Humans expect generosity

Mechanisms supporting human ultra-cooperativeness are very much subject to debate. One psychological feature likely to be relevant is the formation of expectations, particularly about receiving cooperative or generous behavior from others. Without such expectations, social life will be seriously impeded and, in turn, expectations leading to satisfactory interactions can become norms and institutionalize cooperation. In this paper, we assess people’s expectations of generosity in a series of controlled experiments using the dictator game. Despite differences in respective roles, involvement in the game, degree of social distance or variation of stakes, the results are conclusive: subjects seldom predict that dictators will behave selfishly (by choosing the Nash equilibrium action, namely giving nothing). The majority of subjects expect that dictators will choose the equal split. This implies that generous behavior is not only observed in the lab, but also expected by subjects. In addition, expectations are accurate, matching closely the donations observed and showing that as a society we have a good grasp of how we interact. Finally, correlation between expectations and actual behavior suggests that expectations can be an important ingredient of generous or cooperative behavior

Special Olympics Fitness Assessment Project

Fitness is an important aspect of the Special Olympics mission. Physical activity, adequate nutrition, and hydration enhance athletes’ sports performance and improve health and overall quality of life. PURPOSE: The purpose of the study is under a service contract, assist Special Olympics International in data collection to evaluate the effectiveness of their Fit 5 program intervention. Analyze the health and fitness status of the Rio Grande Valley Special Olympics Athletes and the effectiveness of the Fit 5 program in the area. METHODS: Participant eligibility were current special Olympic athletes aged 18 and older in the Rio Grande Valley area. Forty-six special Olympic athletes (Mean±SD; 25.5±7yrs; 33±9kg/m2; 20 male) participated in the study; they completed a six-week exercise intervention consisting of 2 exercise sessions per week delivered remotely. The exercise sessions followed the Fit5 guidelines for endurance, strength, flexibility, and balance exercise recommendations. Three different measurements and surveys were taken: at the beginning of the implementation, after the six-week exercise intervention, and a month after. Special Olympics approved all surveys and exercises. Data were considered for statistical analysis if the participants completed the three measurements and surveys. Data collected included demographic information, healthy habits survey, resting heart rate, blood pressure, BMI, waist circumference, pushup and curl up endurance test, recovery heart rate for a step test, and a single leg balance test. One Way ANOVA was performed to compare the measurement in the three-time instances. RESULTS: Nine participants (25.77±5.8yrs; 36.9±7.8kg/mg2;3 male) completed the three sessions. There were small improvements in waist circumference and blood pressure, but One Way ANOVA showed no significant difference by the exercise interventions. CONCLUSION: Special Olympic Athletes in The Rio Grande Valley Area are an underserved population that can benefit from structured exercise implementations such as Fit5. Future interventions should aim to increase the exercise session and the retention of participants

The emergence of altruism as a social norm

Expectations, exerting influence through social norms, are a very strong candidate to explain how complex societies function. In the Dictator game (DG), people expect generous behavior from others even when they cannot enforce any sharing of the pie. Here we assume that people donate following their expectations, and that they update their expectation after playing a DG by reinforcement learning to construct a model that explains the main experimental results in the DG. Full agreement with the experimental results is reached when some degree of mismatch between expectations and donations is added into the model. These results are robust against the presence of envious agents, but affected if we introduce selfish agents that do not update their expectations. Our results point to social norms being on the basis of the generous behavior observed in the DG and also to the wide applicability of reinforcement learning to explain many strategic interactions