Cooperation, motivation and social balance

Abstract

This paper examines the reflexive interplay between individual decisions and social forces to analyze the evolution of cooperation in the presence of “multi-directedness,” whereby people's preferences depend on their psychological motives. People have access to multiple, discrete motives. Different motives may be activated by different social settings. Inter-individual differences in dispositional types affect the responsiveness of people's motives to their social settings. The evolution of these dispositional types is driven by changes in the frequencies of social settings. In this context, economic policies can influence economic decisions not merely by modifying incentives operating through given preferences, but also by influencing people's motives (thereby changing their preferences) and by changing the distribution of dispositional types in the population (thereby changing their motivational responsiveness to social settings)

Navigating Motivation: A Semantic and Subjective Atlas of 7 Motives

“…Overall, our results may inspire the formulation of new decision making models that highlight the importance of contexts in driving decisions (as recently suggested by Bosworth, Singer, & Snower, 2016) and propose new distinctions in motivation research, involving motives such as care, affiliation, and consumption/resource seeking. Future research could show how each of the seven motives can be induced through contextual primes, and how utility functions may link these different motivational systems to clear computational predictions for psychological or (neuro)economic experiments.…”

Caring Cooperators and Powerful Punishers: Differential Effects of Induced Care and Power Motivation on Different Types of Economic Decision Making

“…In contrast to this, in the case of Power, a motive suggested to have evolved to gain or maintain status/rank-related advantages 9 , punishing/norm-enforcing behaviors are more likely to occur, relative to Care. These findings argue against the assumption in standard neoclassical economic theory that decisions are driven by stable context-independent preferences 1 and rather speak in favor of a motive-based model of economic decision making 14,43 , in which different motives can be activated through different contexts, and once aroused, these motives can facilitate different action tendencies, some being more related to cooperation, others to punishment. Our findings also inform previous behavioral economic and evolutionary theories positing that a same tendency, such as strong reciprocity, could explain engagement in both cooperative and "altruistic punishing" behaviors, as both behaviors can promote cooperation 28,29 .…”

Distinct mental trainings differentially affect altruistically motivated, norm motivated, and self-reported prosocial behaviour

“…Thus, we demonstrate that people’s altruistic motivation and behaviour can be altered through simple, short and non-costly mental practices that target qualities of the heart such as care and compassion. Our findings indicate that stimulating positive prosocial emotions with those in need is a viable alternative to strategies that aim to increase altruism by fostering cognitive understanding and rationality, offer monetary incentives (e.g., tax incentives, as oftentimes proposed by neoclassical views in economy, see 69 ), or emphasize the importance of social norms and punishing free riding more rigorously 4 . Cultivating these affective and motivational capacities in schools, in health-related settings, and in work places may be an effective step towards meeting the challenges of a globalized world and move towards global cooperation and a caring society.…”