Reward, punishment, and prosocial behavior: Recent developments and implications

Reward and punishment change the payoff structures of social interactions and therefore can potentially play a role in promoting prosocial behavior. Yet, there are boundary conditions for them to be effective. We review recent work that addresses the conditions under which rewards and punishment can enhance prosocial behavior, the proximate and ultimate mechanisms for individuals’ rewarding and punishing decisions, and the reputational and behavioral consequences of reward and punishment under noise. The reviewed evidence points to the importance of more field research on how reward and punishment can promote prosocial behavior in real-world settings. We also highlight the need to integrate different methodologies to better examine the effects of reward and punishment on prosocial behavior

Human punishment is motivated by inequity aversion, not a desire for reciprocity

Humans involved in cooperative interactions willingly pay a cost to punish cheats. However, the proximate motives underpinning punitive behaviour are currently debated. Individuals who interact with cheats experience losses, but they also experience lower payoffs than the cheating partner. Thus, the negative emotions that trigger punishment may stem from a desire to reciprocate losses or from inequity aversion. Previous studies have not disentangled these possibilities. Here, we use an experimental approach to ask whether punishment is motivated by inequity aversion or by a desire for reciprocity. We show that humans punish cheats only when cheating produces disadvantageous inequity, while there is no evidence for reciprocity. This finding challenges the notion that punishment is motivated by a simple desire to reciprocally harm cheats and shows that victims compare their own payoffs with those of partners when making punishment decisions.Human Evolutionary Biolog

Paranoia and conspiracy: group cohesion increases harmful intent attribution in the Trust Game

Current theories argue that hyper-sensitisation of social threat perception is central to paranoia. Affected people often also report misperceptions of group cohesion (conspiracy) but little is known about the cognitive mechanisms underpinning this conspiracy thinking in live interactions. In a pre-registered experimental study, we used a large-scale game theory approach (N > 1,000) to test whether the social cohesion of an opposing group affects paranoid attributions in a mixed online and lab-based sample. Participants spanning the full population distribution of paranoia played as proposers in a modified Trust Game: they were allocated a bonus and chose how much money to send to a pair of responders which was quadrupled before reaching these responders. Responders decided how much to return to the proposers through the same process. Participants played in one of two conditions: against a cohesive group who communicated and arrived at a joint decision, or a non-cohesive group who made independent decisions. After the exchange, proposers rated the extent to which the responders’ decisions were driven by (i) self-interest and (ii) intent to harm. Although the true motives are ambiguous, cohesive responders were reliably rated by participants as being more strongly motivated by intent to harm, indicating that group cohesion affects social threat perception. Highly paranoid participants attributed harmful intent more strongly overall but were equally reactive to social cohesion as other participants. This suggests that paranoia involves a generally lowered threshold for social threat detection but with an intact sensitivity for cohesion-related group characteristics

Trusting and learning from others: immediate and long-term effects of learning from observation and advice

Social learning underpins our species's extraordinary success. Learning through observation has been investigated in several species, but learning from advice—where information is intentionally broadcast—is less understood. We used a pre-registered, online experiment (n = 1492) combined with computational modelling to examine learning through observation and advice. Participants were more likely to immediately follow advice than to copy an observed choice, but this was dependent upon trust in the adviser: highly paranoid participants were less likely to follow advice in the short term. Reinforcement learning modelling revealed two distinct patterns regarding the long-term effects of social information: some individuals relied fully on social information, whereas others reverted to trial-and-error learning. This variation may affect the prevalence and fidelity of socially transmitted information. Our results highlight the privileged status of advice relative to observation and how the assimilation of intentionally broadcast information is affected by trust in others

Derationalizing Delusions

Because of the traditional conceptualization of delusion as “irrational belief,” cognitive models of delusions largely focus on impairments to domain-general reasoning. Nevertheless, current rationality-impairment models do not account for the fact that (a) equivalently irrational beliefs can be induced through adaptive social cognitive processes, reflecting social integration rather than impairment; (b) delusions are overwhelmingly socially themed; and (c) delusions show a reduced sensitivity to social context both in terms of how they are shaped and how they are communicated. Consequently, we argue that models of delusions need to include alteration to coalitional cognition—processes involved in affiliation, group perception, and the strategic management of relationships. This approach has the advantage of better accounting for both content (social themes) and form (fixity) of delusion. It is also supported by the established role of mesolimbic dopamine in both delusions and social organization and the ongoing reconceptualization of belief as serving a social organizational function

The roles of coalitional threat and safety in paranoia: A network approach

Objective: Paranoia is known to vary with levels of coalitional threat and safety present in the social environment. However, it remains underexplored whether threat and safety are differentially associated with paranoia, if these relationships vary with the source of threat and safety, and whether such effects hold across the continuum of severity of paranoid thoughts. Methods: We employed a network analysis approach with community analysis on a large dataset (n = 6,337), the UK Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2007, to explore these questions. We included one node to capture paranoia typical in the general population, and one pertaining to thought interference common in persecutory delusions in psychosis. Results: Nodes reflecting paranoia in the general population as well as persecution-related concerns in psychosis shared the strongest positive edges with nodes representing threat stemming from close social relationships. Paranoia common in the general population was negatively associated with both safety stemming from the wider social environment, and safety in close relationships, where the former association was strongest. Conclusions: Our results suggest that threat from within one’s immediate social group is more closely linked to paranoid thoughts than is safety from either one’s social group or the wider social environment. Further, our results imply that coalitional threat may be a particularly associated with concerns common in psychosis, whereas paranoid ideation more common in the general population is also associated with reduced coalitional safety. Overall, this network analysis offers a broad view of how paranoia relates to multiple aspects of our coalitional environment and provides some testable predictions for future research in this area. Practitioner points: Individuals with paranoia more typical of delusions may find threat in close social relationships most challenging Variation in paranoia in the general population may be attributed to feeling safe in the wider social environment more than in close social relationships

Factors affecting conspiracy theory endorsement in paranoia

Paranoia and conspiracy thinking are known to be distinct but correlated constructs, but it is unknown whether certain types of conspiracy thinking are more common in paranoia than others. In a large (n=1000), pre-registered online study we tested if endorsement of items on a new Components of Conspiracy Ideation Questionnaire varied according to a) whether harm was described as being intentional, and b) whether they were self-referential. Our predictions were supported: paranoia was positively associated with endorsement of items on this questionnaire overall and more paranoid individuals were more likely to endorse items describing intentional and self-referential harm. Belief in one item on the Components of Conspiracy Ideation Questionnaire was associated with belief in others and items describing incidental harm and harm to others were found to be more believable overall. Individuals who endorsed conspiracy theory items on the questionnaire were more likely to state that people similar to them would as well, although, counter to our expectations, this effect was not reduced in paranoia

Factors affecting conspiracy theory endorsement in paranoia

Paranoia and conspiracy thinking are known to be distinct but correlated constructs, but it is unknown whether certain types of conspiracy thinking are more common in paranoia than others. In a large (n = 1000), pre-registered online study we tested if endorsement of items on a new Components of Conspiracy Ideation Questionnaire varied according to whether harm was described as being (a) intentional and (b) self-referential. Our predictions were supported: paranoia was positively associated with endorsement of items on this questionnaire overall and more paranoid individuals were more likely to endorse items describing intentional and self-referential harm. Belief in any item on the Components of Conspiracy Ideation Questionnaire was associated with belief in others and items describing incidental harm and harm to others were found to be more believable overall. Individuals who endorsed conspiracy theory items on the questionnaire were more likely to state that people similar to them would as well, although this effect was not reduced in paranoia, counter to our expectations

Punishment is strongly motivated by revenge and weakly motivated by inequity aversion

There are two broad functional explanations for second-party punishment: fitness-leveling and deterrence. The former suggests that people punish to reduce fitness differences, while the latter suggests that people punish in order to reciprocate losses and deter others from inflicting losses on them in the future. We explore the relative roles of these motivations using a pre-registered, two-player experiment with 2426 US participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants played as the “responder” and were assigned to either a Take or Augment condition. In the Take condition, the “partner” could steal money from the responder's bonus or do nothing. In the Augment condition, the partner could augment the responder's bonus by giving them money at no cost to themselves or do nothing. We also manipulated the responders' starting endowments, such that after the partner's decision, responders experienced different payoff outcomes: advantageous inequity, equality, or varying degrees of disadvantageous inequity. Responders then decided whether to pay a cost to punish the partner. Punishment was clearly influenced by theft and was most frequent when theft resulted in disadvantageous inequity. However, people also punished in the absence of theft, particularly when confronted with disadvantageous inequity. While the effect of inequity on punishment was small, our results suggest that punishment is motivated by more than just the desire to reciprocate losses. These findings highlight the multiple motivations undergirding punishment and bear directly on functional explanations for the existence of punishment in human societies

Partner choice versus punishment in human Prisoner’s Dilemmas

Two factors that promote cooperation are partner choice and punishment of defectors, but which option do people actually prefer to use? Punishment is predicted to be more common when organisms cannot escape bad partners, whereas partner choice is useful when one can switch to a better partner. Here we use a modified iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma to examine people’s cooperation and punishment when partner choice was possible and when it was not. The results show that cooperation was higher when people could leave bad partners versus when they could not. When they could not switch partners, people preferred to actively punish defectors rather than withdraw. When they could switch, punishment and switching were equally preferred. Contrary to our predictions, punishment was higher when switching was possible, possibly because cooperators could then desert the defector they had just punished. Punishment did not increase defectors’ subsequent cooperation. Our results support the importance of partner choice in promoting human cooperation and in changing the prevalence of punishment