Sorting, Prices, and Social Preferences

What impact do social preferences have in market-type settings where individuals can sort in response to relative prices? We show that sorting behavior can distinguish between individuals who like to share and those who share but prefer to avoid the sharing environment altogether. In four laboratory experiments, prices and social preferences interact to determine the composition of sharing environments: Costless sorting reduces the number of sharers, even after inducing positive reciprocity. Subsidized sharing increases entry, but mainly by the least generous sharers. Costly sharing reduces entry, but attracts those who share generously. We discuss implications for real-world giving with sorting.

Is Underconfidence Favored over Overconfidence? An Experiment on the Perception of a Biased Self-Assessment

This paper reports findings of a laboratory experiment, which explores how elfassessment regarding the own relative performance is perceived by others. In particular, I investigate whether overconfident subjects or underconfident subjects are considered as more likable by others, and who of the two is expected to achieve a higher performance in a real effort task. I observe that underconfidence beats overconfidence in both respects. Underconfident subjects are rewarded significantly more often than overconfident subjects, and are significantly more often expected to win the competitive real-effort task. It seems as if subjects being less convinced of their performance are taken as more congenial and are expected to be more ambitious to improve, whereas overconfident subjects are rather expected to rest on their high beliefs. While subjects do not anticipate the stronger performance signal of underconfidence, they anticipate its higher sympathy value. The comparison to a non-strategic setting shows that men strategically deflate their self-assessment to be rewarded by others. Women, in contrast, either do not deflate their self-assessment or do so even in non-strategic situations, a behavior that might be driven by nonmonetary image concerns of women

Medical Rhetoric and the Sympathetic “Inebriet”: 1870–1930

The modern view of addiction as a progressive brain disease originated in the second half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Historians attribute the shift from a moral to a medical concept to the efforts of a small but well-organized band of physicians forming what is known as the Inebriety Movement in the United States and Great Britain. Members aimed to distribute the disease theory to a disinterested and biased medical community, establish protocols for evidence-based treatments, and transfer the management of drinkers and drug users away from religious organizations and penal institutions to the care of trained practitioners. Members’ efforts to rhetorically achieve these goals on the pages of medical journals has received scant attention in the scholarly community. Based on an analysis of 92 medical articles on addiction published between 1870 and 1930, I will reveal a complex, inclusive, and multimodal rhetoric employed to refigure “drunkards” and “underworld” drug “fiends” as patients and their confounding addictive behaviors as symptoms rather than signs of degeneracy. Before advanced understanding of brain’s pleasure circuits and dopamine receptors, these early medical authors dramatically rendered the havoc that substances can play on those systems. Recovering the narratives and patient tropes I find in these texts may be instructive as we try to find ways to erase persistent stigma surrounding addiction. My findings will hopefully encourage dialogue and new research pathways for scholars interested in the rhetorical history of addiction

Space Station technology planning

Technological requirements for Space Station design were discussed. The requirements are discussed in relation to the following areas: high voltage arrays; environmental interactions; energy management; power supplies; architecture; and modularity

Volume 4, 2016

Information about the Psychology Student Research Jounral p.1 Letter from the Journal President p.2 Ryan L. Radmall Letter from the Editor-in-Chief p.3 Erin M. Alderson Leaving a Legacy of Research: A Brief Biography and Interview with Dean Jeffrey Thompson p.4 The Salience of Weight Discrimination: Perceived Weight Stigma Predicts Decreased Inhibitory Control and Increased Calorie Selection in Overweight Individuals p.6 Ashley M. Araiza and Joseph D. Wellman, PH. D. Measuring Metacognition: A Comparative Validity Study of the Learning Strategies and Self-Awareness Assessment p.15 Ryan L. Radmall 2015- 2016 Department of Psychology Colloquium Series p.24 Effects of Repeated Paroxetine Exposure on Acoustic Startle in Adolescent Rats p.26 Erin Alderson and Cynthia A. Crawford Ph.D. Religiosity, Depression, Anxiety, and Stress in European and Hispanic Americans p.36 Jennifer Marie Popoff Book Reviews p.49 Dr. Kelly Campbell, Dr.John Clapper, Dr.Ismael Diaz The Relationship Between the Willingness to Work Hard and Career Intentions Among College Students p.51 Daniell J. Study Alignability and Distinctive Features in Free Categorization p.59 Timothy Meyer The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Writing Lab p.71 An interview with writing lab tutor Timothy Meyer The Effects of Shame and Self-Blame on Disclosure in Survivors of Sexual Assault p.74 Monica E. Aguilar Doctoral Students from the Class of 2015-2016 p.82 Special Thanks to Reviewers and Contributors p.8

Ashamed to be Selfish, Second Version

We study a two-stage choice problem. In the first stage, the decision maker (DM) chooses a set of payoff-allocations between herself and a passive recipient. In the second stage, DM chooses an allocation from the set. The recipient is only aware of the second stage choice. Choosing selfishly in the second stage, in the face of a fairer available alternative, may inflict shame on DM. We axiomatize a representation of DM’s preferences over sets that identifies DM’s selfish ranking, her norm of fairness and shame. It has been suggested that altruism is a prominent motive for non-selfish choice. We identify a condition under which shame to be selfish can mimic altruism, when the experimenter only records the second stage choice. An additional condition implies that the norm of fairness can be characterized as the Nash solution of a bargaining game induced by the second-stage choice problem. The representation is applied to a simple strategic situation, a game of trust.Selfishness, Fairness, Shame, Altruism