Correctional "Free Lunch"? Cost Neglect Increases Punishment in Prosecutors.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Aharoni E
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8633388 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Humans are attracted to similar others. As a consequence, social networks are homogeneous in sociodemographic, intrapersonal, and other characteristics--a principle called homophily. Despite abundant evidence showing the importance of interpersonal similarity and homophily for human relationships, their behavioral correlates and cognitive foundations are poorly understood. Here, we show that perceived similarity substantially increases altruistic punishment, a key mechanism underlying human cooperation. We induced (dis)similarity perception by manipulating basic cognitive mechanisms in an economic cooperation game that included a punishment phase. We found that similarity-focused participants were more willing to punish others' uncooperative behavior. This influence of similarity is not explained by group identity, which has the opposite effect on altruistic punishment. Our findings demonstrate that pure similarity promotes reciprocity in ways known to encourage cooperation. At the same time, the increased willingness to punish norm violations among similarity-focused participants provides a rationale for why similar people are more likely to build stable social relationships. Finally, our findings show that altruistic punishment is differentially involved in encouraging cooperation under pure similarity vs. in-group conditions.
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Project description:Strong reciprocity explains prosocial cooperation by the presence of individuals who incur costs to help those who helped them ('strong positive reciprocity') and to punish those who wronged them ('strong negative reciprocity'). Theories of social preferences predict that in contrast to 'strong reciprocators', self-regarding people cooperate and punish only if there are sufficient future benefits. Here, we test this prediction in a two-stage design. First, participants are classified according to their disposition towards strong positive reciprocity as either dispositional conditional cooperators (DCC) or dispositional free riders (DFR). Participants then play a one-shot public goods game, either with or without punishment. As expected, DFR cooperate only when punishment is possible, whereas DCC cooperate without punishment. Surprisingly, dispositions towards strong positive reciprocity are unrelated to strong negative reciprocity: punishment by DCC and DFR is practically identical. The 'burden of cooperation' is thus carried by a larger set of individuals than previously assumed.
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Project description:People often neglect opportunity costs: They do not fully take into account forgone alternatives outside of a particular choice set. Several scholars have suggested that poor people should be more likely to spontaneously consider opportunity costs, because budget constraints should lead to an increased focus on trade-offs. We did not find support for this hypothesis in five high-powered experiments (total N = 2325). The experiments used different products (both material and experiential) with both high and low prices (from $8.50 to $249.99) and different methods of reminding participants of opportunity costs. High-income and low-income participants showed an equally strong decrease in willingness to buy when reminded of opportunity costs, implying that both the rich and the poor neglect opportunity costs.
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Project description:A major goal of healthy aging is to prevent declining resilience and increasing frailty, which are associated with many chronic diseases and deterioration of stress response. We have successfully used loss-or-gain model of stress survival to quantify organismal resilience. As a proof of concept, this is demonstrated in C. elegans exposed to increasing oxidative stress induced by exogenous paraquat and with proteotoxic stress caused by endogenous polyQ and Aβ aggregation, respectively. Based on this, we reveal that abalone peptide AbaPep#07 (SETYELRK) not only promotes survival resilience against paraquat-induced oxidative stress but also confers protection against polyQ- or Aβ-mediated behavioral dysfunction in C. elegans, indicating its capacity against stress and neurodegeneration. Importantly, we further show that the peptide increases physical fitness of aged C. elegans and extends life span without compromise of growth and reproduction, demonstrating its cost-free prolongevity activity. Moreover, we reveal that the peptide induces differential expression of a number of genes, including innate immune, lipid metabolism and metabolic detoxification genes, which are associated with the SKN-1/Nrf transcription factor. Collectively, our findings demonstrate that the novel abalone cryptide AbaPep#07 increases stress survival resilience and cost-free longevity via SKN-1/Nrf-governed transcriptional reprogramming and provide an insight into the neuroprotective and health-promoting potential of cryptides as proteostasis regulators.
2023-11-06 | GSE246759 | GEO
Project description:Four data sets were processed at resolutions significantly exceeding the criteria traditionally used for estimating the diffraction data resolution limit. The analysis of these data and the corresponding model-quality indicators suggests that the criteria of resolution limits widely adopted in the past may be somewhat conservative. Various parameters, such as Rmerge and I/σ(I), optical resolution and the correlation coefficients CC1/2 and CC*, can be used for judging the internal data quality, whereas the reliability factors R and Rfree as well as the maximum-likelihood target values and real-space map correlation coefficients can be used to estimate the agreement between the data and the refined model. However, none of these criteria provide a reliable estimate of the data resolution cutoff limit. The analysis suggests that extension of the maximum resolution by about 0.2 Å beyond the currently adopted limit where the I/σ(I) value drops to 2.0 does not degrade the quality of the refined structural models, but may sometimes be advantageous. Such an extension may be particularly beneficial for significantly anisotropic diffraction. Extension of the maximum resolution at the stage of data collection and structure refinement is cheap in terms of the required effort and is definitely more advisable than accepting a too conservative resolution cutoff, which is unfortunately quite frequent among the crystal structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank.
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Project description:BackgroundThe objective of this study was to evaluate the acceptance of an employer-led free lunch initiative and its effect on health, diet, and attitudes towards health and diet amongst employees in a small workplace in Northern Ireland.MethodsThis was a controlled, employer-led pilot intervention, which was evaluated through a mixed methods approach.ResultsSeventeen participants from the intervention site and 14 participants from the control site completed all assessments. Post-intervention, there was no difference in change in dietary measures between the sites, except for saturated fat intake during weekdays (IS: - 1.3% of calories, SD: 4.3; CS: 2.8% of calories, SD: 6.6; P-value < 0.05). Qualitative information was summarised to highlight employees' expectations and experiences with the intervention.ConclusionThis study highlights the challenges that need to be considered when implementing a free lunch initiative for staff.
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Project description:Although empirical and theoretical studies affirm that punishment can elevate collaborative efforts, its emergence and stability remain elusive. By peer-punishment the sanctioning is something an individual elects to do depending on the strategies in its neighborhood. The consequences of unsustainable efforts are therefore local. By pool-punishment, on the other hand, where resources for sanctioning are committed in advance and at large, the notion of sustainability has greater significance. In a population with free-riders, punishers must be strong in numbers to keep the "punishment pool" from emptying. Failure to do so renders the concept of institutionalized sanctioning futile. We show that pool-punishment in structured populations is sustainable, but only if second-order free-riders are sanctioned as well, and to a such degree that they cannot prevail. A discontinuous phase transition leads to an outbreak of sustainability when punishers subvert second-order free-riders in the competition against defectors.
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Project description:How to run most effectively to catch a projectile, such as a baseball, that is flying in the air for a long period of time? The question about the best solution to the ball catching problem has been subject to intense scientific debate for almost 50 years. It turns out that this scientific debate is not focused on the ball catching problem alone, but revolves around the research question what constitutes the ingredients of intelligent decision making. Over time, two opposing views have emerged: the generalist view regarding intelligence as the ability to solve any task without knowing goal and environment in advance, based on optimal decision making using predictive models; and the specialist view which argues that intelligent decision making does not have to be based on predictive models and not even optimal, advocating simple and efficient rules of thumb (heuristics) as superior to enable accurate decisions. We study two types of approaches to the ball catching problem, one for each view, and investigate their properties using both a theoretical analysis and a broad set of simulation experiments. Our study shows that neither of the two types of approaches can be regarded as superior in solving all relevant variants of the ball catching problem: each approach is optimal under a different realistic environmental condition. Therefore, predictive models neither guarantee nor prevent success a priori, and we further show that the key difference between the generalist and the specialist approach to ball catching is the type of input representation used to control the agent. From this finding, we conclude that the right solution to a decision making or control problem is orthogonal to the generalist and specialist approach, and thus requires a reconciliation of the two views in favor of a representation-centric view.
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Project description:Theoretical models and experiments suggest that social networks may significantly impact the emergence and stability of cooperation in humans. Similarly, theoretical models and experiments have shown that punishing behavior can significantly increase cooperative behavior in individuals. However, how punishing impacts the effects of social networks on cooperation is not yet understood. Here, I examine a set of laboratory experiments in which participants choose to cooperate or defect under differing punishment arrangements. Through analysis of the experiment as a network, I evaluate how institutional arrangements affect the degree to which social networks promote cooperative behavior. The results show that cooperative behavior spreads from person-to-person in all versions of the game, but that in versions of the game with low-cost, high-impact punishment the influence both endures for more rounds and spreads further in the network. These results show that the extent to which cooperative behavior cascades is affected by the institutional arrangements that govern game play.
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Project description:The human ability to establish cooperation, even in large groups of genetically unrelated strangers, depends upon the enforcement of cooperation norms. Third-party punishment is one important factor to explain high levels of cooperation among humans, although it is still somewhat disputed whether other animal species also use this mechanism for promoting cooperation. We study the effectiveness of third-party punishment to increase children's cooperative behavior in a large-scale cooperation game. Based on an experiment with 1,120 children, aged 7 to 11 y, we find that the threat of third-party punishment more than doubles cooperation rates, despite the fact that children are rarely willing to execute costly punishment. We can show that the higher cooperation levels with third-party punishment are driven by two components. First, cooperation is a rational (expected payoff-maximizing) response to incorrect beliefs about the punishment behavior of third parties. Second, cooperation is a conditionally cooperative reaction to correct beliefs that third party punishment will increase a partner's level of cooperation.
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