123 research outputs found
Students And Eli Weisel at the 1993 Commencement Ceremony
No full textNobel-prize winning author, Eli Weisel, at the 1993 Commencement Ceremony, with students
Eli Weisel and University President Francis J. Mertz at 1993 Commencement
No full textNobel-prize winning author, Eli Weisel, at the 1993 Commencement Ceremony, shaking hands with University President Francis J. Mertz
Negative and positive externalities in intergroup conflict: exposure to the opportunity to help the outgroup reduces the inclination to harm it
Get PDFOutgroup hate, in the context of intergroup conflict, can be expressed by harming the outgroup, but also by denying it help. Previous work established that this distinction—whether the externality on the outgroup is negative or positive—has an important effect on the likelihood of outgroup hate emerging as a motivation for individual participation in intergroup conflict. The current work uses a within-subject design to examine the behavior of the same individuals in intergroup conflict with negative and positive externalities on the outgroup. Each participant made two choices, one for each type of externality, and the order was counter balanced. The main results are that (1) behavior is fairly consistent across negative and positive externalities, i.e., the tendency to display outgroup hate by harming the outgroup is correlated with the tendency to display outgroup hate by avoiding to help the outgroup; (2) People are reluctant to harm the outgroup after being exposed to the opportunity to help it; (3) Groupness—the degree to which people care about their group and its well-being—is related to outgroup hate only when participants encounter the opportunity to harm the outgroup first (before they encounter the opportunity to help it). In this setting the relationship between groupness and outgroup hate spilled over to the subsequent interaction, where it was possible to help the outgroup. When the opportunity to help the outgroup was encountered first, groupness was not related to outgroup hate
collaborative dishonesty - meta analysis
No full textAs for May 21st 2020 we conducted three online searches in order to capture all the papers that assess collaborative dishonesty, as measured by the dyadic die rolling task (Weisel & Shalvi, 2015). We identified nine manuscripts in which studies were reported that employed the dyadic die rolling task.
In January 2021, we expand our analyses to include additional tasks that capture collaborative dishonesty. We are interested in tasks allowing groups of participants to lie together. In these tasks, a group of participants has a motivation (financial or other) to misreport the true state of the world. Specifically, we focus on decisions that are either made (i) jointly by groups of participants, (ii) simultaneously by individuals whose outcomes are interdependent with other group members, or (iii) sequentially by individuals whose outcomes are interdependent with other group members. The inclusion criteria are outlined in detail in the call for papers (in the file attached).
In order to capture the additional tasks that assess collaborative dishonesty we will:
(1) Screen all the manuscripts captured in the three online searches we conducted
(2) Conduct an additional online search on ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database
(3) Disseminate a call for papers in the following associations: Economic Science Association (ESA); Society of Judgement and Decision-Making (SJDM); European Association for Decision Making (EADM); Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), European Association for Social Psychology (EASP); and International Association for Research in Economic Psychology (IAREP) as well as relevant researchers in the behavioral ethics filed
Honesty as a Moral Currency
No full textThis study examines how global cultural variation relates to individuals’ tendency to view honesty as an exchangeable moral good. We are especially interested in collaborative situations where honesty and cooperation are mutually exclusive. What determines the balance between honesty and cooperation in such situations?
Recent psychological theory (Weisel & Shalvi, 2015, 2022) holds that individuals consider dishonest acts as more justifiable when they facilitate mutually beneficial collaboration, because cooperation bears intrinsic moral value. Honesty, then, is flexible in that it can give way for cooperation. In other words, cooperation may provide a justification for behaving dishonestly. To the extent that individuals engage in this exchange of moral goods, dishonest acts become more permissible, while a positive self-image of ethical integrity can be sustained.
The degree to which people are willing to forego their honesty for the sake of a fruitful collaboration has so far been studied almost exclusively in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) countries (Henrich et al., 2010). Consequently, it is an open question how the balance between honesty and cooperativeness depends on the cultural setting. We investigate key indicators of cultural differences, namely kinship intensity (Schulz et al., 2019), tightness (Gelfand et al., 2011), and cultural distance to the US (Muthukrishna et al., 2020), in a large-scale online study, to examine their relations with dishonest behaviour across individual and collaborative settings. To that end, we collect responses from over 10,000 participants from 20 culturally diverse societies around the globe, including a majority of non-WEIRD countries
The complementarity of centralized and decentralized institutions in fostering cooperation
No full textNot all group members are created equal: heterogeneous abilities in inter-group contests
Get PDFCompetition between groups is ubiquitous in social and economic life, and typically occurs between groups that are not created equal. Here we experimentally investigate the implications of this general observation on the unfolding of symmetric and asymmetric competition between groups that are either homogeneous or heterogeneous in the ability of their members to contribute to the success of the group. Our main finding is that relative to the benchmark case in which two homogeneous compete against each other, heterogeneity within groups per se has no discernable effect on competition, while introducing heterogeneity between groups leads to a significant intensification of conflict as well as increased volatility, thereby reducing earnings of contest participants and increasing inequality. We further find that heterogeneous groups share the labor much more equally than predicted by theory, and that in asymmetric contests group members change the way in which they condition their efforts on those of their peers. Implications for contest designers are discussed
Social motives in intergroup conflict: group identity and perceived target of threat
Get PDFWe experimentally test the social motives behind individual participation in intergroup conflict by manipulating the perceived target of threat—groups or individuals—and the symmetry of conflict. We find that behavior in conflict depends on whether one is harmed by actions perpetrated by the out-group, but not on one’s own influence on the outcome of the out-group. The perceived target of threat dramatically alters decisions to participate in conflict. When people perceive their group to be under threat, they are mobilized to do what is good for the group and contribute to the conflict. On the other hand, if people perceive to be personally under threat, they are driven to do what is good for themselves and withhold their contribution. The first phenomenon is attributed to group identity, possibly combined with a concern for social welfare. The second phenomenon is attributed to a novel victim effect. Another social motive—reciprocity—is ruled out by the data
Punishment, cooperation, and cheater detection in 'noisy' social exchange
Get PDFExplaining human cooperation in large groups of non-kin is a major challenge to both rational choice theory and the theory of evolution. Recent research suggests that group cooperation can be explained by positing that cooperators can punish non-cooperators or cheaters. The experimental evidence comes from public goods games in which group members are fully informed about the behavior of all others and cheating occurs in full view. We demonstrate that under more realistic information conditions, where cheating is less obvious, punishment is much less effective in enforcing cooperation. Evidently, the explanatory power of punishment is constrained by the visibility of cheating
Punishment, Cooperation, and Cheater Detection in “Noisy” Social Exchange
No full textExplaining human cooperation in large groups of non-kin is a major challenge to both rational choice theory and the theory of evolution. Recent research suggests that group cooperation can be explained by positing that cooperators can punish non-cooperators or cheaters. The experimental evidence comes from public goods games in which group members are fully informed about the behavior of all others and cheating occurs in full view. We demonstrate that under more realistic information conditions, where cheating is less obvious, punishment is much less effective in enforcing cooperation. Evidently, the explanatory power of punishment is constrained by the visibility of cheating.public-goods game; punishment; cooperation; reciprocity; experimental games
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