Social discounting and distance perceptions in costly altruism

Vekaria, Kruti M.; Brethel-Haurwitz, Kristin M.; Cardinale, Elise M.; Stoycos, Sarah A; Marsh, Abigail A.

doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0100

Cited by 71 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The findings from the present studies (and other recent work with bonobos) suggest that the motivation driving human hunter-gatherers to proactively share may have evolved through a quantitative shift from their common ancestor with the other apes, rather than the radical qualitative shift that has previously been suggested [59,60]. This seems increasingly likely considering food-sharing in human hunter-gatherers, such as Hadza men, actually occurs after donors have already met their daily caloric needs [61], and across human populations highly costly altruism towards strangers is exceptionally rare [62,63]. While the quantity of food shared and its role in buffering group members against caloric shortfalls is unparalleled in humans [6], it is less difficult to explain provisioning with surplus food that is of high value to the recipient and of relatively low value to the possessor.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bonobos voluntarily hand food to others but not toys or tools

2018

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A key feature of human prosociality is , the most active form of sharing in which donors voluntarily hand over resources Direct transfers buffer hunter-gatherers against foraging shortfalls. The emergence and elaboration of this behaviour thus likely played a key role in human evolution by promoting cooperative interdependence and ensuring that humans' growing energetic needs (e.g. for increasing brain size) were more reliably met. According to the , among great apes only humans exhibit sufficiently strong prosocial motivations to directly transfer food. The suggests instead that while other apes may make transfers in constrained settings, only humans share flexibly across food and non-food contexts. In controlled experiments, chimpanzees typically transfer objects but not food, supporting both hypotheses. In this paper, we show in two experiments that bonobos directly transfer food but not non-food items. These findings show that, in some contexts, bonobos exhibit a human-like motivation for direct food transfer. However, humans share across a far wider range of contexts, lending support to the versatile prosociality hypothesis. Our species' unusual prosocial flexibility is likely built on a prosocial foundation we share through common descent with the other apes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bonobos voluntarily hand food to others but not toys or tools

2018

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“…The "amount foregone to give someone $75" is then calculated as the average amount foregone between the responses where the respondent crossed from A to B. Those rare cases (usually not more than 10% of participants) that have more than one crossover point are conventionally excluded from analyses (46,51,57). With an estimate of the amount foregone to give someone $75, a researcher can then examine how this varies across partners at varying social distances.…”

Section: Adapting a Common Protocol: Social Discountingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning from failures of protocol in cross-cultural research

Hruschka

Munira

Jesmin

et al. 2018

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The many tools that social and behavioral scientists use to gather data from their fellow humans have, in most cases, been honed on a rarefied subset of humanity: highly educated participants with unique capacities, experiences, motivations, and social expectations. Through this honing process, researchers have developed protocols that extract information from these participants with great efficiency. However, as researchers reach out to broader populations, it is unclear whether these highly refined protocols are robust to cultural differences in skills, motivations, and expected modes of social interaction. In this paper, we illustrate the kinds of mismatches that can arise when using these highly refined protocols with nontypical populations by describing our experience translating an apparently simple social discounting protocol to work in rural Bangladesh. Multiple rounds of piloting and revision revealed a number of tacit assumptions about how participants should perceive, understand, and respond to key elements of the protocol. These included facility with numbers, letters, abstract number lines, and 2D geometric shapes, and the treatment of decisions as a series of isolated events. Through onthe-ground observation and a collaborative refinement process, we developed a protocol that worked both in Bangladesh and among US college students. More systematic study of the process of adapting common protocols to new contexts will provide valuable information about the range of skills, motivations, and modes of interaction that participants bring to studies as we develop a more diverse and inclusive social and behavioral science. generalizability | diversity | cross-cultural | social discounting | Bangladesh I n 1932, the psychologist Rensis Likert (1) published his dissertation on a novel method for measuring attitudes. After giving university students printed statements about race relations, Likert asked them to check one of five options (strongly approve, approve, undecided, disapprove, and strongly disapprove) indicating how much they endorsed each of these statements. Likert then assigned numbers to these levels of approval and took an average across all statements. The simplicity of both the response format and construction of the scale soon spurred researchers to adopt elements of the technique to assess not only attitudes (Likert's original interest) but also subjective judgments along many dimensions, including likelihood, desirability, difficulty, and happiness (2). Today, after decades of testing and refinement on generations of participants, Likert's simple format has become a reliable mainstay of social and behavioral research.Given its ubiquity in the social and behavioral sciences, one might guess that a five-or seven-item Likert format is a natural way of asking humans about their subjective judgments. However, in the rare cases when researchers have described their experience using Likert items outside of formally educated populations, they have been met with mixed success (3,4). It turns out tha...

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“…Third, use of neurocomputational models allows researchers to test how different contexts influence the expression of individual motives and the resulting social behavior [16]. For instance, people tend to be more generous toward close others than to distant strangers [17]. Use of a social discounting model made it possible to characterize and predict how any given social distance influences the value placed on the other's payoff in the utility function [18].…”

Section: Modelling Resource Allocationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neurocomputational approaches to social behavior

Konovalov

Ruff

2018

Current Opinion in Psychology

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Social decision-making is increasingly studied with neurocomputational modeling. Here we discuss how this approach allows researchers to better understand and predict behavior in social settings. Using examples from the study of resource distributions and social learning, we illustrate how this methodology provides a flexible way to quantify social values and beliefs, identify specific motives and cognitive processes underlying social choice and learning, and arbitrate between competing theories of social behavior. We also critically discuss open questions and potential problems associated with this methodology.

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Social discounting and distance perceptions in costly altruism

Cited by 71 publications

References 42 publications

Bonobos voluntarily hand food to others but not toys or tools

Bonobos voluntarily hand food to others but not toys or tools

Learning from failures of protocol in cross-cultural research

Neurocomputational approaches to social behavior

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