It Pays to Be Nice

By Olga Khazan
The Atlantic
Originally published June 23, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

The conclusions of Rand’s studies support corporate do-gooders. Judging by his research, you should be nice even if you don’t trust the other person. In fact, you should keep on being nice even if the other person screws you over.

In one experiment, he found that people playing an unpredictable prisoner’s-dilemma type game benefitted from being lenient—forgiving their partner for acting against them. The same holds true in the business environment, which can be similarly “noisy,” as economists say. Sometimes, when someone is trying to undermine you, they’re actually trying to undermine you. But other times, it’s just an accident. If someone doesn’t credit you for a big idea in a meeting, you can’t know if he or she just forgot, or if it was an intentional slight. According to Rand’s research, you shouldn’t, say, turn around and tattle to the boss about that person’s chronic tardiness—at least not until he or she sabotages you at least a couple more times.

“If someone did something that hurt me, and I get pissed, and I screw them over, that destroys that relationship over a mistake,” Rand said. And losing allies, especially in a cooperative environment, can be costly. In his studies, “the strategy that earns the most money is giving someone a pass and letting the person take advantage of you two or three times.”

The entire article is here.

Humans did not invent morality says study showing moral behaviour in rats

By Jayalakshmi K
IBT
Originally published June 8, 2015

Humans probably inherited morality rather than invented it, suggests an experiment showing that rats can be as morally strong as humans.

The rodents tend to help out fellow rats, even in situations where they do not stand to lose anything by refusing help.

This demonstration of prosocial behaviour seen in the new experiment led the researchers to suggest biological mechanisms probably evolved to keep a group of individuals together.

The entire article is here.

Goal-directed, habitual and Pavlovian prosocial behavior

Filip Gęsiarz and Molly J. Crockett
Front. Behav. Neurosci., 27 May 2015

Discussion

In this review we summarized evidence showing how the RLDM framework can integrate diverse findings describing what motivates prosocial behaviors. We suggested that the goal-directed system, given sufficient time and cognitive resources, weighs the costs of prosocial behaviors against their benefits, and chooses the action that best serves one’s goals, whether they be to merely maintain a good reputation or to genuinely enhance the welfare of another. We also suggested that to appreciate some of the benefits of other-regarding acts, such as the possibility of reciprocity, agents must have a well-developed theory of mind and an ability to foresee the cumulative value of future actions—both of which seem to involve model-based computations.

Furthermore, we reviewed findings demonstrating that the habitual system encodes the consequences of social interactions in the form of prediction errors and uses these signals to update the expected value of actions. Repetition of prosocial acts, resulting in positive outcomes, gradually increases their expected value and can lead to the formation of prosocial habits, which are performed without regard to their consequences. We speculated that the expected value of actions on a subjective level might be experienced as a ‘warm glow’ (Andreoni, 1990), linking our proposition to the behavioral economics literature. We also suggested that the notion of prosocial habits shares many features of the social heuristics hypothesis (Rand et al., 2014), implying that the habitual system could be a possible neurocognitive mechanism explaining the expression of social heuristics.

Finally, we have posited that the Pavlovian system, in response to another’s distress cues, evokes an automatic approach response towards stimuli enhancing another’s well-being—even if that response brings negative consequences.

The entire article is here.

Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior.

P. Piff, P. Dietze, M. Feinberg, D. Stancato, and D. Keltner
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 108(6), Jun 2015, 883-899.

Awe is an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that transcend current frames of reference. Guided by conceptual analyses of awe as a collective emotion, across 5 studies (N = 2,078) we tested the hypothesis that awe can result in a diminishment of the individual self and its concerns, and increase prosocial behavior. In a representative national sample (Study 1), dispositional tendencies to experience awe predicted greater generosity in an economic game above and beyond other prosocial emotions (e.g., compassion). In follow-up experiments, inductions of awe (relative to various control states) increased ethical decision-making (Study 2), generosity (Study 3), and prosocial values (Study 4). Finally, a naturalistic induction of awe in which participants stood in a grove of towering trees enhanced prosocial helping behavior and decreased entitlement compared to participants in a control condition (Study 5). Mediational data demonstrate that the effects of awe on prosociality are explained, in part, by feelings of a small self. These findings indicate that awe may help situate individuals within broader social contexts and enhance collective concern.

The entire article is here.

Science Cannot Teach Us to Be Good

By Daniel Jacobson
Big Ideas at Slate.com

Here is an excerpt:

Consider first the relativist conception of morality, on which goodness consists in conformity with the widely accepted practices of one’s society. Sometimes such behavior is called pro-social, a tendentious term that seems to imply that non-conformity is antisocial. If to be virtuous is to be fully enculturated, as this view claims, then moral dissent must be both mistaken (since moral facts are at bottom sociological facts) and vicious (since goodness is conformity).

Although many social scientists advocate this view, it rests on a premise that cannot claim any scientific backing: the normative principle that it is always illegitimate to criticize another culture by standards it does not accept. This is widely seen as a failure of tolerance, as cultural imperialism or ethnocentrism. The relativists don’t seem to notice that their own principle puts such criticism out of bounds, since conformity to widely accepted ethnocentrism is virtuous by their lights. In fact, no one holds the relativist principle consistently.

The entire article is here.

Coaxing better behavior

Behavioral science is playing a pivotal role in research and policymaking that seeks to gently steer us toward better decisions.

By Tori DeAngelis
The Monitor on Psychology
December 2014, Vol 45, No. 11
Print version: page 62

Here is an excerpt:

But social psychology has probably never held as much potential to change global outcomes as it does now. Governments and other organizations are applying "nudge principles" — psychologists' findings about the human propensities that influence our decisions and actions — to collect unpaid taxes, reduce child mortality, and help people choose healthier foods and make better environmental choices. In one line of study, for example, researchers found that people recycled much more when their trash bin lids featured cut-out shapes of the objects to be recycled, be they circles for cans and bottles or slits for paper.

The entire article is here.

Trait Positive Emotion Is Associated with Increased Self-Reported Empathy but Decreased Empathic Performance

By Hillary C. Devlin, Jamil Zaki, Desmond C. Ong, and June Gruber
Published: October 29, 2014DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0110470

Abstract

How is positive emotion associated with our ability to empathize with others? Extant research provides support for two competing predictions about this question. An empathy amplification hypothesis suggests positive emotion would be associated with greater empathy, as it often enhances other prosocial processes. A contrasting empathy attenuation hypothesis suggests positive emotion would be associated with lower empathy, because positive emotion promotes self-focused or antisocial behaviors. The present investigation tested these competing perspectives by examining associations between dispositional positive emotion and both subjective (i.e., self-report) and objective (i.e., task performance) measures of empathy. Findings revealed that although trait positive emotion was associated with increased subjective beliefs about empathic tendencies, it was associated with both increases and decreases in task-based empathic performance depending on the target’s emotional state. More specifically, trait positive emotion was linked to lower overall empathic accuracy toward a high-intensity negative target, but also a higher sensitivity to emotion upshifts (i.e., shifts in emotion from negative to positive) toward positive targets. This suggests that trait positive affect may be associated with decreased objective empathy in the context of mood incongruent (i.e., negative) emotional stimuli, but may increase some aspects of empathic performance in the context of mood congruent (i.e., positive) stimuli. Taken together, these findings suggest that trait positive emotion engenders a compelling subjective-objective gap regarding its association with empathy, in being related to a heightened perception of empathic tendencies, despite being linked to mixed abilities in regards to empathic performance.

The entire article is here.

The Neuroscience of Moral Decision Making

By Molly Crockett
Edge Video Series
Originally published November 18, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

The neurochemistry adds an interesting layer to this bigger question of whether punishment is prosocially motivated, because in some ways it's a more objective way to look at it. Serotonin doesn't have a research agenda; it's just a chemical. We had all this data and we started thinking differently about the motivations of so-called altruistic punishment. That inspired a purely behavioral study where we give people the opportunity to punish those who behave unfairly towards them, but we do it in two conditions. One is a standard case where someone behaves unfairly to someone else and then that person can punish them. Everyone has full information, and the guy who's unfair knows that he's being punished.

Then we added another condition, where we give people the opportunity to punish in secret— hidden punishment. You can punish someone without them knowing that they've been punished. They still suffer a loss financially, but because we obscure the size of the stake, the guy who's being punished doesn't know he's being punished. The punisher gets the satisfaction of knowing that the bad guy is getting less money, but there's no social norm being enforced.

The entire video and transcript is here.

Empathy: A motivated account

Jamil Zaki
Department of Psychology, Stanford University
IN PRESS at Psychological Bulletin

ABSTRACT

Empathy features a tension between automaticity and context dependency. On the one hand, people often take on each other’s states reflexively and outside of awareness. On the other hand, empathy exhibits deep context dependence, shifting with characteristics of empathizers and situations. These two characteristics of empathy can be reconciled by acknowledging the key role of motivation in driving people to avoid or approach engagement with others’ emotions. In particular, at least three motives—suffering, material costs, and interference with competition—drive people to avoid empathy, and at least three motives—positive affect, affiliation, and social desirability—drive them to approach empathy. Would-be empathizers carry out these motives through regulatory strategies including situation selection, attentional modulation, and appraisal, which alter the course of empathic episodes. Interdisciplinary evidence highlights the motivated nature of empathy, and a motivated model holds wide-ranging implications for basic theory, models of psychiatric illness, and intervention efforts to maximize empathy.

The entire article is here.

When do people cooperate? The neuroeconomics of prosocial decision making.

Declerck CH, Boone C, Emonds G. When do people cooperate? The neuroeconomics

of prosocial decision making. Brain Cogn. 2013 Feb;81(1):95-117. 

doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2012.09.009.

Abstract

Understanding the roots of prosocial behavior is an interdisciplinary research endeavor that has generated an abundance of empirical data across many disciplines. This review integrates research findings from different fields into a novel theoretical framework that can account for when prosocial behavior is likely to occur. Specifically, we propose that the motivation to cooperate (or not), generated by the reward system in the brain (extending from the striatum to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex), is modulated by two neural networks: a cognitive control system (centered on the lateral prefrontal cortex) that processes extrinsic cooperative incentives, and/or a social cognition system (including the temporo-parietal junction, the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala) that processes trust and/or threat signals. The independent modulatory influence of incentives and trust on the decision to cooperate is substantiated by a growing body of neuroimaging data and reconciles the apparent paradox between economic versus social rationality in the literature, suggesting that we are in fact wired for both. Furthermore, the theoretical framework can account for substantial behavioral heterogeneity in prosocial behavior. Based on the existing data, we postulate that self-regarding individuals (who are more likely to adopt an economically rational strategy) are more responsive to extrinsic cooperative incentives and therefore rely relatively more on cognitive control to make (un)cooperative decisions, whereas other-regarding individuals (who are more likely to adopt a socially rational strategy) are more sensitive to trust signals to avoid betrayal and recruit relatively more brain activity in the social cognition system. Several additional hypotheses with respect to the neural roots of social preferences are derived from the model and suggested for future research.

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6. Concluding remarks and directions for future research

Prosociality includes a wide array of behavior, including mutual cooperation, pure altruism, and the costly act of punishing norm violators. Neurologically, these behaviors are all motivated by neural networks dedicated to reward, indicating that prosocial acts (such as cooperating in a social dilemma) are carried out because they were desired and feel good. However, the underlying reasons for the pleasant feelings associated with cooperative behavior may differ. First, cooperation may be valued because of accruing benefits, making it economically rational. This route to cooperation is made possible through brain regions in the lateral frontal cortex that generate cognitive control and process the presence or absence of extrinsic cooperative incentives. Second, consistent with proponents of social rationality, cooperation can also occur when people expect to experience reward through a “warm glow of giving.” Such intrinsically motivated cooperation yields collective benefits from which all group members may eventually benefit, but it can only be sustained when it exists in concert with a mechanism to detect and deter free-riding. Hence socially rational cooperation is facilitated by a neural network dedicated to social cognition that processes trust signals.

The article is here.

The human race evolved to be fair for selfish reasons

By Rachel Kendal
The Conversation
Originally posted September 19, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Biologists are surprised by this tendency to behave fairly. The theory of evolution by natural selection predicts that individuals should behave in ways to maximise their inclusive fitness. So behaviours are only selected, and hence evolve, if they ensure the survival and reproduction of the actor or kin whom contain copies of the actor’s genes. However, the behaviour displayed by children seems to be at a detriment to themselves, especially when those who benefit from their selfless behaviour are not the children’s kin.

A child’s sense of fairness, egalitarianism, or aversion to inequality can actually be hampered by instruction to “be fair” and rewarding of this behaviour. That is because what is the child’s intrinsic motivation, becomes a need to follow externally imposed rules. And, as we all know, following rules we believe in is far easier than following rules that are imposed upon us, despite attendant punishments for not doing so.

The entire article is here.

Morality and the Religious Mind: Why Theists and Nontheists Differ

By Azim Shariff, Jared Piazza, and Stephanie R. Kramer
Science and Society

Religions have come to be intimately tied to morality and much recent research has shown that theists and nontheists differ in their moral behavior and decision making along several dimensions.  Here we discuss how these empirical trends can be explained by fundamental differences in group commitment, motivations for pro-sociality, cognitive styles, and meta-ethics. We conclude that by elucidating key areas of moral congruence.

The entire article is here.

Unethical for the Sake of the Group

Risk of social exclusion and pro-group unethical behavior

By S. Thau, R. Defler-Rozin, M. Marko and others
Journal of Applied Psychology, Apr 28 , 2014, No Pagination Specified. doi: 10.1037/a0036708

Abstract

This research tested the idea that the risk of exclusion from one’s group motivates group members to engage in unethical behaviors that secure better outcomes for the group (pro-group unethical behaviors). We theorized that this effect occurs because those at risk of exclusion seek to improve their inclusionary status by engaging in unethical behaviors that benefit the group; we tested this assumption by examining how the effect of exclusion risk on pro-group unethical behavior varies as a function of group members’ need for inclusion. A 2-wave field study conducted among a diverse sample of employees working in groups (Study 1) and a constructive replication using a laboratory experiment (Study 2) provided converging evidence for the theory. Study 1 found that perceived risk of exclusion from one’s workgroup predicted employees’ engagement in pro-group unethical behaviors, but only when employees have a high (not low) need for inclusion. In Study 2, compared to low risk of exclusion from a group, high risk of exclusion led to more pro-group (but not pro-self) unethical behaviors, but only for participants with a high (not low) need for inclusion. We discuss implications for theory and the management of unethical behaviors in organizations.

Introduction

Rising reports of corporate scandals and incidents of employees engaging in behaviors that are considered "illegal or morally unacceptable to the larger community" (Jones, 1991, p. 367) have increased scholarly attention to the nature and causes of unethical behavior in organizations.

Examples of unethical behaviors include stealing from one's employer, deceiving customers, and misrepresenting performance (Trevino, den Nieuwenboer, & Kish- Gephart, 2014).

The costs associated with just one type of these behaviors--employee theft--are estimated at as much as $40 billion yearly (U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2013), which is nearly ten times the cost of all street crime combined, including burglaries and robberies (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2011).

A large body of research has identified characteristics of individuals, moral issues, and organizational contexts as antecedents of unethical behavior (Kish-Gephart, Harrison, & Trevin~o, 2010; Trevino, 1986; Trevino et al., 2014; Trevino, Weaver, & Reynolds, 2006).

The entire article is here, behind a paywall.

Reprints for the article can be emailed to this author.

Does Belief in Free Will Make Us Better People?

By Jonathan Schooler
Big Questions Online
Originally published August 12, 2013

Resolving what to think about free will is itself a choice. Like many other important decisions, there may be alternatives that are better or worse for each of us, but no single conclusion is necessarily appropriate for everyone.

Too often scholars treat the topic of free will as if there currently exists a single indisputably “correct” perspective. However, the sheer variety of accounts of whether and how our choices control our actions demonstrates that this issue is far from resolved.

Given this lack of consensus, each one of us is faced with deciding for ourselves where we stand on an issue that may have important consequences for how we lead our lives. Increasing evidence suggests that people’s views about free will bear on their pro-social behaviors, sense of personal control, and general well being.

The entire story is here.

Editor's note: Psychologists often provide feedback to their patients about responsibility, choice, options, and autonomy.  In essence, psychologists have, if nothing else, a folk view of free will and it becomes part of the therapeutic relationship.  The articles on free will are meant to provoke self-reflection on our views of free will and how these are expressed in psychotherapy.  This topic may become a future podcast.

Friend or Foe? Early Social Evaluation of Human Interactions

Buon M, Jacob P, Margules S, Brunet I, Dutat M, et al. (2014) Friend or Foe? Early Social Evaluation of Human Interactions. PLoS ONE 9(2): e88612. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0088612

Abstract

We report evidence that 29-month-old toddlers and 10-month-old preverbal infants discriminate between two agents: a pro-social agent, who performs a positive (comforting) action on a human patient and a negative (harmful) action on an inanimate object, and an anti-social agent, who does the converse. The evidence shows that they prefer the former to the latter even though the agents perform the same bodily movements. Given that humans can cause physical harm to their conspecifics, we discuss this finding in light of the likely adaptive value of the ability to detect harmful human agents.

The entire article is here.

Environmental Psychology Matters

Annual Review of Psychology
Vol. 65: 541-579 (Volume publication date January 2014)
First published online as a Review in Advance on September 11, 2013
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115048

Abstract

Environmental psychology examines transactions between individuals and their built and natural environments. This includes investigating behaviors that inhibit or foster sustainable, climate-healthy, and nature-enhancing choices, the antecedents and correlates of those behaviors, and interventions to increase proenvironmental behavior. It also includes transactions in which nature provides restoration or inflicts stress, and transactions that are more mutual, such as the development of place attachment and identity and the impacts on and from important physical settings such as home, workplaces, schools, and public spaces. As people spend more time in virtual environments, online transactions are coming under increasing research attention. Every aspect of human existence occurs in one environment or another, and the transactions with and within them have important consequences both for people and their natural and built worlds. Environmental psychology matters.

The entire review article is here.

Intuitive Prosociality

By Jamil Zaki and Jason P. Mitchell
Current Directions in Psychological Science 22(6) 466–470
DOI: 10.1177/0963721413492764

Abstract

Prosocial behavior is a central feature of human life and a major focus of research across the natural and social sciences. Most theoretical models of prosociality share a common assumption: Humans are instinctively selfish, and prosocial behavior requires exerting reflective control over these basic instincts. However, findings from several scientific disciplines have recently contradicted this view. Rather than requiring control over instinctive selfishness, prosocial behavior appears to stem from processes that are intuitive, reflexive, and even automatic. These observations suggest that our understanding of prosociality should be revised to include the possibility that, in many cases, prosocial behavior—instead of requiring active control over our impulses—represents an impulse of its own.

Click here for accessing the article, behind a paywall.

Time, Money, and Morality

By Gino, F., and C. Mogilner. "Time, Money, and Morality." Psychological Science (forthcoming).

Abstract

Money, a resource that absorbs much daily attention, seems to be present in much unethical behavior thereby suggesting that money itself may corrupt. This research examines a way to offset such potentially deleterious effects—by focusing on time, a resource that tends to receive less attention than money but is equally ubiquitous in our daily lives. Across four experiments, we examine whether shifting focus onto time can salvage individuals' ethicality. We found that implicitly activating the construct of time, rather than money, leads individuals to behave more ethically by cheating less. We further found that priming time reduces cheating by making people reflect on who they are. Implications for the use of time versus money primes in discouraging or promoting dishonesty are discussed.

The entire article is here.

What Drives Us to Do the Right Thing?

A look at recent brain research on voluntary giving versus avoiding punishment

By Robert M. Sapolsky
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted January 2, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

It turns out that doing the right thing voluntarily is very different from doing it to avoid punishment. Recent research even reveals a basis in the brain for this distinction.

In one experiment, a participant in an economic game is given money. In the first round, she chooses whether to share any of it with another anonymous participant. In the second, she makes the same choice knowing that the other player can punish her afterward if he is unhappy. No surprise, the amount shared increases, and the magnitude of that increase indicates the extent of "sanction-induced norm compliance."

The entire article is here.

Nothing Focuses The Mind Like The Ultimate Deadline: Death

By Lulu Miller
NPR Health News
Originally published December 31, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

And, it turns out, there is some evidence for his point of view. A 2009 study showed that thinking about death makes you savor life more. And a 2011 study has shown thinking about death makes you more generous, more likely to donate your blood.

But that's not the whole story. A whole dark underbelly of research suggests that thinking about our own mortality can bring out the worst in us. The work of Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski — grandfathers of an idea in social psychology called terror management theory — has shown that thinking about death makes us, well, pretty xenophobic. When confronted with our mortality, we cling to those like us and disparage those who are different.

The entire article is here.