Recalibrational Emotions and the Regulation of Trust-Based Behaviors

Sheremeta

2014

SSRN Journal

Self Cite

Despite normative predictions from economics and biology, unrelated strangers will often develop the trust necessary to reap gains from one-shot economic exchange opportunities. This appears to be especially true when declared intentions and emotions can be cheaply communicated. Perhaps even more puzzling to economists and biologists is the observation that anonymous and unrelated individuals, known to have breached trust, often make effective use of cheap signals, such as promises and apologies, to encourage trust re-extension. We used a pair of trust games with one-way communication and an emotion survey to investigate the role of emotions in regulating the propensity to message, apologize, re-extend trust, and demonstrate trustworthiness. This design allowed us to observe the endogenous emergence and natural distribution of trust-relevant behaviors, remedial strategies used by promise-breakers, their effects on behavior, and subsequent outcomes. We found that emotions triggered by interaction outcomes are predictable and also predict subsequent apology and trust re-extension. The role of emotions in behavioral regulation helps explain why messages are produced, when they can be trusted, and when trust will be re-extended.Keywords: emotion, cheap signal, promise, apology, trust game, reciprocity, experiment INTRODUCTIONIn this paper, we explore the role of positive emotions (pride, believability, appreciation, contentment, cheerfulness, happiness) and negative emotions (guilt, shame, anger, disgust, aggravation, frustration) in regulating cheap signaling, trust re-extension, and trustworthy behavior in the wake of a veiled trust-based interaction between strangers with no explicit indication of certain expectation for repeated interaction 1 . Interactions with 1 A number of other behavioral economic studies have also used veiled designs where interacting participants are unaware of opportunity for repeated interaction(s) that will later be made available (e.g., see Binmore et al., 1985;Burnham et al., 2000;Ellingsen et al., 2010;Gambetta and Székely, 2014). Ellingsen et al. (2010, p. 96) discuss why the veiled design avoiding deception by commission does not violate the non-deception norm in behavioral economic experiments and why withholding procedural information may serve to limit undesirable experimenter demand. Nevertheless, because there is no clear agreement among economists as to what kinds of deception are taboo (see survey results by Krawczyk, 2013 and discussion by Wilson, 2014), deception by omission remains a potential concern with our design. Veiled designs may create negative externality in that the next time participants return to the laboratory to participate in other studies, they may question whether they should anticipate unannounced tasks or interactions, unless the instructions explicitly exclude such a possibility (see also Davis and Holt, 1993, pp. 23-24;Wilson, 2014). It is unlikely that our design produced these externalities, however, as we followed the procedural norm for conducting...

Section: Schniter and Sheremetamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Predictable and Predictive Emotions: Explaining Cheap Signals and Trust Re-Extension

Sheremeta

2014

SSRN Journal

Self Cite

Regulatory adaptations for delivering information: the case of confession

Sznycer

Evolution and Human Behavior

Tooby

et al. 2015

Self Cite

Prior to, or concurrent with, the encoding of concepts into speech, the individual faces decisions about whether, what, when, how, and with whom to communicate. Compared to the existing wealth of linguistic knowledge however, we know little of the mechanisms that govern the delivery and accrual of information. Here we focus on a fundamental issue of communication: The decision whether to deliver information. Specifically, we study spontaneous confession to a victim. Given the costs of social devaluation, offenders are hypothesized to refrain from confessing unless the expected benefits of confession (e.g. enabling the victim to remedially modify their course of action) outweigh its marginal costs—the victim’s reaction, discounted by the likelihood that information about the offense has not leaked. The logic of welfare tradeoffs indicates that the victim’s reaction will be less severe and, therefore, less costly to the offender, with decreases in the cost of the offense to the victim and, counter-intuitively, with increases in the benefit of the offense to the offender. Data from naturalistic offenses and experimental studies supported these predictions. Offenders are more willing to confess when the benefit of the offense to them is high, the cost to the victim is low, and the probability of information leakage is high. This suggests a conflict of interests between senders and receivers: Often, offenders are more willing to confess when confessions are less beneficial to the victims. An evolutionary-computational framework is a fruitful approach to understanding the factors that regulate communication.

Trust in humans and robots: Economically similar but emotionally different

Journal of Economic Psychology

Shields

Sznycer

2020

Trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road, and in the home. However, a looming concern is that people may not trust robots as they do humans. While trust in fellow humans has been studied extensively, little is known about how people extend trust to robots. Here we compare trust-based investments and emotions from across three nearly identical economic games: human-human trust games, human-robot trust games, and human-robot trust games where the robot decision impacts another human. Robots in our experiment mimic humans: they are programmed to make reciprocity decisions based on previously observed behaviors by humans in analogous situations. We find that people invest similarly in humans and robots. By contrast, the social emotions elicited by the interactions (but not non-social emotions) differed across human and robot trust games, and did so lawfully. Emotional reactions depended on how one's trust game decision interacted with the partnered agent's decision, and whether another person was affected economically and emotionally.