Social setting, intuition, and experience in lab experiments interact to shape cooperative decision-making

Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot interactions is a history-dependent dynamic process: promoting intuition versus deliberation has typically a positive effect on cooperation (dynamism) among people living in a coop- erative setting and with no previous experience in economic games on cooperation (history-dependence). Here we report on a lab experiment exploring how these findings transfer to a non-cooperative setting. We find two major results: (i) promoting intuition versus deliberation has no effect on cooperative behavior among inexperienced subjects living in a non-cooperative setting; (ii) experienced subjects cooperate more than inexperienced subjects, but only under time pressure. These results suggest that cooperation is a learning process, rather than an instinctive impulse or a self-controlled choice, and that experience operates primarily via the channel of intuition. In doing so, our findings shed further light on the cognitive basis of human cooperative decision-making and provide further support for the recently proposed Social Heuristics Hypothesis

Push, don't nudge: behavioral spillovers and policy instruments

Policy interventions are generally evaluated for their direct effectiveness. Little is known about their ability to persist over time and spill across contexts. These latter aspects can reinforce or offset the direct impacts depending on the policy instrument choice. Through an online experiment with 1,486 subjects, we compare four widely used policy instruments in terms of their ability to enforce a norm of fairness in the Dictator Game, and to persist over time (i.e., to a subsequent untreated Dictator Game) or spill over to a norm of cooperation (i.e., to a subsequent Prisoner's Dilemma). As specific policy interventions, we employed two instances of nudges: defaults and social information; and two instances of push measures: rebates and a minimum donation rule. Our results show that (i) rebates, the minimum donation rule and social information have a positive direct effect on fairness, although the effect of social information is only marginally significant, and that (ii) the effect of rebates and the minimum donation rule persists in the second game, but only within the same game type. These findings demonstrate that, within our specific design, push measures are more effective than nudges in promoting fairness

Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill, but Jill Won Both Ways: The True Story about Differential Academic Achievement

This longitudinal study was designed to examine how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) project-based learning (PBL) affected the success of high school women in comparison with high school men in mathematics and science, with English performance as a control. We analysed the four-year performance, course-taking, and retention of high school students (n = 186) in these three subjects in a school where STEM PBL was enacted. Students’ Texas state-mandated high-stakes test scores were collected. A repeated measures MANOVA was used for analysing changes in performance after infusing STEM PBL activities into their classes. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant change in scores for both men and women in mathematics and science; however, the attrition for women was much less than for men. We included implications for how to escalate women's performance and retention in STEM-based areas

Increasing altruistic and cooperative behaviour with simple moral nudges

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social choices over egoistic ones. Particularly important, because cheap and easy to implement, are those mechanisms that can change people's behaviour without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives, the so-called "nudges". Previous research has found that moral nudges (e.g., making norms salient) can promote pro-social behaviour. However, little is known about whether their effect persists over time and spills across context. This question is key in light of research showing that pro-social actions are often followed by selfish actions, thus suggesting that some moral manipulations may backfire. Here we present a class of simple moral nudges that have a great positive impact on pro-sociality. In Studies 1-4 (total N = 1,400), we use economic games to demonstrate that asking subjects to self-report "what they think is the morally right thing to do" does not only increase pro-sociality in the choice immediately after, but also in subsequent choices, and even when the social context changes. In Study 5, we explore whether moral nudges promote charity donations to humanitarian organisations in a large (N = 1,800) crowdfunding campaign. We find that, in this context, moral nudges increase donations by about 44 percent

Displaying News Source Trustworthiness Ratings Reduces Sharing Intentions for False News Posts

Professional fact-checking of individual news headlines is an effective way to fight misinformation, but it is not easily scalable, because it cannot keep pace with the massive speed at which news content gets posted on social media. Here we provide evidence for the effectiveness of ratings of news sources, instead of individual news articles. In a large pre-registered experiment with quota-sampled Americans, we find that participants are less likely to share false headlines (and more discerning of true versus false headlines) when 1-to-5 star trustworthiness ratings were applied to news headlines. This is true both when the ratings are generated by fact-checkers and by laypeople (although the effect is stronger using fact-checker ratings). We also observe a positive spillover effect: sharing discernment also increases for headlines whose source was not rated, likely because the presence of ratings on some headlines prompts users to reflect on source quality more generally. This study suggests that displaying information regarding the trustworthiness of news sources provides a scalable approach for reducing the spread of low-quality information

Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans

Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects: some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more

Aqueye optical observations of the Crab Nebula pulsar

We observed the Crab pulsar in October 2008 at the Copernico Telescope in Asiago - Cima Ekar with the optical photon counter Aqueye (the Asiago Quantum Eye) which has the best temporal resolution and accuracy ever achieved in the optical domain (hundreds of picoseconds). Our goal was to perform a detailed analysis of the optical period and phase drift of the main peak of the Crab pulsar and compare it with the Jodrell Bank ephemerides. We determined the position of the main peak using the steepest zero of the cross-correlation function between the pulsar signal and an accurate optical template. The pulsar rotational period and period derivative have been measured with great accuracy using observations covering only a 2 day time interval. The error on the period is 1.7 ps, limited only by the statistical uncertainty. Both the rotational frequency and its first derivative are in agreement with those from the Jodrell Bank radio ephemerides archive. We also found evidence of the optical peak leading the radio one by ~230 microseconds. The distribution of phase-residuals of the whole dataset is slightly wider than that of a synthetic signal generated as a sequence of pulses distributed in time with the probability proportional to the pulse shape, such as the average count rate and background level are those of the Crab pulsar observed with Aqueye. The counting statistics and quality of the data allowed us to determine the pulsar period and period derivative with great accuracy in 2 days only. The time of arrival of the optical peak of the Crab pulsar leads the radio one in agreement with what recently reported in the literature. The distribution of the phase residuals can be approximated with a Gaussian and is consistent with being completely caused by photon noise (for the best data sets).Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Quantum renormalization group of XYZ model in a transverse magnetic field

We have studied the zero temperature phase diagram of XYZ model in the presence of transverse magnetic field. We show that small anisotropy (0 =< Delta <1) is not relevant to change the universality class. The phase diagram consists of two antiferromagnetic ordering and a paramagnetic phases. We have obtained the critical exponents, fixed points and running of coupling constants by implementing the standard quantum renormalization group. The continuous phase transition from antiferromagnetic (spin-flop) phase to a paramagnetic one is in the universality class of Ising model in transverse field. Numerical exact diagonalization has been done to justify our results. We have also addressed on the application of our findings to the recent experiments on Cs_2CoCl_4.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, new references added to the present versio

Time pressure and honesty in a deception game

Previous experiments have found mixed results on whether honesty is intuitive or requires deliberation. Here we add to this literature by building on prior work of Capraro (2017). We report a large study (N=1,389) manipulating time pressure vs time delay in a deception game. We find that, in this setting, people are more honest under time pressure, and that this result is not driven by confounds present in earlier work