Coordinated decision-making boosts altruistic motivation — but not trust

In the current study, we separately tested whether coordinated decision-making increases altruism and whether it increases trust. To this end, we implemented a paradigm in which participants repeatedly perform a coordinated decision-making task either with the same partner on every trial, or with a different partner on each trial. When both players coordinate on the same option, both are rewarded. In Experiment 1 (N = 52), participants were sometimes presented with tempting opportunities to defect. In Experiment 2 (N = 97), participants sometimes had to decide whether or not to trust that their partners had resisted such tempting opportunities. The results show that repeatedly coordinating with the same partner increased participants’ resistance to temptation (Experiment 1) but did not increase trust (Experiment 2). These findings support the hypothesis that coordinating with a partner increases altruistic motivation towards that partner; they do not support the hypothesis that coordinating boosts trust

Effort Perception is Made More Accurate with More Effort and When Cooperating with Slackers

Recent research on the conditions that facilitate cooperation is limited by a factor that has yet to be established: the accuracy of effort perception. Accuracy matters because the fitness of cooperative strategies depends not just on being able to perceive others' effort but to perceive their true effort. In an experiment using a novel effort-tracker methodology, we calculate the accuracy of human effort perceptions and show that accuracy is boosted by more absolute effort (regardless of relative effort) and when cooperating with a "slacker" rather than an "altruist". A formal model shows how such an effort-prober strategy is likely to be an adaptive solution because it gives would-be collaborators information on when to abort ventures that are not in their interest and opt for ones that are. This serves as a precautionary measure against systematic exploitation by extortionist strategies and a descent into uncooperativeness. As such, it is likely that humans have a bias to minimize mistakes in effort perception that would commit them to a disadvantageous effort-reward relationship. Overall we find support for the idea that humans have evolved smart effort detection systems that are made more accurate by those contexts most relevant for cooperative tasks

Bail-In from an Insolvency Law Perspective

Coherent privaatrech

A survey of the UK tax system

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Regulation of dietary intake of protein and lipid by nurse-age adult worker honeybees

Essential macronutrients are critical to the fitness and survival of animals. Many studies have shown that animals regulate the amount of protein and carbohydrate they eat for optimal performance. Regulation of dietary fat is important but less often studied. Honeybees collect and consume floral pollen to obtain protein and fat but how they achieve the optimal balance of these two macronutrients is presently unknown. Here, using chemically defined diets composed of essential amino acids and lipids (lecithin), we show that adult worker honeybees actively regulate their intake of lipids around optimal values relative to the amount of protein in their diet. We found that broodless, nurse-age worker honeybees consume foods to achieve a ratio between 1:2 and 1:3 for essential amino acids to lipid or ∼1.25:1 protein to fat. Bees fed diets relatively high in fat gained abdominal fat and had enlarged hypopharyngeal glands. In most cases, eating diets high in fat did not result in increased mortality. Importantly, we also discovered that the total quantity of food the bees ate increased when they were given a choice of two diets relatively high in fat, implying that dietary fat influences bee nutritional state in a way that, in turn, influences behaviour. We speculate that dietary fat plays a critical role in maintaining workers in the nurse-like behavioural state independently of the influence of queen pheromone.</p

Election briefing 1997

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