Stated and revealed inequality aversion in three subject pools

Group identities can undermine social tipping after intervention

Social tipping can accelerate behaviour change consistent with policy objectives in diverse domains from social justice to climate change. Hypothetically, however, group identities might undermine tipping in ways that policymakers do not anticipate. To examine this, we implemented an experiment around the 2020 US federal elections. The participants faced consistent incentives to coordinate their choices. Once the participants had established a coordination norm, an intervention created pressure to tip to a new norm. Our control treatment used neutral labels for choices. Our identity treatment used partisan political images. This simple pay-off-irrelevant relabelling generated extreme differences. The control groups developed norms slowly before intervention but transitioned to new norms rapidly after intervention. The identity groups developed norms rapidly before intervention but persisted in a state of costly disagreement after intervention. Tipping was powerful but unreliable. It supported striking cultural changes when choice and identity were unlinked, but even a trivial link destroyed tipping entirely.

Context and the Perceived Fairness of Price Increases Coming out of COVID-19

OBJECTIVE

As the U.S. economy responds to prolonged COVID-19 disruptions, it is important to understand what factors affect the perceived fairness of pandemic-driven price increases.

METHODS

Participants read a vignette and rated how fair they found a pandemic-driven price increase. Versions vary (1) the source (hardware-store products or bus fare), (2) the magnitude of the price increase (6 percent or 18 percent), and (3) the tone of an initial description of COVID (positive or negative).

RESULTS

The price increase was perceived to be fairer when it involved the hardware store or when it was smaller. The relationship between fairness and magnitude was context-specific, as fairness perceptions were insensitive to the magnitude of the price increase in the bus scenario or when the initial description of COVID had a positive tone.

CONCLUSION

Retailers and municipalities may face different fairness constraints as they consider pandemic-driven price increases. The tone of COVID information may affect price fairness through its impact on sensitivity to magnitude.

A model of the evolution of equitable offers in n-person dictator games with interbirth intervals

People are often generous even when it is not in their apparent self-interest to do so as demonstrated by numerous experiments using the dictator game (DG). More recent research using DGs has varied the number of dictators and recipients and used these games to investigate the bystander effect and congestible altruism. These studies have found that people are less generous when there are others who could be generous (the bystander effect) and also less generous when there are multiple recipients (congestible altruism) though the sum of their generosity to all recipients increases. A working hypothesis is proposed that the context-sensitive generosity observed in n-person DGs can be explained as equitable behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, explaining the evolution of equitable behavior is challenging at best. To provide an evolutionary explanation, a second working hypothesis is proposed: equitable offers evolve because they reduce resource deficits produced by variability in the accumulation of resources and thereby minimize the length of interbirth intervals (IBIs) and increase fitness. Based on this working hypothesis, an evolutionary model was developed for n-person DGs to investigate the evolution of equitable offers as a resource allocation problem when reproduction is constrained by IBIs. Simulations demonstrated that equitable offers could evolve in group-structured populations when there is a cost (i.e., longer IBIs) to running resource deficits. Mean evolved offers also varied as a function of the number of dictators and recipients in patterns consistent with the bystander effect and congestible altruism. Equitable offers evolved because they reduced resource variability among group members and thereby reduced resource deficits, which insured higher average rates of reproduction for more equitable groups of agents. Implications of these results are discussed.

Developmental asymmetries in learning to adjust to cooperative and uncooperative environments

Learning to successfully navigate social environments is a critical developmental goal, predictive of long-term wellbeing. However, little is known about how people learn to adjust to different social environments, and how this behaviour emerges across development. Here, we use a series of economic games to assess how children, adolescents, and young adults learn to adjust to social environments that differ in their level of cooperation (i.e., trust and coordination). Our results show an asymmetric developmental pattern: adjustment requiring uncooperative behaviour remains constant across adolescence, but adjustment requiring cooperative behaviour improves markedly across adolescence. Behavioural and computational analyses reveal that age-related differences in this social learning are shaped by age-related differences in the degree of inequality aversion and in the updating of beliefs about others. Our findings point to early adolescence as a phase of rapid change in cooperative behaviours, and highlight this as a key developmental window for interventions promoting well-adjusted social behaviour.