Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness.

Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems-compassion, self-interest, and envy-guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.

Cross-cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride.

Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluate the theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the cost-effective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others' valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose recognition by others would lead them to enhance their evaluations of the individual, and (iii) mobilizing the individual to take advantage of the resulting enhanced social landscape. To modulate how much to invest in actions that might lead to enhanced evaluations by others, the pride system must forecast the magnitude of the evaluations the action would evoke in the audience and calibrate its activation proportionally. We tested this prediction in 16 countries across 4 continents (n = 2,085), for 25 acts and traits. As predicted, the pride intensity for a given act or trait closely tracks the valuations of audiences, local (mean r = +0.82) and foreign (mean r = +0.75). This relationship is specific to pride and does not generalize to other positive emotions that coactivate with pride but lack its audience-recalibrating function.

Consummatory suppression due to incentive downshift is not a consequence of enhanced search behavior.

Rats shifted from 32% to 4% sucrose solution consume less from the 4% solution than rats that experience only the 4% solution. This consummatory suppression, a phenomenon known as consummatory successive negative contrast (cSNC), is accompanied by an increase in other behaviors such as rearing, nose-down locomotion, ambulation, sampling new sources and grooming. Despite a large body of studies on the cSNC, it remains to be determined whether reduced consumption is part of the direct response to the reward downshift or a byproduct of the increase in alternative competing behaviors. The objective of the present study was to determine if consummatory suppression would occur when most competing behaviors are prevented from occurring. Rats were trained either with 32% or 4% sucrose solution for ten days in restrainers that limited almost all movement. On the next five days, all subjects received the 4% sucrose solution and a robust suppression in drinking in the downshifted animals was observed. These results suggest that consummatory suppression is a direct consequence of incentive downshift and not a byproduct of the increase in competing behaviors.

Scaling relative incentive value: different adjustments to incentive downshift in pigeons and rats.

Previous research suggests that pigeons and rats show differences in their behavioral adjustments in spaced-trial, incentive-downshift situations. Also, Papini and Pellegrini [Papini, M.R., Pellegrini, S., 2006. Scaling relative incentive value in consummatory behavior. Learn. Motiv. 37, 357-378] and Pellegrini and Papini [Pellegrini, S., Papini, M.R., 2007. Scaling relative incentive value in anticipatory behavior. Learn. Motiv. 38, 128-154] showed that changes in the rat's lever-pressing performance, runway running, and consumption of sucrose solutions after downshifts in incentive magnitude were a function of the ratio of postshift/preshift incentive magnitudes. Here, two experiments using a Pavlovian autoshaping procedure studied the adjustment of pigeons and rats to changes in incentive magnitude. In Experiment 1, pigeons received light-food pairings, whereas in Experiment 2, rats received lever-sucrose pairings. As a result, key-pecking and lever-pressing developed in each experiment, respectively. Preshift incentive magnitudes were downshifted so as to obtain postshift/preshift ratios of 0.125 and 0.25. Pigeons responded during the postshift phase according to the preshift incentive value and independently of the ratio value. However, rats showed ratio constancy, responding during the postshift in accordance with the postshift/preshift ratio, rather than with the absolute magnitudes of either the preshift or postshift incentives. These results support the comparative hypothesis that the mechanisms underlying ratio constancy during incentive downshifts are unique to mammals.