- TFT wouldn’t end up being the dominant strategy. That prize went to its cousin, a strategy the duo referred to as generous tit-for-tat (GTFT). As its name implies, GTFT was slightly more forgiving than TFT; it would choose to cooperate with some small probability even when facing defection. For example, it might choose to cooperate 25 percent of the time when facing an individual who had previously been untrustworthy. This extra bit of forgiveness functioned to overcome some of the noise mentioned earlier. Sure, sometimes being forgiving led to exploitation, but other times it allowed a loyal relationship to blossom—a relationship where the initial defection was a mistake. Perhaps the most important point, though, to come from Nowak and Sigmund’s simulations was the realization that even GTFT wasn’t always best. Winners, at some point, almost always fall, and so did GTFT. The problem was that as GTFT continued to dominate, the population as a whole became more and more trustworthy. Once everyone is a saint, no one expects to be cheated; everyone cooperates. As a result, the situation becomes ripe for the dishonest
- experiencing social stress increased trustworthy behavior fairly dramatically; those who were socially anxious increased their rate of cooperation by approximately 50 percent
- Recent research has confirmed that children actually remember information better—the same information—if they hear it from a trustworthy source as opposed to an untrustworthy one
- The video recordings made during couples’ discussions reveal a consistent pattern: individuals who entered discussions with higher levels of trust for their partners demonstrated much greater accommodation and collaboration. Not only were they more willing to listen to their partner ’s desires and take them seriously, they also were more motivated to try to find a solution that would be acceptable to both parties. It’s not that trusting individuals were discussing goals that were any less stressful in scope than the ones discussed by their less trusting counterparts; both groups face off over similarly consequential possibilities. The decreased tension and resulting greater success in negotiation derived solely from the subtle effects of trust itself… Simpson’s research demonstrates exactly this phenomenon. Individuals who entered discussions already possessing a high degree of trust in their partners regularly overestimated the amount of accommodation they received. As an example, if a husband agreed to his wife’s request that he work ten more hours a week to allow her to go back to school, the subjective value she attached to his concession was much greater if she had higher levels of trust in him prior to the negotiation. Put simply, the more trust you have for a partner, the more you view his or her actions as noble sacrifices.
- the simple presence of the extra cash significantly increased the amount of cheating on the anagram tasks. Unbeknownst to participants, the experimenter had a way to match up worksheets and score sheets to verify reported scores versus true scores. Across three different experiments, individuals who were in the presence of more cash inflated their performance so that they could keep more of the money than they deserved.
- If a smile comes from someone similar to you (i.e., a member of your own ethnic group, religious group, etc.) it makes you feel happy to see it. But if the smile is on the face of someone from a social outgroup—especially one in conflict with yours—it makes you feel afraid
- The four cues were: crossing arms, leaning away, face touching, hand touching. The more frequently any individual engaged in these behaviors, the less trustworthy he or she acted (i.e., the fewer tokens he or she shared with a partner). Of no small importance, this result provided our ground truth; it demonstrated an objective link between the multicue signal and actual behavior. The overarching question of interest, of course, also involved whether observing the signal influenced judgments of trustworthiness. Here, too, the data provided support. The more frequently partners showed these cues, the less trust individuals placed in them… None of our participants could describe what led them to guess that a partner was going to be untrustworthy. Nonetheless, our findings confirmed that their minds were attuned to this constellation of cues, leading them to dial back expectations for fairness and loyalty each time the multicomponent signal was repeated
- our forecasts for future feelings are hampered by the ways we construct them.Our simulations of events yet to come are usually decontextualized. We hyperfocus on the event in question while ignoring both the context of what we’re currently feeling when thinking about it and what we’re likely to be feeling just before we actually face it. For example, when you think about whether you can trust yourself not to overeat tomorrow night, you’re probably not taking into account whether you feel happy right now or whether you’re likely to be feeling stressed tomorrow evening because of a meeting set to happen right before dinner. As you can imagine, the former will leave you feeling quite positive as you look into the future, meaning that you’ll overestimate how easy it will be to adhere to your dietary plans. That latter will likely leave you feeling negative and emotionally spent at the moment when you face the temptation at hand. In each case, these feelings have nothing to do with the actual event in question (e.g., overeating) but they nonetheless will shape your responses to it. Dan Gilbert’s work with the psychologist Tim Wilson offers a clear example of the perils forward-looking myopia provides. To see why, think about how much you’d like to eat spaghetti tomorrow. That’s a type of question that Gilbert and Wilson often ask their participants. What they find time and again is that hungry people mistakenly believe they like spaghetti so much that they’d enjoy eating it for breakfast. Their sated peers, however, erroneously believe they won’t much enjoy eating it for dinner. In actuality, both groups like spaghetti to similar degrees when not famished or full. But if you ask people to imagine how much they like spaghetti when they’re hungry, they tend to overestimate it so much that they actually believe they’d like eating it in the morning, although in truth they’d be none too pleased if they found it in their cereal bowls
- asked commuters at the Harvard Square T stop a few years back. The only difference among the people they approached was that some were asked these questions while they were waiting for their train, while others were asked after they had in fact just missed it (i.e., seen it pulling away), meaning they would now be delayed about another ten minutes. Those who didn’t miss the train (i.e., those who were making predictions about how they’d respond if they had missed it) reported not only that they’d feel much regret at missing the train, but also that they’d blame themselves for running late. In their view, actions such as hitting the snooze button too many times or forgetting to pack a needed object would have been the likely causes for the problem. However, those who actually missed their train by a minute offered quite different responses. Not only didn’t they feel as much regret as the predictors expected, but they also offered quite different rationales for why they missed the train. Their explanations emphasized situational factors beyond their control: the lines were too long, some of the turnstiles were broken, etc. Put simply, missing the train wasn’t their fault, and so they didn’t feel nearly as much regret about it.
References
- “Oscillations in the evolution of reciprocity, Tit for tat in heterogeneous population, A strategy of win-stay, lose-shift that outperforms tit- for-tat in the prisoner’s dilemma game
- The social dimension of stress reactivity: Acute stress increases prosocial behavior in humans
- How children block learning from ignorant speakers
- Trust and responsiveness in strain-test situations: A dyadic perspective
- The abundance effect: Unethical behavior in the presence of wealth
- Affective divergence: Automatic responses to others’ emotions depend on group membership
- Detecting the trustworthiness of novel partners in economic exchange, Prospection: Experiencing the future
- The future is now: Temporal correction in affective forecasting
- Looking forward to looking backward: The misprediction of regret