Reciprocity on the hardwood: passing patterns among professional basketball players.

Past theory and research view reciprocal resource sharing as a fundamental building block of human societies. Most studies of reciprocity dynamics have focused on trading among individuals in laboratory settings. But if motivations to engage in these patterns of resource sharing are powerful, then we should observe forms of reciprocity even in highly structured group environments in which reciprocity does not clearly serve individual or group interests. To this end, we investigated whether patterns of reciprocity might emerge among teammates in professional basketball games. Using data from logs of National Basketball Association (NBA) games of the 2008-9 season, we estimated a series of conditional logistic regression models to test the impact of different factors on the probability that a given player would assist another player in scoring a basket. Our analysis found evidence for a direct reciprocity effect in which players who had "received" assists in the past tended to subsequently reciprocate their benefactors. Further, this tendency was time-dependent, with the probability of repayment highest soon after receiving an assist and declining as game time passed. We found no evidence for generalized reciprocity - a tendency to "pay forward" assists - and only very limited evidence for indirect reciprocity - a tendency to reward players who had sent others many assists. These findings highlight the power of reciprocity to shape human behavior, even in a setting characterized by extensive planning, division of labor, quick decision-making, and a focus on inter-group competition

Popular Support for Balancing Equity and Efficiency in Resource Allocation: A Case Study in Online Advertising to Increase Welfare Program Awareness

Algorithmically optimizing the provision of limited resources is commonplace across domains from healthcare to lending. Optimization can lead to efficient resource allocation, but, if deployed without additional scrutiny, can also exacerbate inequality. Little is known about popular preferences regarding acceptable efficiency-equity trade-offs, making it difficult to design algorithms that are responsive to community needs and desires. Here we examine this trade-off and concomitant preferences in the context of GetCalFresh, an online service that streamlines the application process for California's Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps). GetCalFresh runs online advertisements to raise awareness of their multilingual SNAP application service. We first demonstrate that when ads are optimized to garner the most enrollments per dollar, a disproportionately small number of Spanish speakers enroll due to relatively higher costs of non-English language advertising. Embedding these results in a survey (N = 1,532) of a diverse set of Americans, we find broad popular support for valuing equity in addition to efficiency: respondents generally preferred reducing total enrollments to facilitate increased enrollment of Spanish speakers. These results buttress recent calls to reevaluate the efficiency-centric paradigm popular in algorithmic resource allocation.Comment: This paper will be presented at the 2023 International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM'23

Correcting misperceptions of the material benefits associated with union membership increases Americans' interest in joining unions

Published online: 29 April 2024How accurate are Americans’ perceptions of the material benefits associated withunion membership, and do these perceptions influence their support for, and interestin joining, unions? We explore these questions in a preregistered, survey experimentconducted on a national sample, representative of the US population on a numberof demographic benchmarks (n = 1,430). We find that Americans exhibit large andconsistent underestimates of the benefits associated with unionization, as compared toevidence from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and peer-reviewed academic research. Forexample, 89% of Americans underestimated the life-time income premium associatedwith union membership, 72% underestimated the percentage of union members whoreceive health insurance from their employer, and 97% overestimated the averageunion dues rate. We next randomly assigned half of the participants to receive a brief,informational correction conveying results of academic and government research onthe material benefits associated with union membership, or not. Those who receivedthe correction reported 11.6% greater interest in joining a union, 7.8% greater supportfor unions, and 6.9% greater interest in helping to organize a union in their workplace,as compared to the control group. These results suggest that, overall, Americans tendto underestimate the material benefits associated with unionization, misperceptions ofthese benefits are causally linked to Americans’ support for unionization, and correctingthese misperceptions increases a range of pro-union sentiments in the American mass public.This research was supported by the project TRANSNATIONAL : 'The transnational divide : local triggers, social networks, and group identities' financed by the European Research Council under the grant agreement 885026

Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis

The masculine overcompensation thesis asserts that men react to masculinity threats with extreme demonstrations of masculinity, a proposition tested here across four studies. In study 1, men and women were randomly given feedback suggesting they were either masculine or feminine. Women showed no effects when told they were masculine; however, men given feedback suggesting they were feminine expressed more support for war, homophobic attitudes, and interest in purchasing an SUV. Study 2 found that threatened men expressed greater support for, and desire to advance in, dominance hierarchies. Study 3 showed in a large-scale survey on a diverse sample that men who reported that social changes threatened the status of men also reported more homophopic and prodominance attitudes, support for war, and belief in male superiority. Finally, study 4 found that higher testosterone men showed stronger reactions to masculinity threats than those lower in testosterone. Together, these results support the masculine overcompensation thesis, show how it can shape political and cultural attitudes, and identify a hormonal factor influencing the effect.American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 4 (January 2013): 980-1022. © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.https://doi.org/10.1086/66841

Attraction to politically extreme users on social media

Political segregation is a pressing issue, particularly on social media platforms. Recent research suggests that one driver of segregation is political acrophily—people’s preference for others in their political group who have more extreme (rather than more moderate) political views. However, acrophily has been found in lab experiments, where people choose to interact with others based on little information. Furthermore, these studies have not examined whether acrophily is associated with animosity toward one’s political out-group. Using a combination of a survey experiment (N = 388) and an analysis of the retweet network on Twitter (3,898,327 unique ties), we find evidence for users’ tendency for acrophily in the context of social media. We observe that this tendency is more pronounced among conservatives on Twitter and that acrophily is associated with higher levels of out-group animosity. These findings provide important in- and out-of-the-lab evidence for understanding acrophily on social media.Este artículo se encuentra originalmente publicado en PNAS Nexus (e-ISSN 2752-6542

Inclusive Masculinity in a Fraternal Setting

This ethnographic research uses thirty-two in-depth interviews and two years of par-ticipant observation on a large chapter of a national fraternity to examine the construc-tion of masculinity among heterosexual men. Whereas previous studies of masculine construction maintain that most men in fraternities attempt to bolster their masculinity through the approximation of requisites of hegemonic masculinity, this research shows that there also exists a more inclusive form of masculinity institutionalized in the fra-ternal system: one based on social equality for gay men, respect for women, and racial parity and one in which fraternity men bond over emotional intimacy

The Social Significance of Spirituality: New Perspectives on the Compassion-Altruism Relationship

In the current research we tested a comprehensive model of spirituality, religiosity, compassion, and altruism, investigating the independent effects of spirituality and religiosity on compassion and altruism. We hypothesized that, even though spirituality and religiosity are closely related, spirituality and religiosity would have different and unique associations with compassion and altruism. In Study 1 and 2 we documented that more spiritual individuals experience and show greater compassion. The link between religiosity and compassion was no longer significant after controlling for the impact of spirituality. Compassion has the capacity to motivate people to transcend selfish motives and act altruistically towards strangers. Therefore, we reasoned that spirituality (but not religiosity) would predict altruistic behavior and that compassion would help explain this link. Indeed, in Studies 3, 4, and 5 we found that more spiritual individuals behaved more altruistically in economic choice and decision-making tasks, and that the tendency of spiritual individuals to feel greater compassion mediated the spirituality-to-altruism relationship. In contrast, more religious participants did not consistently feel more compassion nor behave more altruistically. Moreover, in Studies 3 and 4 we found that the broader traits of Agreeableness, Openness, and Extraversion did not help explain why more spiritual individuals behaved more altruistically. Our findings argue that spirituality—above and beyond religiosity—is uniquely associated with greater compassion and enhanced altruism towards strangers.Keywords: altruism, behavioral economics, religion, spirituality, compassio