Self-activation is a two-edged sword: The effects of I primes on cooperation

Bending Our Ethics Code

Abstract. Deception of research participants has long been and remains a hot-button issue in the behavioral sciences. At the same time, the field of psychology is fortunate to have an ethics code to rely on in determining whether and how to use and report on deception of participants. Despite ongoing normative controversies, the smallest common denominator among psychologists is that deception ought to be a last resort – to be used only when there is no other defensible way to study a question or phenomenon. Going beyond previous normative discussions or inquiries into the mere prevalence of deception, we ask the fundamental question whether common practice is compatible with this interpretation of our field’s ethical standards. Findings from an empirical literature review – focusing on the feasibility of nondeceptive alternative procedures and the presence of explicit justifications for the use of deception – demonstrate that there is a notable gap between the last resort interpretation of our ethical standards and common practice in psychological research. The findings are discussed with the aim of identifying viable ways in which researchers, journal editors, and the scientific associations crafting our ethics codes may narrow this gap.

Reducing Resistance to Narrative Persuasion About Binge Drinking: The Role of Self-Activation and Habitual Drinking Behavior

This study explores the effects of habitual health risk behaviors and self-activation on resistance to narrative persuasion. In two experiments, heavier drinkers were more resistant to an anti-binge-drinking narrative public service announcement (PSA) in which a binge drinker suffers a negative outcome. Specifically, heavier drinkers were more likely to generate counterarguments, unrealism judgments, and negative evaluations about the message compared to lighter drinkers or nondrinkers. However, activating self-concept when processing the persuasive narrative reduced unrealism judgments and negative evaluations, particularly among heavier drinkers. Self-activation also decreased perceived freedom threat among both heavier and lighter drinkers, which further led to higher perceived risk of binge drinking. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Traditional and Health-Related Philanthropy: The Role of Resources and Personality

I study the relationships of resources and personality characteristics to charitable giving, postmortem organ donation, and blood donation in a nationwide sample of persons in households in the Netherlands. I find that specific personality characteristics are related to specific types of giving: agreeableness to blood donation, empathic concern to charitable giving, and prosocial value orientation to postmortem organ donation. I find that giving has a consistently stronger relation to human and social capital than to personality. Human capital increases giving; social capital increases giving only when it is approved by others. Effects of prosocial personality characteristics decline at higher levels of these characteristics. Effects of empathic concern, helpfulness, and social value orientations on generosity are mediated by verbal proficiency and church attendance.

The sociocultural appraisals, values, and emotions (SAVE) framework of prosociality: core processes from gene to meme

The study of prosocial behavior--altruism, cooperation, trust, and the related moral emotions--has matured enough to produce general scholarly consensus that prosociality is widespread, intuitive, and rooted deeply within our biological makeup. Several evolutionary frameworks model the conditions under which prosocial behavior is evolutionarily viable, yet no unifying treatment exists of the psychological decision-making processes that result in prosociality. Here, we provide such a perspective in the form of the sociocultural appraisals, values, and emotions (SAVE) framework of prosociality. We review evidence for the components of our framework at four levels of analysis: intrapsychic, dyadic, group, and cultural. Within these levels, we consider how phenomena such as altruistic punishment, prosocial contagion, self-other similarity, and numerous others give rise to prosocial behavior. We then extend our reasoning to chart the biological underpinnings of prosociality and apply our framework to understand the role of social class in prosociality.

Social Value Orientation

What motivates people when they make decisions and how those motivations are potentially entangled with concerns for others are central topics for the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. According to the postulate of narrow self-interest, decision makers have the goal of maximizing personal payoffs and are wholly indifferent to the consequences for others. The postulate of narrow self-interest—which has been influential in economics, psychology, and sociology—is precise and powerful but is often simply wrong. Its inadequacy is well known and efforts have been made to develop reliable and valid measurement methods to quantify the more nuanced social preferences that people really have. In this paper, we report on the emergence and development of the predominant conceptualization of social preferences in psychology: social value orientation (SVO). Second, we discuss the relationship between measurement and theory development of the SVO construct. We then provide an overview of the literature regarding measurement methods that have been used to assess individual variations in social preferences. We conclude with a comparative evaluation of the various measures and provide suggestions regarding the measures’ constructive use in building psychologically realistic theories of people’s social preferences.

Prosocial Consequences of Imitation

Research has shown that helping behavior can be primed easily. However, helping decreases significantly in the presence of inhibition cues, signaling high costs for the executor. On the other hand, multiple studies demonstrated that helping behavior increases after being mimicked. The present study investigated whether imitation still increases helping when more substantial costs are involved. Helping behavior was operationalized as the willingness to accompany the confederate on a 15–20 minute walk to the train station. Results show that even in the face of these high costs, participants who were mimicked agreed more often to help the confederate than participants who were anti-mimicked. These findings suggest that mimicry not only makes people more helpful when it comes to small favors, but also allows them to ignore the substantial costs possibly involved in helping others.

Prosocial behavior in diverse workgroups

Members from diverse workgroups face the challenge to work effectively together. Benefits associated with diversity may be overshadowed by lack of cohesion and subgroup forming, which can withdraw team members from working together cooperatively or helping each other out when necessary. In three studies, we showed that an individual’s focus on relationships (relational identity orientation; Brewer & Gardner, 1996), promotes prosocial behavior towards workgroup members from a different social group. Study 1 showed that high-trait relationally oriented individuals are more willing to cooperate with an outgroup member compared to low-trait relationally oriented individuals. Study 2 showed that priming a relational orientation leads to a higher willingness to help outgroup members compared to priming a personal or collective orientation. In Study 3, we replicated the findings of both studies and additionally tested two person-by-situation interaction models. It appeared that both trait relational identity orientation and identity primes appeared to independently predict cooperation tendencies with fellow workgroup members.

Social Value Orientation and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: A Meta-Analysis

This article reports a meta-analysis of 82 studies assessing the relationship between social value orientation (SVO) and cooperation in social dilemmas. A significant and small to medium effect size was found ( r = .30). Results supported a hypothesis that the effect size was larger when participants were not paid ( r = .39) than when they were paid ( r = .23). The effect size was also larger in give-some ( r = .29) as opposed to take-some ( r = .22) games. However, contrary to expectations, the effect was not larger in one-shot, as opposed to iterated games. Findings are discussed in the context of theory on SVO and directions for future research are outlined.

Importance of Personal Goals in People with Independent Versus Interdependent Selves

This paper investigates how the importance attached to personal goals differs according to the person’s independent or interdependent self. Results of one questionnaire study and two priming studies showed that, overall, independents considered their goals more important than interdependents. A closer analysis revealed, however, that interdependents assigned more relevance to social goals (e.g., harmony with others), than to individual goals (e.g., to be successful), whereas independents attached equal importance to both types of goals.

Motivated Information Processing in Group Judgment and Decision Making

This article expands the view of groups as information processors into a motivated information processing in groups (MIP-G) model by emphasizing, first, the mixed-motive structure of many group tasks and, second, the idea that individuals engage in more or less deliberate information search and processing. The MIP-G model postulates that social motivation drives the kind of information group members attend to, encode, and retrieve and that epistemic motivation drives the degree to which new information is sought and attended to, encoded, and retrieved. Social motivation and epistemic motivation are expected to influence, alone and in combination, generating problem solutions, disseminating information, and negotiating joint decisions. The MIP-G model integrates the influence of many individual and situational differences and combines insight on human thinking with group-level interaction process and decision making.