A bizalomvesztés ára

Szemle: Pamela Shockley-Zalabak, Sherwyn Morreale & Michael Hackman: Building the High-Trust Organization: Strategies for Supporting Five Key Dimensions of Trust. San Francisco, 2010. Jossey-Bass. xv + 256 p. ISBN 978-0-470-39472-

Reputation and cooperation in social dilemma games [védés előtt]

A human solution to the problem of cooperation is the maintenance of informal reputation hierarchies. Reputational information contributes to cooperation by providing guidelines about previous group-beneficial or free-rider behaviour in social dilemma interactions. How reputation system emerges, however, remains a puzzle. The dissertation tests two dimensions of a reputation system that affect the establishment of a credible reputation system: (i) if direct benefit can be earned for reputation it has to be a scarce resource or (ii) if it is not earned for direct benefits good reputation should not be restricted. Four different setups were tested in a laboratory experiment in which participants played two-person Prisoner’s Dilemma games without partner selection, could observe some other interactions, and could communicate reputational information about possible opponents to each other. Reputational information clearly influenced cooperation decisions. Although cooperation was not sustained at a high level in any of the conditions, the possibility of exchanging third-party information was able to temporarily increase the level of strategic cooperation when reputation was a scarce resource and reputational scores were directly translated into monetary benefits. Competition for monetary rewards or unrestricted non-monetary reputational rewards helped the reputation system to be informative. Finally, high reputational scores are reinforced further as they are rewarded with positive messages, and positive gossip was leading to higher reputations. Communication about previous acts and passing on reputational information could be valuable for conditional action in cooperation problems and pose a punishment threat to defectors. It is an open question, however, what kind of mechanisms can make gossip honest and credible and reputational information reliable, especially if intense competition for reputations does not exclusively dictate passing on honest information. The dissertation proposes two mechanisms that could support the honesty and credibility of gossip under such a conflict of interest. One is the possibility of voluntary checks of received evaluative information from different sources and the other is social bonding between the sender and the receiver. The efficiency of cross-checking and social bonding was tested in a laboratory experiment where subjects played the Prisoner's Dilemma with gossip interactions. Although individuals had confidence in gossip in both conditions, it was found that, overall, neither the opportunities for cross-checking nor bonding were able to maintain cooperation. Meanwhile, strong competition for reputation increased cooperation when individuals' payoffs depended greatly on their position relative to their rivals. Results suggest that intense competition for reputation facilitates gossip functioning as an informal device promoting cooperation. To build and maintain an informative reputation system people has to be able to differentiate between honest and dishonest signals of cooperative intentions. Previous theories suggest that signals have to be costly to be honest. This dissertation challenges this claim, and empirically test an alternative explanation of credible signalling. Accordingly, signals have to be costly for dishonest signallers and beneficial to honest signallers in order to get meaning and remain informative. Results of a laboratory decision-making experiment with human participants confirm the alternative, or corrective explanation. In everyday life humans cooperate in different contexts despite the individual costs prosocial actions imply. Theory suggests that prosocial behaviour persists because the costs implied are compensated by reputational and other social benefits. Namely, prosocial individuals are more likely to receive friendship nominations and less likely to experience exclusion threats or avoidance than others. The dissertation tests if such beneficial network dynamics occur in a unique dataset from twenty primary school classes in northern Italy. Social preferences of 420 students in grades 4 and 5 were elicited with incentivised social dilemma games, and full class-networks were traced in two subsequent occasions. The dynamics of friendship and negative ties in classrooms were analysed with Stochastic Actor Oriented Models, and a meta-analysis of the results was conducted. The key result is that, while no evidence was observe related to homophily in friendship nominations and being prosocial does not lead to more friendship nomination, individuals are significantly more likely to send negative tie nominations to peers with different offers in the dictator game. The dissertation finds that social network dynamics support cooperation through avoidance between prosocial and selfish students rather than because prosocial individuals are rewarded with friendship

Scarce and directly beneficial reputations support cooperation

A human solution to the problem of cooperation is the maintenance of informal reputation hierarchies. Reputational information contributes to cooperation by providing guidelines about previous group-beneficial or free-rider behaviour in social dilemma interactions. How reputation information could be credible, however, remains a puzzle. We test two potential safeguards to ensure credibility: (i) reputation is a scarce resource and (ii) it is not earned for direct benefits. We test these solutions in a laboratory experiment in which participants played two-person Prisoner’s Dilemma games without partner selection, could observe some other interactions, and could communicate reputational information about possible opponents to each other. Reputational information clearly influenced cooperation decisions. Although cooperation was not sustained at a high level in any of the conditions, the possibility of exchanging third-party information was able to temporarily increase the level of strategic cooperation when reputation was a scarce resource and reputational scores were directly translated into monetary benefits. We found that competition for monetary rewards or unrestricted non-monetary reputational rewards helped the reputation system to be informative. Finally, we found that high reputational scores are reinforced further as they are rewarded with positive messages, and positive gossip was leading to higher reputations

Taxon-specific responses to different forestry treatments in a temperate forest

There are only few studies that explore the ecological consequences of forest management on several organism groups. We studied the short-term effects of four forestry treatments including preparation cutting, clear-cutting, retention tree group and gap-cutting in a temperate managed forest on the assemblage structure of understory plants, enchytraeid worms, spiders and ground beetles. Here we show, that the effect of treatments on the different facets of assemblage structure was taxon-specific. Clear-cutting and retention tree group strongly impoverished enchytraeids assemblages. Even if the species richness and cover of plants increased in clear-cutting and gap-cutting, their species composition moderately changed after treatments. For spiders only their species composition was influenced by the treatments, while the response of ground beetles was slightly affected. Short-term effect of forest management interventions on biodiversity might be compensated by the dispersal (spiders, ground beetles) and resilience (plants) of organism groups, however sedentary soil organism showed high sensitivity

The psychological foundations of reputation-based cooperation

Humans care about having a positive reputation, which may prompt them to help in scenarios where the return benefits are not obvious. Various game-theoretical models support the hypothesis that concern for reputation may stabilize cooperation beyond kin, pairs or small groups. However, such models are not explicit about the underlying psychological mechanisms that support reputation-based cooperation. These models therefore cannot account for the apparent rarity of reputation-based cooperation in other species. Here, we identify the cognitive mechanisms that may support reputation-based cooperation in the absence of language. We argue that a large working memory enhances the ability to delay gratification, to understand others' mental states (which allows for perspective-taking and attribution of intentions) and to create and follow norms, which are key building blocks for increasingly complex reputation-based cooperation. We review the existing evidence for the appearance of these processes during human ontogeny as well as their presence in non-human apes and other vertebrates. Based on this review, we predict that most non-human species are cognitively constrained to show only simple forms of reputation-based cooperation. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’

StaffTalk : magyar nyelvű spontán beszélgetések korpusza

A cikkben bemutatjuk a StaffTalk nevű, nagy méretű, kézzel annotált korpuszt, mely magyar nyelvű spontán beszélgetéseket tartalmaz. A korpusz létrehozásával elsősorban ahhoz szerettünk volna vizsgálati anyagot teremteni, hogy zárt közösségeken belül az informális kommunikáció és a megbecsültség hogyan befolyásolja a közösség működését és normarendszerét. A munka első lépéseként a hanganyagokat legépeltettük, amelynek során a verbális információn túl egyéb, nem verbális információk megjelölésére is megkértük az annotátorokat. A legépelt hanganyagokat ezt követően három szinten annotáltuk: a beszélgetésekben megjelenő pletykát, beszédaktusokat és egyéb pragmatikai jegyeket, valamint bizonytalanságra utaló szavakat egyaránt megjelöltünk. Mindezeknek a sajátságoknak köszönhetően a kiinduló kutatási kérdéssel összefüggésben, valamint azon túl is a korpusz sokféle pragmatikai szempontú elemzés elvégzésére is alkalmassá vált

StaffTalk: magyar nyelvű spontán beszélgetések korpusza

A cikkben bemutatjuk a StaffTalk nevű, nagy méretű, kézzel annotált korpuszt, mely magyar nyelvű spontán beszélgetéseket tartalmaz. A korpusz létrehozásával elsősorban ahhoz szerettünk volna vizsgálati anyagot teremteni, hogy zárt közösségeken belül az informális kommunikáció és a megbecsültség hogyan befolyásolja a közösség működését és normarendszerét. A munka első lépéseként a hanganyagokat legépeltettük, amelynek során a verbális információn túl egyéb, nem verbális információk megjelölésére is megkértük az annotátorokat. A legépelt hanganyagokat ezt követően három szinten annotáltuk: a beszélgetésekben megjelenő pletykát, beszédaktusokat és egyéb pragmatikai jegyeket, valamint bizonytalanságra utaló szavakat egyaránt megjelöltünk. Mindezeknek a sajátságoknak köszönhetően a kiinduló kutatási kérdéssel összefüggésben, valamint azon túl is a korpusz sokféle pragmatikai szempontú elemzés elvégzésére is alkalmassá vált

Evaluating mechanisms that could support credible reputations and cooperation : cross-checking and social bonding

Gossip is believed to be an informal device that alleviates the problem of cooperation in humans. Communication about previous acts and passing on reputational information could be valuable for conditional action in cooperation problems and pose a punishment threat to defectors. It is an open question, however, what kind of mechanisms can make gossip honest and credible and reputational information reliable, especially if intense competition for reputations does not exclusively dictate passing on honest information. We propose two mechanisms that could support the honesty and credibility of gossip under such a conflict of interest. One is the possibility of voluntary checks of received evaluative information from different sources and the other is social bonding between the sender and the receiver. We tested the efficiency of cross-checking and social bonding in a laboratory experiment where subjects played the Prisoner's Dilemma with gossip interactions. Although individuals had confidence in gossip in both conditions, we found that, overall, neither the opportunities for cross-checking nor bonding were able to maintain cooperation. Meanwhile, strong competition for reputation increased cooperation when individuals' payoffs depended greatly on their position relative to their rivals. Our results suggest that intense competition for reputation facilitates gossip functioning as an informal device promoting cooperation.Funding: European Research Council (ERC)European Research Council (ERC)European Commission [648693]; National Research, Development and Innovation Office -NKFIH (OTKA)Orszagos Tudomanyos Kutatasi Alapprogramok (OTKA) [K 132250]</p