Revenue fell under receiverships: Can Europe Run Greece? Lessons from U.S. Fiscal Receiverships in Latin America, 1904-3

Maurer, Noel and Arroyo Abad, Leticia, Can Europe Run Greece? Lessons from U.S. Fiscal Receiverships in Latin America, 1904-31 (June 13, 2017). George Washington University Working Paper, June 2017. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3026330

Abstract: In 2012 and again in 2015, the German government proposed sending German administrators to manage Greece’s tax and privatization authorities. The idea was that shared governance would reduce corruption and root out inefficient practices. (In 2017 the Boston Globe proposed a similar arrangement for Haiti.) We test a version of shared governance using eight U.S. interventions between 1904 and 1931, under which American officials took over management of Latin American fiscal institutions. We develop a stylized model in which better monitoring by incorruptible managers does not lead to higher government revenues. Using a new panel of data on fiscal revenues and the volume and terms of trade, we find that revenue fell under receiverships. Our results hold under instrumental variables estimation and with counterfactual specifications using synthetic controls.

Chimps do not “do what the others do” merely to fit in, nor suffer for attacks against non-group members

Do Chimpanzees Conform to Social Norms? Laura Schlingloff, and Richard Moore. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, Jul 2017. ISBN: 978-1138822887. DOI 10.4324/9781315742250.ch36

Many studies on social influences on human behavior – including the famous Asch conformity experiments (1951) – show that we change our behavior to fit in with the crowd. [...]

To investigate whether chimpanzees copy for affiliative reasons, van Leeuwen and colleagues tested whether they abandon individually learned information in favor of a majority strategy. They found that chimpanzees do not change a first-learned strategy to conform to a majority, although they will do so to gain higher rewards (van Leeuwen et al. 2013; see also Hrubesch, Preuschoft and van Schaik 2009; and van Leeuwen and Haun 2013). This suggests that chimpanzees are not motivated to “do what the others do” merely to fit in (Leeuwen and Haun 2013).

[...] In human communities, not only do individuals prefer to conform, they also uphold the principles of their group – for example, by punishing those who do not conform. In humans, third-party enforcement of arbitrary conventional norms emerges in children as young as three years (Schmidt, Rakoczy and Tomasello 2012). Humans are also willing to suffer costs in order to sanction norm violations, even if they themselves were not harmed by the violation (Fehr and Fischbacher 2004). Currently, there is no evidence that chimpanzees enforce social norms. While they punish those who harm them directly (Jensen, Call and Tomasello 2007), this is consistent with them punishing out of revenge, and not because they think group norms should be upheld. They do not seem to engage in ‘third-party punishment’. For example, Riedl and colleagues (2012) found that chimpanzees would not retaliate against a conspecific when a third party’s food was stolen.

[...]

Apes looked longer at videos of unfamiliar individuals committing infanticidal attacks than at control videos (e.g., of chimpanzees behaving aggressively towards adults). However – with the exception of one individual who performed threat displays towards the video screen – watching infanticide did not elicit negative emotional arousal. The authors interpret the findings as showing that while chimpanzees may recognize norm violations, these violations elicit strong emotional responses only when they affect group members.

Genomic Imprinting Is Implicated in the Psychology of Music

Genomic Imprinting Is Implicated in the Psychology of Music. Samuel Mehr et al. Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617711456

Abstract: Why do people sing to babies? Human infants are relatively altricial and need their parents’ attention to survive. Infant-directed song may constitute a signal of that attention. In Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), a rare disorder of genomic imprinting, genes from chromosome 15q11–q13 that are typically paternally expressed are unexpressed, which results in exaggeration of traits that reduce offspring’s investment demands on the mother. PWS may thus be associated with a distinctive musical phenotype. We report unusual responses to music in people with PWS. Subjects with PWS (N = 39) moved more during music listening, exhibited greater reductions in heart rate in response to music listening, and displayed a specific deficit in pitch-discrimination ability relative to typically developing adults and children (N = 589). Paternally expressed genes from 15q11–q13, which are unexpressed in PWS, may thus increase demands for music and enhance perceptual sensitivity to music. These results implicate genomic imprinting in the psychology of music, informing theories of music’s evolutionary history.

LGB respondents are more liberal than heterosexuals on 99 percent of 199 attitudinal items

Schnabel, Landon. 2017. “Sexual Orientation and Social Attitudes”. SocArXiv. August 23. www.osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/73xsz

Abstract: Gender, race, and class strongly predict social attitudes and are at the core of social scientific theory and empirical analysis. Sexuality (i.e., same-sex behavior or LGB identity), however, is not as central a factor by which we conceptualize and systematize society. Using the General Social Survey, this study examines the effect of sexuality, gender, race, and education on 199 attitudinal items. Sexuality consistently and substantially predicts a broad range of attitudes. Measured by partnering behavior, sexuality significantly predicts attitudes on 137 items. On all 137 of these items, LGB respondents are more liberal than heterosexuals. Irrespective of significance, LGB respondents are more liberal than heterosexuals on 99 percent of 199 total items. These patterns are consistent with the underdog principle of marginalized identity and progressive values. Sexuality predicts attitudes at least as consistently as gender, race, and education. I argue that future work should pay more attention to sexuality as a core factor in social scientific theory and empirical analysis.

Introverts emerge less as leaders because they engage in higher levels of forecasted negative affect

The failure of introverts to emerge as leaders: The role of forecasted affect. Andrew Spark, Timothy Stansmore, and Peter O'Connor. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 121, January 15 2018, Pages 84–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.09.026

Highlights
•    Introverts are less likely to emerge as leaders compared to extraverts.
•    Forecasted affect is proposed to mediate this relationship.
•    Forecasted positive affect has no mediation effect.
•
    Forecasted negative affect fully mediates the relationship.

Abstract: Introverts are less likely to emerge as leaders than extraverts, however the existing literature provides little explanation as to why. To investigate the potential cause of this trait-based difference in emergent leadership, we measured trait extraversion in a sample of 184 business students and studied their leadership-related behavior in an unstructured group task. We drew from a model of forecasted affect to hypothesize that introverts would be less likely to emerge as leaders based on their belief that engaging in the necessary extraverted behavior would be unpleasant/unenjoyable (i.e. they would forecast higher levels of negative affect compared to extraverts). Consistent with this, we found that introverts were less likely to emerge as leaders, and that forecasted negative affect fully accounted for the relationship between extraversion and peer-rated emergent leadership. We therefore argue that introverts fail to emerge as leaders as often as extraverts because they engage in higher levels of forecasted negative affect and that these forecasts impede their emergent leadership potential.

Keywords: Extraversion; Introversion; Forecasted affect; Emergent leadership

Disgust and Deontology: Trait Sensitivity to Contamination Promotes a Preference for Order, Hierarchy, and Rule-Based Moral Judgment

Disgust and Deontology: Trait Sensitivity to Contamination Promotes a Preference for Order, Hierarchy, and Rule-Based Moral Judgment. Jeffrey S. Robinson, Xiaowen Xu, and Jason E. Plaks. Social Psychological and Personality Science, https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617732609

Abstract: Models of moral judgment have linked generalized emotionality with deontological moral judgment. The evidence, however, is mixed. Other research has linked the specific emotion of disgust with generalized moral condemnation. Here too, the evidence is mixed. We suggest that a synthesis of these two literatures points to one specific emotion (disgust) that reliably predicts one specific type of moral judgment (deontological). In all three studies, we found that trait disgust sensitivity predicted more extreme deontological judgment. In Study 3, with deontological endorsement and consequentialist endorsement operationalized as independent constructs, we found that disgust was positively associated with deontological endorsement but was unrelated to consequentialist endorsement. Across studies, the disgust–deontology link was mediated by individual difference variables related to preference for order (right-wing authoritarianism and intolerance for ambiguity). These data suggest a more precise model of emotion and moral judgment that identifies specific emotions, specific types of moral judgment, and specific motivational pathways.

A Study of Political Candidacy Among Swedish Adoptees -- Strong transmission in candidacy status between rearing mothers and their daughter

It Runs in the Family: A Study of Political Candidacy Among Swedish Adoptees. Oskarsson, S., Dawes, C.T. & Lindgren, KO. Polit Behav (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9429-1

Abstract: What motivates citizens to run for office? Recent work has shown that early life parental socialization is strongly associated with a desire to run for office. However, parents not only shape their children’s political environment, they also pass along their genes to those same children. A growing area of research has shown that individual differences in a wide range of political behaviors and attitudes are linked to genetic differences. As a result, genetic factors may confound the observed political similarities among parents and their children. This study analyzes Swedish register data containing information on all nominated and elected candidates in the ten parliamentary, county council, and municipal elections from 1982 to 2014 for a large sample of adoptees and their adoptive and biological parents. By studying the similarity in political ambition within both adoptive and biological families, our research design allows us to disentangle so-called “pre-birth” factors, such as genes and pre-natal environment, and “post-birth” factors like parental socialization. We find that the likelihood of standing as a political candidate is twice as high if one’s parent has been a candidate. We also find that the effects of pre-birth and post-birth factors are approximately equal in size. In addition, we test a number of potential pre- and post-birth transmission mechanisms. First, disconfirming our expectations, the pre-birth effects do not seem to be mediated by cognitive ability or leadership skills. Second, consistent with a role modeling mechanism, we find evidence of a strong transmission in candidacy status between rearing mothers and their daughters.

Immobile Australia: Surnames Show Strong Status Persistence, 1870–2017

Immobile Australia: Surnames Show Strong Status Persistence, 1870–2017. Gregory Clark, Andrew Leigh, and Mike Pottenger. IZA DP No. 11021. http://legacy.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers/viewAbstract?dp_id=11021

Abstract: The paper estimates long run social mobility in Australia 1870–2017 tracking the status of rare surnames. The status information includes occupations from electoral rolls 1903–1980, and records of degrees awarded by Melbourne and Sydney universities 1852–2017. Status persistence was strong throughout, with an intergenerational correlation of 0.7–0.8, and no change over time. Notwithstanding egalitarian norms, high immigration and a well-targeted social safety net, Australian long-run social mobility rates are low. Despite evidence on conventional measures that Australia has higher rates of social mobility than the UK or USA (Mendolia and Siminski, 2016), status persistence for surnames is as high as that in England or the USA. Mobility rates are also just as low if we look just at mobility within descendants of UK immigrants, so ethnic effects explain none of the immobility.

Women perceive men's limbal rings as a health cue when in mood for casual sex

Put a (limbal) ring on it: Women perceive men's limbal rings as a health cue in short-term mating domains. Mitch Brown and Donald F Sacco. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319321311_Put_a_limbal_ring_on_it_Women_perceive_men%27s_limbal_rings_as_a_health_cue_in_short-term_mating_domains

Abstract: Limbal rings are dark annuli encircling the iris that fluctuate in visibility based on health and age. Research also indicates their presence augments facial attractiveness. Given individuals’ prioritization of health cues in short-term mates, those with limbal rings may be implicated as ideal short-term mates. Three studies tested whether limbal rings serve as veridical health cues, specifically the extent to which this cue enhances a person’s value as a short-term mating partner. In Study 1, targets with limbal rings were rated as healthier, an effect that was stronger for female participants and male targets. In Study 2, temporally activated short-term mating motives led women to report a heightened preference for targets with limbal rings. In Study 3, women rated targets with limbal rings as more desirable short-term mates. Results provide evidence for limbal rings as veridical cues to health, particularly in relevant mating domains.

Accurate Genomic Prediction Of Human Height -- "within a few cm of the prediction"

Accurate Genomic Prediction Of Human Height. Louis Lello, Steven G Avery, Laurent Tellier, Ana Vazquez, Gustavo de los Campos, and Stephen D. H. Hsu. BioRxiv, Sep 19 2017. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/190124

Abstract: We construct genomic predictors for heritable and extremely complex human quantitative traits (height, heel bone density, and educational attainment) using modern methods in high dimensional statistics (i.e., machine learning). Replication tests show that these predictors capture, respectively, ~40, 20, and 9 percent of total variance for the three traits. For example, predicted heights correlate ~0.65 with actual height; actual heights of most individuals in validation samples are within a few cm of the prediction. The variance captured for height is comparable to the estimated SNP heritability from GCTA (GREML) analysis, and seems to be close to its asymptotic value (i.e., as sample size goes to infinity), suggesting that we have captured most of the heritability for the SNPs used. Thus, our results resolve the common SNP portion of the "missing heritability" problem - i.e., the gap between prediction R-squared and SNP heritability. The ~20k activated SNPs in our height predictor reveal the genetic architecture of human height, at least for common SNPs. Our primary dataset is the UK Biobank cohort, comprised of almost 500k individual genotypes with multiple phenotypes. We also use other datasets and SNPs found in earlier GWAS for out-of-sample validation of our results.

Psychological roadblocks to the adoption of self-driving vehicles

Psychological roadblocks to the adoption of self-driving vehicles. Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon & Iyad Rahwan. Nature Human Behaviour (2017), doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0202-6

Summary: Self-driving cars offer a bright future, but only if the public can overcome the psychological challenges that stand in the way of widespread adoption. We discuss three: ethical dilemmas, overreactions to accidents, and the opacity of the cars’ decision-making algorithms — and propose steps towards addressing them.

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Psychological roadblocks to the adoption of self-driving vehicles

Self-driving cars offer a bright future, but only if the public can overcome the psychological challenges that stand in the way of widespread adoption. We discuss three: ethical dilemmas, overreactions to accidents, and the opacity of the cars’ decision-making algorithms — and propose steps towards addressing them. Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon and Iyad Rahwan

The widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles promises to make us happier, safer and more efficient. Manufacturers are speeding past the remaining technical challenges to the cars’ readiness. But the biggest roadblocks standing in the path of mass adoption may be psychological, not technological; 78% of Americans report fearing riding in an autonomous vehicle, with only 19% indicating that they would trust the car1.  Trust — the comfort in making oneself vulnerable to another entity in the pursuit of some benefit — has long been recognized as critical to the adoption of automation, and becomes even more important as both the complexity of automation and the vulnerability of the users increase2. For autonomous vehicles, which will need to navigate our complex urban environment with the power of life and death, trust will determine how widely the cars are adopted by consumers, and how tolerated they are by everyone else. Achieving the bright future promised by autonomous vehicles will require overcoming the psychological barriers to trust. Here we diagnose three factors underlying this resistance and offer a plan of action (see Table 1).


The dilemmas of autonomous ethics

The necessity for autonomous vehicles to make ethical decisions leads to a series of dilemmas for their designers, regulators and the public at large3. These begin with the need for an autonomous vehicle to decide how it will operate in situations where its actions could decrease the risk of harming its own passengers by increasing the risk to a potentially larger number of non-passengers (for example, pedestrians and other drivers).  While these decisions will most often involve probabilistic trade-offs in small-risk manoeuvres, at its extreme the decision could involve an autonomous vehicle determining whether to harm its passenger to spare the lives of two or more pedestrians, or vice versa (Fig. 1).

In handling these situations, the cars may operate as utilitarians, minimizing total risk to people regardless of who they are, or as self-protective, placing extra weight on the safety of their own passengers. Human drivers make such decisions instinctively in a split second, and thus cannot be expected to abide by whatever ethical principle they formulated in the comfort of their armchair.  But autonomous vehicle manufacturers have the luxury of moral deliberation — and thus the responsibility of that deliberation.  The existence of this ethical dilemma in turn produces a social dilemma. People are inconsistent about what principles they want autonomous vehicles to follow. Individuals recognize the utilitarian approach to be the more ethical, and as citizens, want the cars to save the greater number. But as consumers, they want self-protective cars3.  As a result, adopting either strategy brings its own risks for manufacturers — a selfprotective strategy risks public outrage, whereas a utilitarian strategy may scare consumers away.

Both the ethical and social dilemmas will need to be addressed to earn the trust of the public. And because it seems unlikely that regulators will adopt the strictest selfprotective solution — in which autonomous vehicles would never harm their passengers, however small the danger to passengers and large the risk to others — we will have to grapple with consumers’ fear that their car might someday decide to harm them.  To overcome that fear, we need to make people feel both safe and virtuous about owning an autonomous vehicle. To make

Table 1 | A summary of the psychological challenges to autonomous vehicles, and suggested actions for overcoming them

Psychological challenge Suggested actions
The dilemmas of autonomous ethics. People are torn between how they want autonomous vehicles to ethically behave; they morally believe the vehicles should operate under utilitarian principles, but prefer to buy vehicles that prioritize their own lives as passengers. The idea of a car sacrificing its passengers deters people from purchasing an autonomous vehicle. Shift the discussion from the relative risk of injury to the absolute risk. Appeal to consumers’ desire for virtue signalling.

Risk heuristics and algorithmic aversion. The novelty and nature of autonomous vehicles will result in outsized reactions in the face of inevitable accidents. Such overreactions risk slowing or stalling the adoption of autonomous vehicles. Prepare the public for the inevitability of accidents.

Openly communicate algorithmic improvement.

Manage public overreaction with ‘fear placebos’ and information about actual risk levels. Asymmetric information and the theory of the machine mind. A lack of transparency into the underlying decision-making processes can make it difficult for people to predict the autonomous vehicles’ behaviour, diminishing trust.
Research the type of information required to form trustable mental models of autonomous vehicles.

to most effectively convey the absolute reduction in risk to passengers due to overall accident reduction, so that it is not irrationally overshadowed by a potentially small increase in relative risk that passengers face in relation to other road users.  Communication about the overall safety benefits of autonomous vehicles could be further leveraged to appeal to potential consumers’ concerns about self-image and reputation. Virtue signalling is a powerful motivation for buying ethical products, but only when the ethicality is conspicuous4.  Allowing the altruistic benefits of autonomous vehicles to reflect on the consumer can change the conversation about autonomous vehicle ethics and prove itself to be a marketing asset. The most relevant example of successful virtue consumerism is that of the Toyota Prius, a hybrid-electric automobile whose distinctive shape has allowed owners to signal their environmental commitment. However, whereas ‘green’ marketing can backfire for those politically unaligned with the environmental movement5, the package of virtues connected with autonomous vehicles — safety, but also reductions in traffic and parking congestion — contain uncontroversial values that allow consumers to advertise themselves as safe, smart and prosocial.


Risk heuristics and algorithm aversion

When the first traffic fatality involving Tesla’s Autopilot occurred in May 2016, it was covered by every major news organization — a feat unmatched by any of the other 40,200 US traffic fatalities that year. We can expect an even larger reaction the first time an autonomous vehicle kills a pedestrian, or kills a child, or two autonomous vehicles crash into each other. Outsized media coverage of crashes involving autonomous vehicles may feed and amplify people’s fears by tapping into the availability heuristic (risks are subjectively higher when they come to mind easily) and affective heuristic (risks are perceived to be higher when they evoke a vivid emotional reaction). As with airplane crashes, the more disproportionate — and disproportionately sensational — the coverage that autonomous vehicle accidents receive, the more exaggerated people will perceive the risk and dangers of these cars in comparison to those of traditional human-driven ones. Worse, for autonomous vehicles, these reactions may be compounded by algorithm aversion6, the tendency for people to more rapidly lose faith in an erring decision-making algorithm than in humans making comparable errors.  These reactions could derail the adoption of autonomous vehicles through numerous paths; they could directly deter consumers, provoke politicians to enact suffocating restrictions, or create outsized liability issues — fuelled by court and jury overreactions — that compromise the financial feasibility of autonomous vehicles.  Each path could slow or even stall widespread adoption.

Countering these powerful psychological effects may prove especially difficult.  Nevertheless, there are opportunities.  Autonomous vehicle spokespeople should prepare the public for the inevitability of accidents — not overpromising infallibility, but still emphasizing autonomous vehicles’ safety advantages over human drivers.  One barrier that prevents people from adopting (superior) algorithms over human judgment is overconfidence in one’s own performance7 — something famously prevalent in driving. Manufacturers should also be open about algorithmic improvements.  Autonomous vehicles are better portrayed as being perfected, not as being perfect.  Politicians and regulators can also play a role in managing overreaction.  Though human themselves, and ultimately answerable to the public, legislators should resist capitulating to the public’s fears of low-probability risks8. They should instead educate the public about the actual risks and, if moved to act, do so in a calculated way, perhaps by offering the public ‘fear placebos'8 — high-visibility, low-cost gestures that do the most to assuage the public’s fears without undermining the real benefits that autonomous vehicles might bring.  Asymmetric information and the theory of the machine mind

The dubious reputation of the CIA is sometimes blamed on the asymmetry between the secrecy of their successes and the broad awareness of their failures. Autonomous vehicles will face a similar challenge.  Passengers will be acutely aware of the cars’ rare failures — leading to the issues described above — but may be blissfully unaware of all the small successes and optimizations.  This asymmetry of information is part of a larger psychological barrier to the trust in autonomous vehicles: the opacity to the decision-making occurring under the hood.  If trust is characterized by the willingness to yield vulnerability to another entity, it is critical that people can comfortably predict and understand the behaviour of the other entity. Indeed, the European Union General Data Protection Regulation recently established the citizen’s “right to [...] obtain an explanation of the decision reached [...] and to challenge the decision” made by algorithms9.  However, full transparency may be neither possible nor optimal. Autonomous vehicle intelligence is driven in part by Fig. 1 | A schematic example of the ethical trade-offs that autonomous vehicles will need to make between the lives of passengers and pedestrians3. The visual comes from the Moral Machine website (http://moralmachine.mit.edu), which we launched to collect large-scale data from the public. So far, we have collected over 30 million decisions from over 3 million people.

machine learning, in which computers learn increasingly sophisticated patterns without being explicitly taught. This leaves underlying decision-making processes opaque even to the programmer (let alone the passenger).  But even if a detailed account of the computer’s decisions were available, it would only offer the end-user an incomprehensible deluge of information. The trend in many ‘lower stakes’ computer interfaces (for example, web browsers) has thus been in the opposite direction — hiding the complex decision-making of the machine to present a simple, minimalistic user experience.  For autonomous vehicles, although some transparency can improve trust, too much transparency into the explanations for the car’s actions can overwhelm the passenger, thereby increasing anxiety10.

Thus, what is most important for generating trust and comfort is not full transparency but communication of the correct amount and type of information to allow people to develop mental models (an abstract representation of the entity’s perceptions and decision rules) of the cars5 — a sort of theory of the machine mind. There is already a robust literature investigating what information is most crucial to communicate; however, most of this research has been conducted on artificial intelligence in industrial, residential or software interface settings. Not all of it will be perfectly transferable to autonomous vehicles, so researchers need to investigate what information best fosters predictability, trust and comfort in this new and specific setting.  Moreover, autonomous vehicles will need to communicate not just with their passengers, but with pedestrians, fellow drivers and the other stakeholders on the road. Currently, people decipher the intentions of other drivers through explicit signals (such as indicators, horns and gestures) and through assumptions based on the mental models formed of drivers (‘Why is she slowing down here?’ or ‘Why is he positioning himself like that?’). Everyone on the road will need to adjust their human models to those of autonomous vehicles, and the more research delineating what information people find crucial and comforting, the more seamless and less panicky this transition will be.


A new social contract

Automobiles began their transformational integration into our lives over a century ago.  In this time, a system of laws regulating the behaviour of drivers and pedestrians, and the designs and practices of manufacturers, has been introduced and continuously refined.  Today, the technologies that mediate these regulations, and the norms, fines and other punishments that enforce them, maintain just enough trust in the traffic system to keep it tolerable. Tomorrow, the integration of autonomous cars will be similarly transformational, but will occur over a much shorter timescale. In that time, we will need a new social contract that provides clear guidelines about who is responsible for different kinds of accidents, how monitoring and enforcement will be performed, and how trust among all stakeholders can be engendered.  Many challenges remain — hacking, liability and labour displacement issues, most significantly — but this social contract will be bound as much by psychological realities as by technological and legal ones. We have identified several here, but more work remains. We believe it is morally imperative for behavioural scientists of all disciplines to weigh in on this contract.  Every day the adoption of autonomous cars is delayed is another day that people will continue to lose their lives to the non-autonomous human drivers of yesterday.

Prolonged transport and cannibalism of mummified infant remains by a Tonkean macaque mother

Prolonged transport and cannibalism of mummified infant remains by a Tonkean macaque mother. Arianna De Marco, Roberto Cozzolino, and Bernard Thierry. Primates. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-017-0633-8

Abstract: Observations of animals’ responses to dying or dead companions raise questions about their awareness of states of helplessness or death of other individuals. In this context, we report the case of a female Tonkean macaque (Macaca tonkeana) that transported the body of her dead infant for 25 days and cannibalized its mummified parts. The mother appeared agitated in the first 2 days after the birth. She then took care of her infant’s corpse, which progressively dried and became mummified. In a third stage, the mother continued to transport the corpse as it started disintegrating, and she gnawed and consumed some parts of the remains. Our observations suggest that mummification of the body favored persistence of maternal behaviors by preserving the body’s shape. The female gradually proceeded from strong attachment to the infant’s body to decreased attachment, then finally full abandonment of the remains.

Anticipated regret from erring after following advice is greater than anticipated regret from erring after ignoring advice

Tzini, K., and Jain, K. (2017) The Role of Anticipated Regret in Advice Taking. J. Behav. Decision Making, doi: 10.1002/bdm.2048.

Abstract: Across five studies, we demonstrate that anticipated future regret influences receptiveness to advice. While making a revision to one's own judgment based on advice, people can anticipate two kinds of future regret: (a) the regret of following non-beneficial advice and (b) the regret of ignoring beneficial advice. In studies 1a (scenario task) and 1b (judgment task), we find that anticipated regret from erring after following advice is greater than anticipated regret from erring after ignoring advice. Furthermore, receptiveness decreases as the difference between anticipated regret from following and from ignoring advice increases. In study 2, we demonstrate that perceived justifiability of one's own initial decision is greater than that of advice. This difference in perceived justifiability influences anticipated regret and that, in turn, influences receptiveness. In study 3, we investigate the effect of advisor's expertise on perceived justifiability, anticipated regret, and receptiveness. In study 4, we propose and test an intervention to improve receptiveness based on self-generation of advice justifications. Participants who were asked to self-generate justifications for the advice were more receptive to it. This effect was mediated by perceived justifiability and anticipated regret. These findings shed further light on what prevents people from being receptive to advice and how this can be improved.