing and supporting an inner group does not happen easily with strangers.     

Reputation,a universal currency for human social interactions

Decision rules of reciprocity include ‘I help those who helped me’ (direct reciprocity) and ‘I help those who have helped others’ (indirect reciprocity), i.e. I help those who have a reputation to care for others. A person''s reputation is a score that members of a social group update whenever they see the person interacting or hear at best multiple gossip about the person''s social interactions. Reputation is the current standing the person has gained from previous investments or refusal of investments in helping others. Is he a good guy, can I trust him or should I better avoid him as a social partner? A good reputation pays off by attracting help from others, even from strangers or members from another group, if the recipient''s reputation is known. Any costly investment in others, i.e. direct help, donations to charity, investment in averting climate change, etc. increases a person''s reputation. I shall argue and illustrate with examples that a person''s known reputation functions like money that can be used whenever the person needs help. Whenever possible I will present tests of predictions of evolutionary theory, i.e. fitness maximizing strategies, mostly by economic experiments with humans.     

Do I Have My Attention? Speed of Processing Advantages for the Self-Face Are Not Driven by Automatic Attention Capture

We respond more quickly to our own face than to other faces, but there is debate over whether this is connected to attention-grabbing properties of the self-face. In two experiments, we investigate whether the self-face selectively captures attention, and the attentional conditions under which this might occur. In both experiments, we examined whether different types of face (self, friend, stranger) provide differential levels of distraction when processing self, friend and stranger names. In Experiment 1, an image of a distractor face appeared centrally – inside the focus of attention – behind a target name, with the faces either upright or inverted. In Experiment 2, distractor faces appeared peripherally – outside the focus of attention – in the left or right visual field, or bilaterally. In both experiments, self-name recognition was faster than other name recognition, suggesting a self-referential processing advantage. The presence of the self-face did not cause more distraction in the naming task compared to other types of face, either when presented inside (Experiment 1) or outside (Experiment 2) the focus of attention. Distractor faces had different effects across the two experiments: when presented inside the focus of attention (Experiment 1), self and friend images facilitated self and friend naming, respectively. This was not true for stranger stimuli, suggesting that faces must be robustly represented to facilitate name recognition. When presented outside the focus of attention (Experiment 2), no facilitation occurred. Instead, we report an interesting distraction effect caused by friend faces when processing strangers’ names. We interpret this as a “social importance” effect, whereby we may be tuned to pick out and pay attention to familiar friend faces in a crowd. We conclude that any speed of processing advantages observed in the self-face processing literature are not driven by automatic attention capture.     

Virtual Bystanders in a Language Lesson: Examining the Effect of Social Evaluation,Vicarious Experience,Cognitive Consistency and Praising on Students' Beliefs,Self-Efficacy and Anxiety in a Virtual Reality Environment

Bystanders in a real world''s social setting have the ability to influence people’s beliefs and behavior. This study examines whether this effect can be recreated in a virtual environment, by exposing people to virtual bystanders in a classroom setting. Participants (n = 26) first witnessed virtual students answering questions from an English teacher, after which they were also asked to answer questions from the teacher as part of a simulated training for spoken English. During the experiment the attitudes of the other virtual students in the classroom was manipulated; they could whisper either positive or negative remarks to each other when a virtual student was talking or when a participant was talking. The results show that the expressed attitude of virtual bystanders towards the participants affected their self-efficacy, and their avoidance behavior. Furthermore, the experience of witnessing bystanders commenting negatively on the performance of other students raised the participants’ heart rate when it was their turn to speak. Two-way interaction effects were also found on self-reported anxiety and self-efficacy. After witnessing bystanders’ positive attitude towards peer students, participants’ self-efficacy when answering questions received a boost when bystanders were also positive towards them, and a blow when bystanders reversed their attitude by being negative towards them. Still, inconsistency, instead of consistency, between the bystanders’ attitudes towards virtual peers and the participants was not found to result in a larger change in the participants’ beliefs. Finally the results also reveal that virtual flattering or destructive criticizing affected the participants’ beliefs not only about the virtual bystanders, but also about the neutral teacher. Together these findings show that virtual bystanders in a classroom can affect people’s beliefs, anxiety and behavior.     

Dogs’ Eavesdropping from People’s Reactions in Third Party Interactions

Eavesdropping involves the acquisition of information from third-party interactions, and can serve to indirectly attribute reputation to individuals. There is evidence on eavesdropping in dogs, indicating that they can develop a preference for people based on their cooperativeness towards others. In this study, we tested dogs’ eavesdropping abilities one step further. In a first experiment, dogs could choose between cooperative demonstrators (the donors) who always gave food to an approaching third person (the beggar); here, the only difference between donors was whether they received positive or negative reactions from the beggar (through verbal and gestural means). Results showed that dogs preferentially approached the donor who had received positive reactions from the beggar. By contrast, two different conditions showed that neither the beggar’s body gestures nor the verbal component of the interaction on their own were sufficient to affect the dogs’ preferences. We also ran two further experiments to test for the possibility of dogs’ choices being driven by local enhancement. When the donors switched places before the choice, dogs chose at random. Similarly, in a nonsocial condition in which donors were replaced by platforms, subjects chose at chance levels. We conclude that dogs’ nonrandom choices in the present protocol relied on the simultaneous presence of multiple cues, such as the place where donors stood and several features of the beggar’s behavior (gestural and verbal reactions, and eating behavior). Nonetheless, we did not find conclusive evidence that dogs discriminated the donors by their physical features, which is a prerequisite of reputation attribution.     

Evaluating the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) to Assess the Bond between Dogs and Humans

The Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) is increasingly being used to study attachment between dogs and humans. It has been developed from the Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure, which is used extensively to investigate attachment between children and their parents. In this experiment, 12 female beagle dogs were tested in two treatments to identify possible order effects in the test, a potential weakness in the SSP. In one treatment (FS), dogs participated together with a ‘familiar person’ and a ‘stranger’. In a control treatment (SS), the same dogs participated together with two unfamiliar people, ‘stranger A’ and ‘stranger B’. Comparisons were made between episodes within as well as between treatments. As predicted in FS, dogs explored more in the presence of the familiar person than the stranger. Importantly, they also explored more in the presence of stranger A (who appeared in the same order as the familiar person and followed the same procedure) than stranger B in SS. Furthermore, comparisons between treatments, where a familiar person was present in FS and stranger A was present in SS, showed no differences in exploration. In combination, these results indicate that the effect of a familiar person on dogs'' exploratory behaviour, a key feature when assessing secure attachment styles, could not be tested reliably due to the order in which the familiar person and the stranger appear. It is proposed that in the future only counterbalanced versions of the SSP are used. Alternatively, since dogs reliably initiated more contact with the familiar person compared to the strangers, it is suggested that future studies on attachment in dogs towards humans should focus either on the behaviour of the dog in those episodes of the SSP when the person returns, or on reunion behaviour in other studies, specially designed to address dog-human interactions at this time.     

The ‘Positive Effect’ Is Present in Older Chinese Adults: Evidence from an Eye Tracking Study

The ''Positive Effect'' is defined as the phenomenon of preferential cognitive processing of positive affective information, and avoidance or dismissal of negative affective information in the social environment. The ‘Positive Effect’ is found for older people compared with younger people in western societies and is believed to reflect a preference for positive emotional regulation in older adults. It is not known whether such an effect is Universal, and in East Asian cultures, there is a highly controversial debate concerning this question. In the current experiment we explored whether Chinese older participants showed a ''Positive Effect'' when they inspected picture pairs that were either a positive or a negative picture presented with a neutral picture, or a positive and negative picture paired together. The results indicated that both groups of participants showed an attentional bias to both pleasant (more processing of) and unpleasant pictures (initial orienting to) when these were paired with neutral pictures. When pleasant and unpleasant pictures were paired together both groups showed an initial orientation bias for the pleasant picture, but the older participants showed this bias for initial orienting and increased processing measures, providing evidence of a ‘Positive Effect’ in older Chinese adults.     

Familiarity with Interest Breeds Gossip: Contributions of Emotion,Expectation, and Reputation

Although gossip serves several important social functions, it has relatively infrequently been the topic of systematic investigation. In two experiments, we advance a cognitive-informational approach to gossip. Specifically, we sought to determine which informational components engender gossip. In Experiment 1, participants read brief passages about other people and indicated their likelihood to share this information. We manipulated target familiarity (celebrity, non-celebrity) and story interest (interesting, boring). While participants were more likely to gossip about celebrity than non-celebrity targets and interesting than boring stories, they were even more likely to gossip about celebrity targets embedded within interesting stories. In Experiment 2, we additionally probed participants'' reactions to the stories concerning emotion, expectation, and reputation information conveyed. Analyses showed that while such information partially mediated target familiarity and story interest effects, only expectation and reputation accounted for the interactive pattern of gossip behavior. Our findings provide novel insights into the essential components and processing mechanisms of gossip.     

Cooperation and Shared Beliefs about Trust in the Assurance Game

Determinants of cooperation include ingroup vs. outgroup membership, and individual traits, such as prosociality and trust. We investigated whether these factors can be overridden by beliefs about people’s trust. We manipulated the information players received about each other’s level of general trust, “high” or “low”. These levels were either measured (Experiment 1) or just arbitrarily assigned labels (Experiment 2). Players’ choices whether to cooperate or defect in a stag hunt (or an assurance game)—where it is mutually beneficial to cooperate, but costly if the partner should fail to do so—were strongly predicted by what they were told about the other player’s trust label, as well as by what they were told that the other player was told about their own label. Our findings demonstrate the importance for cooperation in a risky coordination game of both first- and second-order beliefs about how much people trust each other. This supports the idea that institutions can influence cooperation simply by influencing beliefs.     

Neural signatures of betrayal aversion: an fMRI study of trust

Decisions are said to be ‘risky’ when they are made in environments with uncertainty caused by nature. By contrast, a decision is said to be ‘trusting’ when its outcome depends on the uncertain decisions of another person. A rapidly expanding literature reveals economically important differences between risky and trusting decisions, and further suggests these differences are due to ‘betrayal aversion’. While its neural foundations have not been previously illuminated, the prevailing hypothesis is that betrayal aversion stems from a desire to avoid negative emotions that arise from learning one''s trust was betrayed. Here, we provide evidence from an fMRI study that supports this hypothesis. In particular, our data indicate that the anterior insula modulates trusting decisions that involve the possibility of betrayal.     

Dogs' Social Referencing towards Owners and Strangers

Social referencing is a process whereby an individual uses the emotional information provided by an informant about a novel object/stimulus to guide his/her own future behaviour towards it. In this study adult dogs were tested in a social referencing paradigm involving a potentially scary object with either their owner or a stranger acting as the informant and delivering either a positive or negative emotional message. The aim was to evaluate the influence of the informant''s identity on the dogs'' referential looking behaviour and behavioural regulation when the message was delivered using only vocal and facial emotional expressions. Results show that most dogs looked referentially at the informant, regardless of his/her identity. Furthermore, when the owner acted as the informant dogs that received a positive emotional message changed their behaviour, looking at him/her more often and spending more time approaching the object and close to it; conversely, dogs that were given a negative message took longer to approach the object and to interact with it. Fewer differences in the dog''s behaviour emerged when the informant was the stranger, suggesting that the dog-informant relationship may influence the dog''s behavioural regulation. Results are discussed in relation to studies on human-dog communication, attachment, mood modification and joint attention.     

Parents of Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes - Their Views on Information and Communication Needs and Internet Use. A Qualitative Study

Background

Little is known about parents’ views on the use of online resources for information, education and support regarding childhood type 1 diabetes (T1DM). Considering the rapidly evolving new communication practices, parents’ perspectives need to be explored. The main purpose of this paper was to explore parents’ perceptions of their information-seeking, Internet use, and social networking online. This applied to their everyday life, including the contexts of T1DM and contact with peers. A second aim was to identify implications for future development of Internet use in this respect.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Twenty-seven parents of 24 young persons aged 10–17 with T1DM participated in eight focus group interviews during their regular visits to a county hospital. Focus group discussions were video/audio-taped, transcribed and analysed using inductive qualitative content analysis. Self-reported demographic and medical information was also collected. A main theme was Finding things out, including two sub-themes, Trust and Suitability. The latter were key factors affecting parents’ perceptions of online resources. Parents’ choice of information source was related to the situation, previous experiences and knowledge about sources and, most importantly, the level of trust in the source. A constantly present background theme was Life situation, including two sub-themes, Roles and functions and Emotions and needs. Parents’ information-seeking regarding T1DM varied greatly, and was closely associated with their life situation, the adolescents development phases and the disease trajectory.

Conclusions/Significance

Health practitioners and system developers need to focus on creating trust and suitability for users’ needs. They should understand the children’s diverse needs, which depend on their life situation, on the children’s development, and on the disease trajectory. To enhance trust in online health information and support services, the participation of local practitioners is crucial.     

Introduction to Special Issue on "Familial and Peer Influences on Adolescent Substance Use"

This study examined associations between well-being and positive and negative aspects of social relationships among 128 married older adults with a best friend. Women were more depressed than men if they did not have a friend in whom to confide, but women who did have a friend in whom to confide reported lower levels of depressive symptomatology, closer to levels reported by men. Men's depressive symptomatology was not related to having a friend confidant. Similarly, women who did not have a same-sex best friend in whom to confide were less satisfied with life than women who did have a friend confidant and men in general. Having a best friend who gets on their nerves was negatively related to men's life satisfaction and positively related to women's. Thus, positive and negative aspects of friendships were related to women's and men's well-being in different ways and were more important for women. Positive and negative aspects of marital relationships, on the other hand, related to depressive symptomatology and life satisfaction of women in comparable ways as for men. Results are considered in terms of the practical implications for supportive relationships to help older people meet the challenges of aging.     

Sherborn’s Index Animalium: New names,systematic errors and availability of names in the light of modern nomenclature

This study is aimed to shed light on the reliability of Sherborn’s Index Animalium in terms of modern usage. The AnimalBase project spent several years’ worth of teamwork dedicated to extracting new names from original sources in the period ranging from 1757 to the mid-1790s. This allowed us to closely analyse Sherborn’s work and verify the completeness and correctness of his record. We found the reliability of Sherborn’s resource generally very high, but in some special situations the reliability was reduced due to systematic errors or incompleteness in source material. Index Animalium is commonly used by taxonomists today who rely strongly on Sherborn’s record; our study is directed most pointedly at those users. We recommend paying special attention to the situations where we found that Sherborn’s data should be read with caution.In addition to some categories of systematic errors and mistakes that were Sherborn’s own responsibility, readers should also take into account that nomenclatural rules have been changed or refined in the past 100 years, and that Sherborn’s resource could eventually present outdated information. One of our main conclusions is that error rates in nomenclatoral compilations tend to be lower if one single and highly experienced person such as Sherborn carries out the work, than if a team is trying to do the task. Based on our experience with extracting names from original sources we came to the conclusion that error rates in such a manual work on names in a list are difficult to reduce below 2–4%. We suggest this is a natural limit and a point of diminishing returns for projects of this nature.     

Preschool Children’s Behavioral Tendency toward Social Indirect Reciprocity

Social indirect reciprocity seems to be crucial in enabling large-scale cooperative networks among genetically unrelated individuals in humans. However, there are relatively few studies on social indirect reciprocity in children compared to adults. Investigating whether young children have a behavioral tendency toward social indirect reciprocity will help us understand how and when the fundamental ability to form cooperative relationships among adults is acquired. Using naturalistic observation at a nursery school, this study examined whether 5- to 6-year-olds show a behavioral tendency to engage in social indirect reciprocity in response to their peers’ prosocial behavior toward a third party. The results revealed that bystander children tended to display prosocial behavior toward their peers more frequently after observing these peers’ prosocial behavior toward third-party peers, compared with control situations; this suggests that 5- to 6-year-olds may have an essential behavioral tendency to establish social indirect reciprocity when interacting with peers in their daily lives. In addition, bystanders tended to display affiliative behavior after observing focal children’s prosocial behavior. In other words, observing peers’ prosocial behavior toward third-party peers evoked bystanders’ positive emotions toward the helpers. Considering both the present results and previous findings, we speculate that in preschoolers, such positive emotions might mediate the increase in the bystander’s prosocial behavior toward the helper. In addition, an intuitional emotional process plays an important role in the preschooler’s behavioral tendency toward social indirect reciprocity in natural interactions with peers.     

Only the Carrot,Not the Stick: Incorporating Trust into the Enforcement of Regulation

New enforcement strategies allow agents to gain the regulator’s trust and consequently face a lower audit probability. Prior research suggests that, in order to prevent lower compliance, a reduction in the audit probability (the “carrot”) must be compensated with the introduction of a higher penalty for non-compliance (the “stick”). However, such carrot-and-stick strategies reflect neither the concept of trust nor the strategies observed in practice. In response to this, we define trust-based regulation as a strategy that incorporates rules that allow trust to develop, and using a generic (non-cooperative) game of tax compliance, we examine whether trust-based regulation is feasible (i.e., whether, in equilibrium, a reduction in the audit probability, without ever increasing the penalty for non-compliance, does not lead to reduced compliance). The model shows that trust-based regulation is feasible when the agent sufficiently values the future. In line with the concept of trust, this strategy is feasible when the regulator is uncertain about the agent’s intentions. Moreover, the model shows that (i) introducing higher penalties makes trust-based regulation less feasible, and (ii) combining trust and forgiveness can lead to a lower audit probability for both trusted and distrusted agents. Policy recommendations often point toward increasing deterrence. This model shows that the opposite can be optimal.     

国家公园农户对野生动物肇事保险购买意愿及其影响因素——以大熊猫国家公园为例

国家公园内人与野生动物冲突严重,建立野生动物肇事保险机制是减缓冲突的重要举措。以大熊猫国家公园周边社区为例,分析建立国家公园以及农户风险偏好对野生动物肇事保险购买意愿的影响,并探讨冲突程度和制度信任的中介效应。研究结果表明建立国家公园显著增加了农户野生动物肇事保险购买意愿,而农户风险偏好对保险购买意愿会产生负向显著影响。冲突程度和制度信任是重要的中介变量,冲突程度和制度信任均对农户保险购买意愿产生正向显著影响。建立国家公园显著增加了人与野生动物冲突严重程度,进而对保险购买意愿产生正向影响。此外,建立国家公园显著降低了农户制度信任,进而对保险购买意愿产生负向影响。农户风险偏好对野生动物肇事损失程度产生正向显著影响,进而对保险购买意愿产生正向影响。农户风险偏好对制度信任影响并不显著。基于此,研究提出吸纳社会资本参与,拓宽野生动物肇事保险资金来源,开展社区共管、地役权补偿等措施提升社区信任以及建立基于农户自主防护行为的野生动物肇事保险机制等政策建议。     

Failed Replication of Oxytocin Effects on Trust: The Envelope Task Case

The neurohormone Oxytocin (OT) has been one of the most studied peptides in behavioral sciences over the past two decades. Many studies have suggested that OT could increase trusting behaviors. A previous study, based on the “Envelope Task” paradigm, where trust is assessed by the degree of openness of an envelope containing participant’s confidential information, showed that OT increases trusting behavior and reported one of the most powerful effects of OT on a behavioral variable. In this paper we present two failed replications of this effect, despite sufficient power to replicate the original large effect. The non-significant results of these two failed replications clearly exclude a large effect of OT on trust in this paradigm but are compatible with either a null effect of OT on trust, or a small effect, undetectable with small sample size (N = 95 and 61 in Study 1 and 2, respectively). Taken together, our results question the purported size of OT’s effect on trust and emphasize the need for replications.