D o strong demographic faultlines breed opinion polarization in work teams? We integrate two theories that have been used to explain faultline effects. The first, the approach of Lau and A2 Murnighan [Lau DC, Murnighan JK (1998) Demographic diversity and faultlines: The compositional dynamics of organizational groups. Acad. Management Rev. 23(2):325-340], suggests that in teams with strong faultlines the mechanisms of homophilious selection of interaction partners and persuasive influence cause subgroup polarization, defined as the split of the team into subgroups holding opposing opinions. The second, from sociological and anthropological traditions, emphasizes that crisscrossing actors bridge faultlines because they share demographic attributes with several subgroups. Demographically crisscrossing actors help to prevent polarization in social groups. We argue that Lau and Murnighan's theory implicitly factors in the effects of crisscrossing actors. However, we show that the authors overlooked crucial implications of their theory because they did not consider crisscrossing actors explicitly. Most importantly, we demonstrate that demographic crisscrossing implies that even teams with strong faultlines will overcome polarization in the long run, although they might suffer from it in the short term. We develop and analyze a formal computational model of the opinion and network dynamics in work teams to show the consistency of our reasoning with Lau and Murnighans' theory. The model also revealed another counterintuitive effect: strong faultlines lead to structures of interaction that make teams with strong faultlines faster in arriving at a stable consensus than teams with weak faultlines.

Abstract. Although peer review is crucial for innovation and experimental discoveries in science, it is poorly understood in scientific terms. Discovering its true dynamics and exploring adjustments which improve the commitment of everyone involved could benefit scientific development for all disciplines and consequently increase innovation in the economy and the society. We have reported the results of an innovative experiment developed to model peer review. We demonstrate that offering material rewards to reviewers tends to decrease the quality and efficiency of the reviewing process. Our findings help to discuss the viability of different options of incentive provision, supporting the idea that journal editors and responsible of research funding agencies should be extremely careful in offering material incentives on reviewing, since these might undermine moral motives which guide reviewers' behavior.

Abstract:The emergence of disliking relations depends on how adolescents perceive the relative informal status of their peers. This notion is examined on a longitudinal sample using dynamic network analysis (585 students across 16 classes in 5 schools). As hypothesized individuals dislike those who they look down on (disdain) and conform to others by disliking those who they perceive as being looked down on by their peers (conformity). The inconsistency between status perceptions also leads to disliking, when individuals do not look up to those who they perceive to be admired by peers (frustration). No evidence is found that adolescents do not dislike those who they look up to (admiration). Results demonstrate the role of status perceptions on disliking tie formation. Interpersonal relationships among adolescents play a central role in their social development. Recent research suggests that although disliking ties are reported less frequently than liking relations, they are present in adolescents' everyday life and therefore drive their development in fundamental ways (Card, 2010). Compared to positive emotional relationships, such as friendship or liking, disliking ties are relatively rare (e.g., Baldwin, Bedell, & Johnson, 1997; Card, 2010; Gersick, Dutton, & Bartunek, 2000; Labianca, Brass, & Gray, 1998). Although disliking ties are scarce, they are very powerful: studies that successfully measured them found that disliking relations have a disproportionally greater effect on satisfaction, mood, performance and stress than liking relations, which has been described as a "negative asymmetry" (Labianca, Brass, & Gray, 1998; Labianca & Brass, 2006;Moerbeek & Need, 2003). Journal of Research on AdolescenceDisliking relations should be studied in a network context, given that they are not independent from each other (Huitsing et al., 2012). Disliking nominations depend on each other in various ways. They are often reciprocated (e.g., Berger & Dijkstra, 2013; Card, 2010) and balanced in triadic relations (Cartwright & Harary, 1956;Hummon & Doreian, 2003;Ludwig & Abell, 2007; Marvel, Kleinberg, Kleinberg, & Strogatz, 2011;Wang & Thorngate, 2003). Moreover, heterophobia exists as people dislike dissimilar others (Flache & Mäs, 2008). Going beyond these elementary structural processes, we argue that a crucial factor that requires particular attention for the explanation of the emergence of disliking relations is status.Gaining status among peers represents a major goal for adolescents (Lindenberg & Steg, 2007; Pellegrini & Long, 2002), and high status adolescents are more influential than their low status peers as they have a major role to set the norm in a class (Rambaran, Dijkstra, & Stark, 2013). Status competition and the resulting status perceptions in particular are important drivers of the formation of relational ties and peer influence (e.g., Brechwald & Prinstein, 2011;Faris & Ennett, 2010;Faris & Felmlee, 2011; Faris, 2012). Only few studies attempted thus far to explain how status is responsible fo...

Both classical social psychological theories and recent formal models of opinion differentiation and bi-polarization assign a prominent role to negative social influence. Negative influence is defined as shifts away from the opinion of others and hypothesized to be induced by discrepancy with or disliking of the source of influence. There is strong empirical support for the presence of positive social influence (a shift towards the opinion of others), but evidence that large opinion differences or disliking could trigger negative shifts is mixed. We examine positive and negative influence with controlled exposure to opinions of other individuals in one experiment and with opinion exchange in another study. Results confirm that similarities induce attraction, but results do not support that discrepancy or disliking entails negative influence. Instead, our findings suggest a robust positive linear relationship between opinion distance and opinion shifts.

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Large-scale non-kin cooperation is a unique ingredient of human success. This type of cooperation is challenging to explain in a world of self-interested individuals. There is overwhelming empirical evidence from different disciplines that reputation and gossip promote cooperation in humans in different contexts. Despite decades of research, important details of reputation systems are still unclear. Our goal with this theme issue is to promote an interdisciplinary approach that allows us to explore and understand the evolution and maintenance of reputation systems with a special emphasis on gossip and honest signalling. The theme issue is organized around four main questions: What are the necessary conditions for reputation-based systems? What is the content and context of reputation systems? How can reputations promote cooperation? And, what is the role of gossip in maintaining reputation systems and thus cooperation? This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.

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.