Environmental adversity is associated with lower investment in collective actions

Perception of uncontrollable mortality risk is associated with food insecurity and reduced economic effort among resource-insecure college students during COVID-19

In the framework of the uncontrollable mortality risk hypothesis, resource scarcity intersects with mortality risk, shaping resource allocation strategies with enduring impacts on human health and wellbeing. Despite rising economic and food insecurity among US college students, little is known about how these insecurities relate to mortality risk, or how scarcity and mortality risk interact to shape college students' resource allocation strategies. We examine perceptions of resource scarcity and mortality risk and their associations with food insecurity and resource allocation strategies among economically insecure college students during COVID-19 lockdowns. Participants were recruited through an economic crisis response center at a major public university in the United States. A total of 118 participants completed an online Qualtrics survey assessing sociodemographic characteristics, perceptions of mortality risk and resource availability, food security, economic effort, and time perspective; a subset (n = 51) also participated in a telephone interview assessing psychological distress. In general, participants reported more environmental adversity and economic effort during COVID-19 lockdowns compared to before. Students experiencing higher levels of uncontrollable (and not controllable) mortality risk report lower levels of economic effort, and the association was strongest among students perceiving the fewest resources. We also found significant associations between uncontrollable mortality risk and food insecurity. Our results highlight uncontrollable mortality risk's influence on human well-being. Public health efforts should target the experiences and root structural causes of uncontrollable mortality risk, which among economically insecure college students increasingly involves food insecurity.

The Effect of Income and Wealth on Behavioral Strategies, Personality Traits, and Preferences

Individuals living in either harsh or favorable environments display well-documented psychological and behavioral differences. For example, people in favorable environments tend to be more future-oriented, trust strangers more, and have more explorative preferences. To account for such differences, psychologists have turned to evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, in particular, the literature on life-history theory and pace-of-life syndrome. However, critics have found that the theoretical foundations of these approaches are fragile and that differences in life expectancy cannot explain vast psychological and behavioral differences. In this article, we build on the theory of optimal resource allocation to propose an alternative framework. We hypothesize that the quantity of resources available, such as income, has downstream consequences on psychological traits, leading to the emergence of behavioral syndromes. We show that more resources lead to more long-term orientation, more tolerance of variance, and more investment in low marginal-benefit needs. At the behavioral level, this translates, among others, into more large-scale cooperation, more investment in health, and more exploration. These individual-level differences in behavior, in turn, account for cultural phenomena such as puritanism, authoritarianism, and innovation.

Human-environment feedback and the consistency of proenvironmental behavior

Addressing global environmental crises such as anthropogenic climate change requires the consistent adoption of proenvironmental behavior by a large part of a population. Here, we develop a mathematical model of a simple behavior-environment feedback loop to ask how the individual assessment of the environmental state combines with social interactions to influence the consistent adoption of proenvironmental behavior, and how this feeds back to the perceived environmental state. In this stochastic individual-based model, individuals can switch between two behaviors, 'active' (or actively proenvironmental) and 'baseline', differing in their perceived cost (higher for the active behavior) and environmental impact (lower for the active behavior). We show that the deterministic dynamics and the stochastic fluctuations of the system can be approximated by ordinary differential equations and a Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type process. By definition, the proenvironmental behavior is adopted consistently when, at population stationary state, its frequency is high and random fluctuations in frequency are small. We find that the combination of social and environmental feedbacks can promote the spread of costly proenvironmental behavior when neither, operating in isolation, would. To be adopted consistently, strong social pressure for proenvironmental action is necessary but not sufficient-social interactions must occur on a faster timescale compared to individual assessment, and the difference in environmental impact must be small. This simple model suggests a scenario to achieve large reductions in environmental impact, which involves incrementally more active and potentially more costly behavior being consistently adopted under increasing social pressure for proenvironmentalism.

Moral disciplining: The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality

Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism, sobriety, modesty, and piety as cardinal moral virtues? According to existing theories, this puritanical morality cannot be reduced to concerns for harm and fairness: It must emerge from cognitive systems that did not evolve for cooperation (e.g., disgust-based "purity" concerns). Here, we argue that, despite appearances, puritanical morality is no exception to the cooperative function of moral cognition. It emerges in response to a key feature of cooperation, namely that cooperation is (ultimately) a long-term strategy, requiring (proximately) the self-control of appetites for immediate gratification. Puritanical moralizations condemn behaviors which, although inherently harmless, are perceived as indirectly facilitating uncooperative behaviors, by impairing the self-control required to refrain from cheating. Drinking, drugs, immodest clothing, and unruly music and dance are condemned as stimulating short-term impulses, thus facilitating uncooperative behaviors (e.g., violence, adultery, free-riding). Overindulgence in harmless bodily pleasures (e.g., masturbation, gluttony) is perceived as making people slave to their urges, thus altering abilities to resist future antisocial temptations. Daily self-discipline, ascetic temperance, and pious ritual observance are perceived as cultivating the self-control required to honor prosocial obligations. We review psychological, historical, and ethnographic evidence supporting this account. We use this theory to explain the fall of puritanism in western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, and discuss the cultural evolution of puritanical norms. Explaining puritanical norms does not require adding mechanisms unrelated to cooperation in our models of the moral mind.

Retrospective Self-Reported Childhood Experiences in Enriched Environments Uniquely Predict Prosocial Behavior and Personality Traits in Adulthood

What features of people's childhood environments go on to shape their prosocial behavior during adulthood? Past studies linking childhood environment to adult prosocial behavior have focused primarily on adverse features, thereby neglecting the possible influence of exposure to enriched environments (e.g., access to material resources, experiences with rich cooperative relationships, and interactions with morally exemplary role models). Here, we expand the investigation of childhood environmental quality to include consideration of enriching childhood experiences and their relation to adult prosociality. In two cross-sectional studies, we found promising evidence that enriched childhood environments are associated with adult moral behavior. In study 1 (N = 1,084 MTurk workers), we adapted an existing measure of enriched childhood environmental quality for retrospective recall of childhood experiences and found that subjects' recollections of their enriched childhood experiences are distinct from their recollections of adverse childhood experiences. In Study 2 (N = 2,208 MTurk workers), we found that a formative composite of subjects' recollections of enriched childhood experiences is positively associated with a variety of morally relevant traits in adulthood, including agreeableness, honesty-humility, altruism, endorsement of the principle of care, empathic responding to the plights of needy others, and charitable donations in an experimental setting, and that these associations held after controlling for childhood environmental adversity, childhood socioeconomic status, sex, and age. We also found evidence suggesting that some, but not all, of the relationship between enrichment and adult prosociality can be explained by a shared genetic correlation. We include a new seven-item measure as an appendix.

Cooperation as a signal of time preferences

Many evolutionary models explain why we cooperate with non-kin, but few explain why cooperative behaviour and trust vary. Here, we introduce a model of cooperation as a signal of time preferences, which addresses this variability. At equilibrium in our model (i) future-oriented individuals are more motivated to cooperate, (ii) future-oriented populations have access to a wider range of cooperative opportunities, and (iii) spontaneous and inconspicuous cooperation reveal stronger preference for the future, and therefore inspire more trust. Our theory sheds light on the variability of cooperative behaviour and trust. Since affluence tends to align with time preferences, results (i) and (ii) explain why cooperation is often associated with affluence, in surveys and field studies. Time preferences also explain why we trust others based on proxies for impulsivity, and, following result (iii), why uncalculating, subtle and one-shot cooperators are deemed particularly trustworthy. Time preferences provide a powerful and parsimonious explanatory lens, through which we can better understand the variability of trust and cooperation.

The Cognitive, Ecological, and Developmental Origins of Self-Disturbance in Borderline Personality Disorder

Self-disturbance is recognized as a key symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Although it is the source of significant distress and significant costs to society, it is still poorly specified. In addition, current research and models on the etiology of BPD do not provide sufficient evidence or predictions about who is at risk of developing BPD and self-disturbance, and why. The aim of this review is to lay the foundations of a new model inspired by recent developments at the intersection of social cognition, behavioral ecology, and developmental biology. We argue that the sense of agency is an important dimension to consider when characterizing self-disturbances in BPD. Second, we address the poorly characterized relation between self-disturbances and adverse life conditions encountered early in life. We highlight the potential relevance of Life-History Theory-a major framework in evolutionary developmental biology-to make sense of this association. We put forward the idea that the effect of early life adversity on BPD symptomatology depends on the way individuals trade their limited resources between competing biological functions during development.

Childhood environmental adversity is not linked to lower levels of cooperative behaviour in economic games

Cooperation is a universal phenomenon, it is present in all human cultures from hunter-gatherers to industrialised societies, and it constitutes a fundamental aspect of social relationships. There is, however, variability in the amount of resources people invest in cooperative activities. Recent findings indicate that this variability may be partly explained as a contextually appropriate response to environmental conditions. Specifically, adverse environments seem to be associated with less cooperation and recent findings suggest that this effect is partly mediated by differences in individuals' life-history strategy. In this paper, we set out to replicate and extend these findings by measuring actual cooperative behaviour in three economic games - a Dictator game, a Trust game and a Public Goods game - on a nationally representative sample of 612 people. Although we found that the cooperation and life-history strategy latent variables were adequately captured by the models, the hypothesised relationship between childhood environmental adversity and adult cooperation and the mediation effect by life-history strategy were not found.

Correction: Environmental adversity is associated with lower investment in collective actions

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236715.].

Neighbourhood wealth, not urbanicity, predicts prosociality towards strangers

Urbanization is perhaps the most significant and rapid cause of demographic change in human societies, with more than half the world's population now living in cities. Urban lifestyles have been associated with increased risk for mental disorders, greater stress responses, and lower trust. However, it is not known whether a general tendency towards prosocial behaviour varies across the urban-rural gradient, or whether other factors such as neighbourhood wealth might be more predictive of variation in prosocial behaviour. Here, we present findings from three real-world experiments conducted in 37 different neighbourhoods, in 12 cities and 12 towns and villages across the UK. We measured whether people: (i) posted a lost letter; (ii) returned a dropped item; and (iii) stopped to let someone cross the road in each neighbourhood. We expected to find that people were less willing to help a stranger in more urban locations, with increased diffusion of responsibility and perceived anonymity in cities being measured as variables that might drive this effect. Our data did not support this hypothesis. There was no effect of either urbanicity or population density on people's willingness to help a stranger. Instead, the neighbourhood level of deprivation explained most of the variance in helping behaviour with help being offered less frequently in more deprived neighbourhoods. These findings highlight the importance of socio-economic factors, rather than urbanicity per se, in shaping variation in prosocial behaviour in humans.