Linking Fearfulness and Coping Styles in Fish

Consistent individual differences in cognitive appraisal and emotional reactivity, including fearfulness, are important personality traits in humans, non-human mammals, and birds. Comparative studies on teleost fishes support the existence of coping styles and behavioral syndromes also in poikilothermic animals. The functionalist approach to emotions hold that emotions have evolved to ensure appropriate behavioral responses to dangerous or rewarding stimuli. Little information is however available on how evolutionary widespread these putative links between personality and the expression of emotional or affective states such as fear are. Here we disclose that individual variation in coping style predicts fear responses in Nile tilapia Oreochromis niloticus, using the principle of avoidance learning. Fish previously screened for coping style were given the possibility to escape a signalled aversive stimulus. Fearful individuals showed a range of typically reactive traits such as slow recovery of feed intake in a novel environment, neophobia, and high post-stress cortisol levels. Hence, emotional reactivity and appraisal would appear to be an essential component of animal personality in species distributed throughout the vertebrate subphylum

Multinational data show that conspiracy beliefs are associated with the perception (and reality) of poor national economic performance

While a great deal is known about the individual difference factors associated with conspiracy beliefs, much less is known about the country-level factors that shape people's willingness to believe conspiracy theories. In the current article we discuss the possibility that willingness to believe conspiracy theories might be shaped by the perception (and reality) of poor economic performance at the national level. To test this notion, we surveyed 6723 participants from 36 countries. In line with predictions, propensity to believe conspiracy theories was negatively associated with perceptions of current and future national economic vitality. Furthermore, countries with higher GDP per capita tended to have lower belief in conspiracy theories. The data suggest that conspiracy beliefs are not just caused by intrapsychic factors but are also shaped by difficult economic circumstances for which distrust might have a rational basis

Outgroup threat and the emergence of cohesive groups: a cross-cultural examination

Evolutionary models and empirical evidence suggest that outgroup threat is one of the strongest factors inducing group cohesion, however, little is known about the process of forming such cohesive groups. We investigated how outgroup threat galvanizes individuals to affiliate with others to form engaged units that are willing to act on behalf of their in-group. A total of 864 participants from six countries were randomly assigned to an outgroup threat, environmental threat, or no-threat condition. We measured the process of group formation through physical proximity and movement mirroring together with activity toward threat resolution and found that outgroup threat induced activity and heightened mirroring in males. We also observed higher mirroring and proximity in participants who perceived the outgroup threat as a real danger, albeit the latter results were imprecisely estimated. Together, these findings help understand how sharing subtle behavioral cues influences collaborative aggregation of people under threat

Digital Trust für KI-basierte Mensch-Maschine-Schnittstellen

Menschen sind seit Jahrzehnten davon fasziniert, Maschinen mit menschlichem Bewusstsein zu erschaffen. Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) trifft genau diesen Nerv und stößt aber gerade deshalb auf Misstrauen. Die zunehmende Entwicklung innovativer Produkte, die auf KI basieren, führen zu einer Erleichterung im Alltag der Menschen sowie zu einer Revolution der Arbeitswelt. Zum anderen erzeugen Medienberichte über Datenmissbrauch, Abhöraktionen und über die KI als Gefahr für die Menschheit Misstrauen. Dies kann in eine ablehnende Haltung gegenüber dem technologischen Fortschritt resultieren. Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, einen Beitrag zum Aufbau eines berechtigten digitalen Vertrauens zu leisten. Hierzu werden Kenntnisse zu humanen Vertrauensquellen und -mustern zusammengeführt und ein Trust-Journey-Ansatz zum Vertrauensaufbau für das Marketing entwickelt. Implikationen einer spezifischen KI-Trust-Journey werden am Beispiel von Voice User Interfaces (VUI) wie z. B. Amazon Alexa, Tmall Genie von Alibaba, Alice und Google Home konkretisiert. Abschließend werden Prinzipien des digitalen Vertrauensaufbaus empfohlen, um Marken und innovative, digitale Produkte aus der Vertrauensperspektive zu stärken und die wesentliche Rolle des Marketings in der menschzentrierten digitalen Produktentwicklung herauszuarbeiten

Moral expansiveness around the world: the role of societal factors across 36 countries

What are the things that we think matter morally, and how do societal factors influence this? To date, research has explored several individual-level and historical factors that influence the size of our ‘moral circles.' There has, however, been less attention focused on which societal factors play a role. We present the first multi-national exploration of moral expansiveness—that is, the size of people’s moral circles across countries. We found low generalized trust, greater perceptions of a breakdown in the social fabric of society, and greater perceived economic inequality were associated with smaller moral circles. Generalized trust also helped explain the effects of perceived inequality on lower levels of moral inclusiveness. Other inequality indicators (i.e., Gini coefficients) were, however, unrelated to moral expansiveness. These findings suggest that societal factors, especially those associated with generalized trust, may influence the size of our moral circles

A 32-society investigation of the influence of perceived economic inequality on social class stereotyping

There is a growing body of work suggesting that social class stereotypes are amplified when people perceive higher levels of economic inequality—that is, the wealthy are perceived as more competent and assertive and the poor as more incompetent and unassertive. The present study tested this prediction in 32 societies and also examines the role of wealth‐based categorization in explaining this relationship. We found that people who perceived higher economic inequality were indeed more likely to consider wealth as a meaningful basis for categorization. Unexpectedly, however, higher levels of perceived inequality were associated with perceiving the wealthy as less competent and assertive and the poor as more competent and assertive. Unpacking this further, exploratory analyses showed that the observed tendency to stereotype the wealthy negatively only emerged in societies with lower social mobility and democracy and higher corruption. This points to the importance of understanding how socio‐structural features that co‐occur with economic inequality may shape perceptions of the wealthy and the poor