A recent study by a team of researchers at the Universities of Leicester and Exeter reported that the assumption that people always act in their own best interests when making decisions is not always true. They present evidence which suggests that people will often make decisions that benefit the team, even at the expense of their own self interests. These two views, referred to as classical game theory and team reasoning theory, respectively, make very different predictions about how decisions makers will behave when confronted with choices that require deciding between pursuing personal interests or sacrificing individual gains for the welfare of the collective. Their findings speak to why people may not always serve their own best interests and demonstrate that team reasoning theory can reliably predict decision making behavior more powerfully in some games and situations than classical decision theory. Possible applications for this research may include constructing work place environments that foster cooperative decision making strategies.
Have you ever wondered why Hollywood marriages almost always include an older man settling down with a much younger woman? More specifically, how successful are these marriages given the great age disparity and that exists between husband and wife? A recent study by researchers at the Univeristy of Tennessee may provide an answer to this daunting question and it may not be what you expect. They compared the facial attractiveness of husband and wife across 82 newly-wed couples and then tested this comparison against the quality of their marriage. Their finding suggests that men who were rated as more attractive than their partner demonstrated a tendency to be less likely to offer emotional and practical support to their wives. The researchers offer an evolutionary account of this finding and argue that attractive men have more short-term mating opportunities available to them and this in turn may lead them to feel less satisfied and less committed to their marriage. In fact, they report that men are rated as more likeable and friendly when they are in a martial relationship with a partner who is very attractive. Likening this finding back to the question concerning the success of Hollywood marriages, it is not necessarily the age discrepancy between men and women that unites celebrities in matrimony but instead the ostensible difference in their levels of attractiveness.
Does the use of punishment lead to greater cooperation within interpersonal situations? Researchers at Harvard University emphatically suggest that it does not. Using a slight variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, a classic paradigm used to study cooperation, they found that the use of punitive behavior to coerce others into cooperation causes less overall cooperative behavior from others, leads to reduced individual pay-off, and provides no benefit for the group as a whole. Even more, the researchers found that the top-ranked players in the game rarely used punishment at all, opting instead to employ a tit-for-tat strategy, whereas the lowest ranked players, in contrast, made use of costly punishment. The study’s authors suggest that punishment can lead to a downward spiral of retaliation which can have negative consequences for everyone involved. One question of interest then is why does there exist such a strong motivation in humans to punish when engaged with others in a competitive task. One answer suggested by the researchers is that punitive behaviors may serve to establish a dominance hierarchy or to defend ownership of property and good. However, the overall conclusion that can be drawn from this study is clear: the use of costly punishment does not promote cooperative behaviors and those who readily employ it are often left at a severe disadvantage; in other words, punish and perish!
Kees van den Bos and colleagues at Utrecht University report an intriguing study where they found that mundane aspects of the environment, like, for instance, the mere presence of blinking lights, can lead us to make quicker and more extreme judgments of fairness. In one experiment, the researchers asked pedestrians shopping along the streets of the Netherlands to mentally simulate a scenario whereby a coworker received either the same or a greater job bonus than they did. The (very neat!) manipulation in this study was that half of the participants were asked to imagine this scenario while standing next to a flashing road-work light. Their results are shocking! – When asked to judge the fairness of this unequal bonus distribution, participants standing next to the blinking light generated more extreme judgments than those who were not in its presence. The researchers suggest that this happens because environmental stimuli detected as a potential threat (such as the blinking light) initiates what they refer to as the ‘human alarm system’, which, when activated, leads to the production of quicker and more extreme justice-related judgments (among others). The implications for this research are many and include application to judicial systems and public policy decision-making.
Why do some things make us happy while others do not? This intriguing question, which has fascinated philosophers for centuries, is finally being given the empirical treatment by a host of researchers who are attempting to find out what factors contribute to whether something make us feel a sense of happiness or not. The Washington Post reports on several of the findings uncovered by this research program, led by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, such as that people who are forced to make irrevocable choices often feel happier about their decisions than do people who are asked to make choices that can be altered in the future. He also found that, while most people do actively attempt to minimize their uncertainty about negative life events, this same principal is not applied to positive life events, such as receiving anonymous compliments or being bestowed gifts for no apparent reasons. Gilbert argues that the inherent uncertainty contained within these events amplifies the emotional consequences of these events thereby causing a greater sense of happiness to be felt than, say, if it were known who made the compliment or the reason why the gift was given. Understanding the essence of what it means to be happy and how feelings of happiness can be generated is vitally important, since being happy is correlated with a host of positive physical and psychological outcomes, and, therefore, this research provides a significant contribution to our knowledge about the factors that promote happiness and perhaps even a better life.
The New York Times reports on a series of laboratory studies by researchers at Florida State University that demonstrated a fascinating relationship to exist between blood-glucose levels and the exertion of self-control. In particular, they found that participants’ glucose levels decreased significantly after a short bout of exerting self-control to stifle their facial reactions to a video that they were instructed to watch. In a follow-up task requiring the application of self-control to achieve success, participants with depleted blood-glucose were found to be less successful than participants who were not instructed to suppress their responses to the video, however, after drinking a sugary drink, which increased glucose levels, these participants performed better than those who were given a drink containing artificial sweetener. The researchers suggest that these results imply that self-control can be depleted in a sense, and that eating and drinking may have a positive effect on the amount of willpower that an individual can exert. The implications for this research are many and could potentially be applied to programs that emphasize dieting, quitting smoking, or treating maladaptive behaviors.
Have you ever wondered about the strange old lady who lives in the rickety house down the street surrounded by her troupe of cats? A recent study by researchers at the University of Chicago suggests that one way in which people relieve feelings of loneliness is to construct "people" out of their surroundings by imparting human-like characteristics to their pets, gods, or even gadgets.
They found that this tendency, which is referred to by social scientists as "anthropomorphism", most profoundly occurred as a result of loneliness, as opposed to other negative emotional states, like fear, and has strong therapeutic and societal ramifications because it is thought that non-human connections can bestow many of the same psychological and physical benefits that come from interpersonal relationships with other people.
Science Daily reports on new research which uses brain imaging techniques to show different brain activation patterns in Americans and East Asians performing visual perception tasks. This effect was greatest for those who identified with their culture the most.
New research conducted with Romanian orphans and reported in the the journal Science confirms that institutionalized orphans placed into foster care have much better intellectual development than those who remain behind.
Science Daily reports on research conducted at Columbia University Medical Center’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center which shows that watching violent media can cause the brain areas that suppress aggresive behaviour to become less active.
The New York Times reports on a number of recent studies which suggest that perfectionists, whilst often praised in some contexts such as the work place, can be at risk for a range of negative health outcomes such as eating disorders, suicidal thinking and obsessive comulsive disorder.
