Introducing IOS11 as an extended interactive version of the 'Inclusion of Other in the Self' scale to estimate relationship closeness.

The study of relationship closeness has a long history in psychology and is currently expanding across the social sciences, including economics. Estimating relationship closeness requires appropriate tools. Here, we introduce and test a tool for estimating relationship closeness: 'IOS11'. The IOS11 scale has an 11-point response scale and is a refinement of the widely used Inclusion-of-Other-in-the-Self scale. Our tool has three key features. First, the IOS11 scale is easy to understand and administer. Second, we provide a portable, interactive interface for the IOS11 scale, which can be used in lab and online studies. Third, and crucially, based on within-participant correlations of 751 individuals, we demonstrate strong validity of the IOS11 scale in terms of representing features of relationships captured by a range of more complex survey instruments. Based on these correlations we find that the IOS11 scale outperforms the IOS scale and performs as well as the related Oneness scale.

Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe.

Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one's location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost, social mindfulness typically entails small acts of attention or kindness. Even though fairly common, such low-cost cooperation has received little empirical attention. Measuring social mindfulness across 31 samples from industrialized countries and regions (n = 8,354), we found considerable variation. Among selected country-level variables, greater social mindfulness was most strongly associated with countries' better general performance on environmental protection. Together, our findings contribute to the literature on prosociality by targeting the kind of everyday cooperation that is more focused on communicating benevolence than on providing material benefits.

Contextualised strong reciprocity explains selfless cooperation despite selfish intuitions and weak social heuristics.

Humans frequently cooperate for collective benefit, even in one-shot social dilemmas. This provides a challenge for theories of cooperation. Two views focus on intuitions but offer conflicting explanations. The Social Heuristics Hypothesis argues that people with selfish preferences rely on cooperative intuitions and predicts that deliberation reduces cooperation. The Self-Control Account emphasizes control over selfish intuitions and is consistent with strong reciprocity-a preference for conditional cooperation in one-shot dilemmas. Here, we reconcile these explanations with each other as well as with strong reciprocity. We study one-shot cooperation across two main dilemma contexts, provision and maintenance, and show that cooperation is higher in provision than maintenance. Using time-limit manipulations, we experimentally study the cognitive processes underlying this robust result. Supporting the Self-Control Account, people are intuitively selfish in maintenance, with deliberation increasing cooperation. In contrast, consistent with the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, deliberation tends to increase the likelihood of free-riding in provision. Contextual differences between maintenance and provision are observed across additional measures: reaction time patterns of cooperation; social dilemma understanding; perceptions of social appropriateness; beliefs about others' cooperation; and cooperation preferences. Despite these dilemma-specific asymmetries, we show that preferences, coupled with beliefs, successfully predict the high levels of cooperation in both maintenance and provision dilemmas. While the effects of intuitions are context-dependent and small, the widespread preference for strong reciprocity is the primary driver of one-shot cooperation. We advance the Contextualised Strong Reciprocity account as a unifying framework and consider its implications for research and policy.

People prefer coordinated punishment in cooperative interactions.

Human groups can often maintain high levels of cooperation despite the threat of exploitation by individuals who reap the benefits of cooperation without contributing to its costs1-4. Prominent theoretical models suggest that cooperation is particularly likely to thrive if people join forces to curb free riding and punish their non-contributing peers in a coordinated fashion5. However, it is unclear whether and, if so, how people actually condition their punishment of peers on punishment behaviour by others. Here we provide direct evidence that many people prefer coordinated punishment. With two large-scale decision-making experiments (total n = 4,320), we create minimal and controlled conditions to examine preferences for conditional punishment and cleanly identify how the punishment decisions of individuals are impacted by the punishment behaviour by others. We find that the most frequent preference is to punish a peer only if another (third) individual does so as well. Coordinated punishment is particularly common among participants who shy away from initiating punishment. With an additional experiment we further show that preferences for conditional punishment are unrelated to well-studied preferences for conditional cooperation. Our results highlight the importance of conditional preferences in both positive and negative reciprocity, and they provide strong empirical support for theories that explain cooperation based on coordinated punishment.

Dispositional free riders do not free ride on punishment.

Strong reciprocity explains prosocial cooperation by the presence of individuals who incur costs to help those who helped them ('strong positive reciprocity') and to punish those who wronged them ('strong negative reciprocity'). Theories of social preferences predict that in contrast to 'strong reciprocators', self-regarding people cooperate and punish only if there are sufficient future benefits. Here, we test this prediction in a two-stage design. First, participants are classified according to their disposition towards strong positive reciprocity as either dispositional conditional cooperators (DCC) or dispositional free riders (DFR). Participants then play a one-shot public goods game, either with or without punishment. As expected, DFR cooperate only when punishment is possible, whereas DCC cooperate without punishment. Surprisingly, dispositions towards strong positive reciprocity are unrelated to strong negative reciprocity: punishment by DCC and DFR is practically identical. The 'burden of cooperation' is thus carried by a larger set of individuals than previously assumed.

Conducting interactive experiments online.

Online labor markets provide new opportunities for behavioral research, but conducting economic experiments online raises important methodological challenges. This particularly holds for interactive designs. In this paper, we provide a methodological discussion of the similarities and differences between interactive experiments conducted in the laboratory and online. To this end, we conduct a repeated public goods experiment with and without punishment using samples from the laboratory and the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. We chose to replicate this experiment because it is long and logistically complex. It therefore provides a good case study for discussing the methodological and practical challenges of online interactive experimentation. We find that basic behavioral patterns of cooperation and punishment in the laboratory are replicable online. The most important challenge of online interactive experiments is participant dropout. We discuss measures for reducing dropout and show that, for our case study, dropouts are exogenous to the experiment. We conclude that data quality for interactive experiments via the Internet is adequate and reliable, making online interactive experimentation a potentially valuable complement to laboratory studies.

Reciprocity and the Tragedies of Maintaining and Providing the Commons.

Social cooperation often requires collectively beneficial but individually costly restraint to maintain a public good1-4, or it needs costly generosity to create one1,5. Status quo effects6 predict that maintaining a public good is easier than providing a new one. Here we show experimentally and with simulations that even under identical incentives, low levels of cooperation (the 'tragedy of the commons'2) are systematically more likely in Maintenance than Provision. Across three series of experiments, we find that strong and weak positive reciprocity, known to be fundamental tendencies underpinning human cooperation7-10, are substantially diminished under Maintenance compared to Provision. As we show in a fourth experiment, the opposite holds for negative reciprocity ('punishment'). Our findings suggest that incentives to avoid the 'tragedy of the commons' need to contend with dilemma-specific reciprocity.

Combining "real effort" with induced effort costs: the ball-catching task.

We introduce the "ball-catching task", a novel computerized task, which combines a tangible action ("catching balls") with induced material cost of effort. The central feature of the ball-catching task is that it allows researchers to manipulate the cost of effort function as well as the production function, which permits quantitative predictions on effort provision. In an experiment with piece-rate incentives we find that the comparative static and the point predictions on effort provision are remarkably accurate. We also present experimental findings from three classic experiments, namely, team production, gift exchange and tournament, using the task. All of the results are closely in line with the stylized facts from experiments using purely induced values. We conclude that the ball-catching task combines the advantages of real effort tasks with the use of induced values, which is useful for theory-testing purposes as well as for applications.

Eye Movements in Strategic Choice.

In risky and other multiattribute choices, the process of choosing is well described by random walk or drift diffusion models in which evidence is accumulated over time to threshold. In strategic choices, level-k and cognitive hierarchy models have been offered as accounts of the choice process, in which people simulate the choice processes of their opponents or partners. We recorded the eye movements in 2 × 2 symmetric games including dominance-solvable games like prisoner's dilemma and asymmetric coordination games like stag hunt and hawk-dove. The evidence was most consistent with the accumulation of payoff differences over time: we found longer duration choices with more fixations when payoffs differences were more finely balanced, an emerging bias to gaze more at the payoffs for the action ultimately chosen, and that a simple count of transitions between payoffs-whether or not the comparison is strategically informative-was strongly associated with the final choice. The accumulator models do account for these strategic choice process measures, but the level-k and cognitive hierarchy models do not. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies.

Deception is common in nature and humans are no exception. Modern societies have created institutions to control cheating, but many situations remain where only intrinsic honesty keeps people from cheating and violating rules. Psychological, sociological and economic theories suggest causal pathways to explain how the prevalence of rule violations in people's social environment, such as corruption, tax evasion or political fraud, can compromise individual intrinsic honesty. Here we present cross-societal experiments from 23 countries around the world that demonstrate a robust link between the prevalence of rule violations and intrinsic honesty. We developed an index of the 'prevalence of rule violations' (PRV) based on country-level data from the year 2003 of corruption, tax evasion and fraudulent politics. We measured intrinsic honesty in an anonymous die-rolling experiment. We conducted the experiments with 2,568 young participants (students) who, due to their young age in 2003, could not have influenced PRV in 2003. We find individual intrinsic honesty is stronger in the subject pools of low PRV countries than those of high PRV countries. The details of lying patterns support psychological theories of honesty. The results are consistent with theories of the cultural co-evolution of institutions and values, and show that weak institutions and cultural legacies that generate rule violations not only have direct adverse economic consequences, but might also impair individual intrinsic honesty that is crucial for the smooth functioning of society.

Measuring the Closeness of Relationships: A Comprehensive Evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' Scale.

Understanding the nature and influence of social relationships is of increasing interest to behavioral economists, and behavioral scientists more generally. In turn, this creates a need for tractable, and reliable, tools for measuring fundamental aspects of social relationships. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' (IOS) Scale, a handy pictorial tool for measuring the subjectively perceived closeness of a relationship. The tool is highly portable, very easy for subjects to understand and takes less than 1 minute to administer. Across our three online studies with a diverse adult population (n = 772) we show that six different scales designed to measure relationship closeness are all highly significantly positively correlated with the IOS Scale. We then conduct a Principal Component Analysis to construct an Index of Relationship Closeness and find that it correlates very strongly (ρ = 85) with the IOS Scale. We conclude that the IOS Scale is a psychologically meaningful and highly reliable measure of the subjective closeness of relationships.

Stated and revealed inequality aversion in three subject pools.

This paper reports data from three subject pools (n=717 subjects) using techniques based on those of Loewenstein, et al. (1989) and Blanco, et al. (2011) to obtain parameters, respectively, of stated and revealed inequality aversion. We provide a replication opportunity for those papers, with two innovations: (i) a design which allows stated and revealed preferences to be compared at the individual level; (ii) assessment of robustness of findings across subjects from a UK university, a Turkish university and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our findings on stated aversion to inequality are qualitatively similar to those of Loewenstein, et al. in each of our subject pools, whereas there are notable differences between some of our findings on revealed preference and those of Blanco, et al. We find that revealed advantageous inequality aversion is often stronger than revealed dis-advantageous inequality aversion. In most subject pools, we find some (weak) correlation between corresponding parameters of stated and revealed inequality aversion.

Peer Effects in Pro-Social Behavior: Social Norms or Social Preferences?

We compare social preference and social norm based explanations for peer effects in a three-person gift-exchange experiment. In the experiment a principal pays a wage to each of two agents, who then make effort choices sequentially. In our baseline treatment we observe that the second agent's effort is influenced by the effort choice of the first agent, even though there are no material spillovers between agents. This peer effect is predicted by the Fehr-Schmidt (1999) model of social preferences. As we show from a norms-elicitation experiment, it is also consistent with social norms compliance. A conditional logit investigation of the explanatory power of payoff inequality and elicited norms finds that the second agent's effort is best explained by the social preferences model. In further experiments we find that the peer effects change as predicted by the social preferences model. Again, a conditional logit analysis favors an explanation based on social preferences, rather than social norms. Our results suggest that, in our context, the social preferences model provides a parsimonious explanation for the observed peer effect.

In the lab and the field: punishment is rare in equilibrium.

I argue that field (experimental) studies on (costly) peer punishment in social dilemmas face the problem that in equilibrium punishment will be rare and therefore may be hard to observe in the field. I also argue that the behavioral logic uncovered by lab experiments is not fundamentally different from the behavioral logic of cooperation in the field.