Between Joy and Sympathy: Smiling and Sad Recipient Faces Increase Prosocial Behavior in the Dictator Game.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Weiß M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8201160 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:ObjectiveResearchers have investigated human altruism toward strangers for decades, using economic games such as the dictator game (DG) in their experiments. However, factors that cause the allocating behavior exhibited by those participants willing to be recipients in the DG have not been identified and the psychological mechanism of avoiding decision-making in economic games has not been widely addressed in previous studies. This study aimed to replicate previous findings regarding the number of people who are willing to be assigned the role of recipient and their allocation behavior and to explore why they share more than people who are willing to be dictators.ResultsWe demonstrate that there are people willing to be assigned the role of the recipient, rather than the role of the dictator during the dictator game. In addition, we find evidence indicating that people who are willing to be recipients behave more altruistically in the dictator game than those who prefer to be dictators. Based on our results, we argue that willingness to be a recipient, in relation to the psychological unwillingness to assume responsibility and reputational concerns, is a strategic consideration.
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Project description:Despite the popular notion that power motivations are associated with aggression and antisocial behavior, this study tested the hypothesis that activating power motivations can promote prosocial behavior. Because previous research has shown that public prosocial behavior is associate with reputation and status, this study examined how making prosocial decisions publicly or privately moderates the relationship between power motivations and prosocial behavior. One hundred and forty participants were randomly assigned to watch 20 min of either The Experiment (power motivation arousal) or a documentary called Beautiful China (control condition). A modified version of the dictator game was used to measure prosocial behavior. Participants were instructed to allocate an amount of money between themselves and a stranger girl in need, in the presence of the experimenter (the experimenter registers donation amount) or in the absence of the experimenter (the donation was put in a closed envelope). The results showed that individuals in the power motivation arousal group increased their help when their reputation was under scrutiny due to the experimenter's presence. In the private condition (experimenter is absent), power motivation is not related to prosocial behavior. The contrasting behavioral reactions resulting from the presence or absence of the experimenter are discussed in terms of reputation gain and competitive altruism.
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Project description:Prosocial behaviours such as helping, comforting, or sharing are central to human social life. Because they emerge early in ontogeny, it has been proposed that humans are prosocial by nature and that from early on empathy and sympathy motivate such behaviours. The emerging question is whether humans share these abilities to feel with and for someone with our closest relatives, the great apes. Although several studies demonstrated that great apes help others, little is known about their underlying motivations. This study addresses this issue and investigates whether four species of great apes (Pongo pygmaeus, Gorilla gorilla, Pan troglodytes, Pan paniscus) help a conspecific more after observing the conspecific being harmed (a human experimenter steals the conspecific's food) compared to a condition where no harming occurred. Results showed that in regard to the occurrence of prosocial behaviours, only orangutans, but not the African great apes, help others when help is needed, contrasting prior findings on chimpanzees. However, with the exception of one population of orangutans that helped significantly more after a conspecific was harmed than when no harm occurred, prosocial behaviour in great apes was not motivated by concern for others.
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Project description:BACKGROUND:Economic games observe social decision making in the laboratory that involves real money payoffs. Previously we have shown that allocation of funds in the Dictator Game (DG), a paradigm that illustrates costly altruistic behavior, is partially determined by promoter-region repeat region variants in the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor gene (AVPR1a). In the current investigation, the gene encoding the related oxytocin receptor (OXTR) was tested for association with the DG and a related paradigm, the Social Values Orientation (SVO) task. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:Association (101 male and 102 female students) using a robust-family based test between 15 single tagging SNPs (htSNPs) across the OXTR was demonstrated with both the DG and SVO. Three htSNPs across the gene region showed significant association with both of the two games. The most significant association was observed with rs1042778 (p = 0.001). Haplotype analysis also showed significant associations for both DG and SVO. Following permutation test adjustment, significance was observed for 2-5 locus haplotypes (p<0.05). A second sample of 98 female subjects was subsequently and independently recruited to play the dictator game and was genotyped for the three significant SNPs found in the first sample. The rs1042778 SNP was shown to be significant for the second sample as well (p = 0.004, Fisher's exact test). CONCLUSIONS:The demonstration that genetic polymorphisms for the OXTR are associated with human prosocial decision making converges with a large body of animal research showing that oxytocin is an important social hormone across vertebrates including Homo sapiens. Individual differences in prosocial behavior have been shown by twin studies to have a substantial genetic basis and the current investigation demonstrates that common variants in the oxytocin receptor gene, an important element of mammalian social circuitry, underlie such individual differences.
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Project description:The perception and storage of facial emotional expressions constitutes an important human skill that is essential for our daily social interactions. While previous research revealed that facial feedback can influence the perception of facial emotional expressions, it is unclear whether facial feedback also plays a role in memory processes of facial emotional expressions. In the present study we investigated the impact of facial feedback on the performance in emotional visual working memory (WM). For this purpose, 37 participants underwent a classical facial feedback manipulation (FFM) (holding a pen with the teeth-inducing a smiling expression vs. holding a pen with the non-dominant hand-as a control condition) while they performed a WM task on varying intensities of happy or sad facial expressions. Results show that the smiling manipulation improved memory performance selectively for happy faces, especially for highly ambiguous facial expressions. Furthermore, we found that in addition to an overall negative bias specifically for happy faces (i.e. happy faces are remembered as more negative than they initially were), FFM induced a positivity bias when memorizing emotional facial information (i.e. faces were remembered as being more positive than they actually were). Finally, our data demonstrate that men were affected more by FFM: during induced smiling men showed a larger positive bias than women did. These data demonstrate that facial feedback not only influences our perception but also systematically alters our memory of facial emotional expressions.
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Project description:The somatic marker hypothesis proposes that the cortical representation of visceral signals is a crucial component of emotional processing. No previous study has investigated the information flow among brain regions that process visceral information during emotional perception. In this magnetoencephalography study of 32 healthy subjects of either sex, heartbeat-evoked responses (HERs), which reflect the cortical processing of heartbeats, were modulated by the perception of a sad face. The modulation effect was localized to the prefrontal cortices, the globus pallidus, and an interoceptive network including the right anterior insula (RAI) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (RdACC). Importantly, our Granger causality analysis provides the first evidence for the increased flow of heartbeat information from the RAI to the RdACC during sad face perception. Moreover, using a surrogate R-peak analysis, we have shown that this HER modulation effect was time-locked to heartbeats. These findings advance the understanding of brain-body interactions during emotional processing.
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Project description:Studies have demonstrated the influence of the cultural values of individualism and collectivism on individuals' economic behavior (e.g., competition and trade). By using individualistic and collectivistic texts to prime participants' minds in a lab experiment, we investigated the impact of the cultural values of individualism and collectivism on allocation behavior in an ultimatum game (UG) and dictator game (DG). In the dictator game, we found that participants in the collectivism-priming condition reported a slightly higher mean offer than in the individualism-priming condition, and participants had an average higher acceptance rate of the proposers' offer in the collectivism-priming (vs. individualism-priming) condition in the ultimatum game. Our findings suggest that participants exhibit more altruistic allocation behavior and are more tolerant of unfair allocation behavior after being primed by the collectivistic (vs. individualistic) texts. In comparison with participants who did not undergo initiation, we also found that Chinese participants who had been influenced by collectivist values for a long time remained unaffected after the initiation of collectivism, but shifted their allocation behavior (i.e., showed decreased altruistic allocation behavior and reduced tolerance of unfair allocation behavior) when individualism was primed.
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Project description:Human behaviour is influenced by social norms but norms can entail two types of information. Descriptive norms refer to what others do in this context, while injunctive norms refer to what ought to be done to ensure social approval. In many real-world situations these norms are often presented concurrently meaning that their independent effects on behaviour are difficult to establish. Here we used an online Dictator Game to test how descriptive and injunctive norms would influence dictator donations when presented independently of one another. In addition, we varied the cost of complying with the norm: By stating that $0.20 or $0.50 cent donations from a $1 stake were normal or suggested, respectively. Specifying a higher target amount was associated with increased mean donation size. In contrast to previous studies, descriptive norms did not seem to influence giving behaviour in this context, whereas injunctive norms were associated with increased likelihood to give at least the target amount to the partner. This raises the question of whether injunctive norms might be more effective than descriptive norms at promoting prosocial behaviour in other settings.
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Project description:Does religion promote prosocial behaviour? Despite numerous publications that seem to answer this question affirmatively, divergent results from recent meta-analyses and pre-registered replication efforts suggest that the issue is not yet settled. Uncertainty lingers around (i) whether the effects of religious cognition on prosocial behaviour were obtained through implicit cognitive processes, explicit cognitive processes or both and (ii) whether religious cognition increases generosity only among people disinclined to share with anonymous strangers. Here, we report two experiments designed to address these concerns. In Experiment 1, we sought to replicate Shariff and Norenzayan's demonstration of the effects of implicit religious priming on Dictator Game transfers to anonymous strangers; unlike Shariff and Norenzayan, however, we used an online environment where anonymity was virtually assured. In Experiment 2, we introduced a 'taking' option to allow greater expression of baseline selfishness. In both experiments, we sought to activate religious cognition implicitly and explicitly, and we investigated the possibility that religious priming depends on the extent to which subjects view God as a punishing, authoritarian figure. Results indicated that in both experiments, religious subjects transferred more money on average than did non-religious subjects. Bayesian analyses supported the null hypothesis that implicit religious priming did not increase Dictator Game transfers in either experiment, even among religious subjects. Collectively, the two experiments furnished support for a small but reliable effect of explicit priming, though among religious subjects only. Neither experiment supported the hypothesis that the effect of religious priming depends on viewing God as a punishing figure. Finally, in a meta-analysis of relevant studies, we found that the overall effect of implicit religious priming on Dictator Game transfers was small and did not statistically differ from zero.
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Project description:This paper provides experimental evidence on the relationship between social preferences and cognitive abilities, which we measure using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). We elicit social preferences by way of 24 dictatorial situations, in which the Dictator's choice sets include (i) standard Dictator games, where increasing the Dictator's payoff yields a loss for the Recipient, (ii) efficient Dictator games, where increasing the Dictator's payoff also increases that the Recipient's; as well as other situations in which (iii) either the Dictator's or (iv) the Recipient's monetary payoff is held constant. We partition our subject pool into three groups: reflective (scoring 2 or more in the CRT), impulsive (opting twice or more for the "intuitive" but wrong answers in the CRT) and the remainder. We find that impulsive Dictators show a marked inequity aversion attitude, especially in standard Dictator Games. By contrast, reflective Dictators show lower distributional concerns, except for the situations in which the Dictators' payoff is held constant. In this case, reflective Dictators give significantly more.
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