360 research outputs found

    Individual decision making and the evolutionary roots of institutions

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    Just as many aspects of individual decisions are sometimes called unconscious or automatic, we know that some institutions have evolved through unconscious, nondeliberative mechanisms. Their function can also be largely nondeliberative, as in the case of some institutions that may structure behavior without requiring any reflection on the part of the participants. On the other hand, political institutions exist for the purpose of bringing deliberative mechanisms to bear on institutions in the hope of changing them for the better. The immense project of building an integrated explanation of institutions from individual brains to nations-has only barely begun. In this chapter, we report on our discussions that attempted to sketch the mechanisms that connect individuals to large-scale institutions. We begin with a discussion of current thought on the design of individual decision making. If institutions regulate behavior, then presumably the mechanisms that have evolved to produce individual behavior will be relevant to the broader enterprise of integrating these two scales of explanation. Then we explore ways in which institutions may have evolved, both as a result of individual decision making and as a result of processes distinct from those that govern individual behavior. We approach this topic from two perspectives. Seen one way, unconscious psychological forces constrain the design of institutions, sometimes powerfully. Seen another way, unconscious population-level processes create functional institutional design that few social architects could conceive of with their individual deliberate faculties

    Testosterone Administration Decreases Generosity in the Ultimatum Game

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    How do human beings decide when to be selfish or selfless? In this study, we gave testosterone to 25 men to establish its impact on prosocial behaviors in a double-blind within-subjects design. We also confirmed participants' testosterone levels before and after treatment through blood draws. Using the Ultimatum Game from behavioral economics, we find that men with artificially raised T, compared to themselves on placebo, were 27% less generous towards strangers with money they controlled (95% CI placebo: (1.70, 2.72); 95% CI T: (.98, 2.30)). This effect scales with a man's level of total-, free-, and dihydro-testosterone (DHT). Men in the lowest decile of DHT were 560% more generous than men in the highest decile of DHT. We also found that men with elevated testosterone were more likely to use their own money punish those who were ungenerous toward them. Our results continue to hold after controlling for altruism. We conclude that elevated testosterone causes men to behave antisocially

    Female economic dependence and the morality of promiscuity

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    This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ The Author(s) 2014.In environments in which female economic dependence on a male mate is higher, male parental investment is more essential. In such environments, therefore, both sexes should value paternity certainty more and thus object more to promiscuity (because promiscuity undermines paternity certainty). We tested this theory of anti-promiscuity morality in two studies (N = 656 and N = 4,626) using U.S. samples. In both, we examined whether opposition to promiscuity was higher among people who perceived greater female economic dependence in their social network. In Study 2, we also tested whether economic indicators of female economic dependence (e.g., female income, welfare availability) predicted anti-promiscuity morality at the state level. Results from both studies supported the proposed theory. At the individual level, perceived female economic dependence explained significant variance in anti-promiscuity morality, even after controlling for variance explained by age, sex, religiosity, political conservatism, and the anti-promiscuity views of geographical neighbors. At the state level, median female income was strongly negatively related to anti-promiscuity morality and this relationship was fully mediated by perceived female economic dependence. These results were consistent with the view that anti-promiscuity beliefs may function to promote paternity certainty in circumstances where male parental investment is particularly important

    Cognitive control and the non-conscious regulation of health behavior

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    A commentary on 'Cognitive control in the self-regulation of physical activity and sedentary behavior' by Buckley, J., Cohen, J. D., Kramer, A. F., McAuley, E., and Mullen, S. P. (2014). Front. Hum. Neurosci. 8:747. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.0074

    Informing the design of a national screening and treatment programme for chronic viral hepatitis in primary care: qualitative study of at-risk immigrant communities and healthcare professionals

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    n Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise statedThis paper presents independent research funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) under the Programme Grants for Applied Research programme (RP-PG-1209-10038).

    The General Age of Leadership: Older-Looking Presidential Candidates Win Elections during War

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    As nation-state leaders age they increasingly engage in inter-state militarized disputes yet in industrialized societies a steady decrease in testosterone associated with aging is observed – which suggests a decrease in dominance behavior. The current paper points out that from modern societies to Old World monkeys increasing both in age and social status encourages dominant strategies to maintain acquired rank. Moreover, it is argued this consistency has shaped an implicit prototype causing followers to associate older age with dominance leadership. It is shown that (i) faces of older leaders are preferred during intergroup conflict and (ii) morphing U.S. Presidential candidates to appear older or younger has an overriding effect on actual election outcomes. This indicates that democratic voting can be systematically adjusted by activating innate biases. These findings appear to create a new line of research regarding the biology of leadership and contextual cues of age

    Choosy Moral Punishers

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    The punishment of social misconduct is a powerful mechanism for stabilizing high levels of cooperation among unrelated individuals. It is regularly assumed that humans have a universal disposition to punish social norm violators, which is sometimes labelled “universal structure of human morality” or “pure aversion to social betrayal”. Here we present evidence that, contrary to this hypothesis, the propensity to punish a moral norm violator varies among participants with different career trajectories. In anonymous real-life conditions, future teachers punished a talented but immoral young violinist: they voted against her in an important music competition when they had been informed of her previous blatant misconduct toward fellow violin students. In contrast, future police officers and high school students did not punish. This variation among socio-professional categories indicates that the punishment of norm violators is not entirely explained by an aversion to social betrayal. We suggest that context specificity plays an important role in normative behaviour; people seem inclined to enforce social norms only in situations that are familiar, relevant for their social category, and possibly strategically advantageous

    On the Perception of Newcomers: Toward an Evolved Psychology of Intergenerational Coalitions

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    Human coalitions frequently persist through multiple, overlapping membership generations, requiring new members to cooperate and coordinate with veteran members. Does the mind contain psychological adaptations for interacting within these intergenerational coalitions? In this paper, we examine whether the mind spontaneously treats newcomers as a motivationally privileged category. Newcomers—though capable of benefiting coalitions—may also impose considerable costs (e.g., they may free ride on other members, they may be poor at completing group tasks). In three experiments we show (1) that the mind categorizes coalition members by tenure, including newcomers; (2) that tenure categorization persists in the presence of orthogonal and salient social dimensions; and (3) that newcomers elicit a pattern of impressions consistent with their probable ancestral costs. These results provide preliminary evidence for a specialized component of human coalitional psychology: an evolved concept of newcomer

    Individual differences in reproductive strategy are related to views about recreational drug use in Belgium, the Netherlands and Japan

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    Individual differences in moral views are often explained as the downstream effect of ideological commitments, such as political orientation and religiosity. Recent studies in the U.S. suggest that moral views about recreational drug use are also influenced by attitudes towards sex and that this relationship cannot be explained by ideological commitments. In this study, we investigate student samples from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Japan. We find that, in all samples, sexual attitudes are strongly related to views about recreational drug use, even after controlling for various ideological variables. We discuss our results in the light of reproductive strategies as determinants of moral views

    Internet Daters’ Body Type Preferences: Race–Ethnic and Gender Differences

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    Employing a United States sample of 5,810 Yahoo heterosexual internet dating profiles, this study finds race–ethnicity and gender influence body type preferences for dates, with men and whites significantly more likely than women and non-whites to have such preferences. White males are more likely than non-white men to prefer to date thin and toned women, while African-American and Latino men are significantly more likely than white men to prefer female dates with thick or large bodies. Compatible with previous research showing non-whites have greater body satisfaction and are less influenced by mainstream media than whites, our findings suggest Latinos and African Americans negotiate dominant white idealizations of thin female bodies with their own cultures’ greater acceptance of larger body types
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