Meta-analysis: Psychopaths do not achieve larger gains in social economic decision-making games – unless their opponents lack the option to retaliate

Social Economic Decision-Making and Psychopathy: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Gunschera, L. J., Brazil I. A. and Driessen, J. M. A. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, November 18 2022, 104966. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104966

Highlights

• Psychopathy is associated with reduced cooperation

• Psychopathy is associated with smaller offering behaviour

• No support for link of psychopathy with higher total gains

• Adaptiveness of psychopathic traits is dependent on context

• Advanced approaches enable examination of more refined motivations

Abstract: Psychopathy is a personality construct that encompasses a constellation of traits reflecting emotional dysfunction and antisocial behavior. This constellation has consistently been linked to poor decision-making, often focused on personal and monetary gains at the others’ expense. However, there remains a lack of a systematic examination of how psychopathy is related to the prospect of obtaining monetary gains as a function of social context. Therefore, we conducted a series of meta-analyses to elucidate these relationships. Our findings indicated that elevated levels of psychopathy are related to a reduced tendency to cooperate with others, and no difference in the extent to which knowledge of others’ retaliation possibilities informs decision-making. However, the type of social economic decision-making game employed moderated the association between psychopathic traits and total gain obtained, suggesting that context plays a key role in moderating the link between psychopathic features and decision-making. These findings advance our understanding of psychopathy and open new avenues for research on adaptive and maladaptive social behavior in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits.

Keywords: psychopathycooperationdecision-makingantisocial behaviorneuroeconomics

4. Discussion

The present meta-analysis shows that increased levels of psychopathic traits are associated with less cooperative behavior and lower offers across social economic decision-making paradigms. Moreover, our findings suggest that individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits ignore the potential retaliative acts of opponents in their behavioral choices challenge. Finally, these individuals obtain higher gains in games where opponents lack the option to retaliate, compared to reciprocal games. In the following sections we will discuss these findings in more detail.

4.1. Cooperation

The results indicated that increasing levels of psychopathic traits co-occurred with reduced cooperation across social economic decision-making contexts. The manifestation of uncooperative behavior varies across paradigms. In a Trust Game, for instance, defection takes the form of lower reciprocal actions when offered the opportunity to reward the investor for their investment. In contrast, defection in an Ultimatum or Dictator Game relates to the individual’s posed offers. The finding that individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits are inclined to behave less cooperative across a range of social economic decision-making contexts aligns with our primary hypothesis and emphasizes the interpersonal component of psychopathic traits. More generally, the finding supports contemporary theories of psychopathy which postulate that psychopathy encompasses interpersonal deficits and antisocial tendencies. Yet, these theories insinuate different motivations for reduced cooperative behavior.

Prevailing theories of psychopathy tend to emphasize affective deficits. One prominent account is Lykken’s low-fear hypothesis, which suggests that psychopathy is underpinned by an impairment of fear processing (Lykken, 1957, Lykken, 1995). Psychopathic individuals are thought to experience the emotion of fear to a lesser extent. Hypothesized mechanisms underlying this lack of fear are deficits in passive avoidance learning (i.e., learning to avoid an aversive stimulus by inhibiting a previously punished response) and fear conditioning (i.e., learning to associate a particular neutral stimulus with an aversive stimulus) (Birbaumer et al., 2005; R. J. R. Blair et al., 2004; Oba et al., 2019; Veit et al., 2013). Punishing responses are inherent to learning appropriate behavior in social situations, and many parenting methods rely on punishment of undesirable behaviors. Consequently, individuals scoring high on psychopathic traits may be more inclined to engage in deviant behaviors due to the lack of fear associated with undesirable outcomes. Since noncooperative behavior tends to yield the highest reward for the individual, there are few reasons not to act in socially deviant manners if fear of social or monetary punishment is disregarded.

In contrast to previously discussed emotion-focused theories, attention-based models suggest broad and nonspecific attention deficits to underpin psychopathy. The Response Modulation Hypothesis (RMH; Gorenstein & Newman, 1980; Newman & Baskin-Sommers, 2016) concerns individuals’ ability to modulate a dominant response set in the presence of nondominant response cues. Psychopathic individuals are thought to focus on immediate, motivationally salient cues while disregarding peripheral information. The attentional bottleneck model (Baskin-Sommers & Brazil, 2022) elaborates on the underlying mechanism, suggesting an exaggerated attention bottleneck that restricts parallel processing of peripheral cues. Such an overactive attention bottleneck in psychopathy filters out too much information and forces serial processing instead. Evidence in favor of the attentional bottleneck comes from studies investigating information processing in dual-task conditions. These studies showed that psychopathy-related deficits are most apparent in tasks that required participants to learn and track multiple sets or types of contingencies (e.g., Brazil et al., 2013; Von Borries et al., 2010; Newman & Kosson, 1986). It has been demonstrated that increasing levels of psychopathic traits are associated with reduced interference to response incongruent information when this information is presented outside the focus of attention (Scheeff et al., 2021, Zeier and Newman, 2013). Regarding cooperation, the attention-based models of psychopathy suggest that a disregard of contextual information, as a consequence of an exaggerated attention bottleneck, explains the negative relationship between psychopathic traits and cooperation. For instance, when in pursuit of monetary reward, individuals with elevated levels of psychopathy may be less likely to incorporate affective cues of the social interaction in their decision-making. This is limited to instances where cooperation cues remain outside the central focus of attention. As such, one may expect these individuals to consider contextual social cues when amply encouraged to do so.

Taken together, conceptualizations of psychopathy tend to converge in their predictions on cooperative behavior, while their proposed underlying motivations diverge. To effectively differentiate between said theories, we need to address the boundary conditions of the suggested deficits. For instance, absence of fear-related deficits when fear-related cues are the focus of attention challenge contemporary affective theories of psychopathy (Lykken, 1995, Newman et al., 2010). Instead, it is important to consider the situational specificity of dysfunctions associated with psychopathy, something that has become clear from researchers extending upon overly simplistic social economic decision-making studies in recent years and considering variables that go beyond the binary cooperation-defection distinction (e.g., Driessen et al., 2021; Gong et al., 2019; Osumi & Ohira, 2017; Testori et al., 2019). Throughout the following paragraph we will address the moderating variables of interest to the relationship of psychopathic traits and cooperation.

Our findings indicated that the negative relationship between psychopathic traits and cooperation is not moderated by any of the included moderators. Whereas scholars have suggested that the behavior that is associated with F1 and F2 subtypes may be driven by different motivations (Karpman, 1941, Mealey, 1995), our findings indicated no moderating effect of factor on the observed association of psychopathy and cooperation. Our analysis of the factor structure is limited as aggregate findings of studies using a wide range of psychopathy measures, only some of which strictly adhere to the F1/F2 distinction. The PPI F1, for instance, incorporates adaptive aspects. whereas F1 of the PCL-R is strictly limited to maladaptive characteristics of the disorder (Benning et al., 2003, Miller and Lynam, 2012). While findings seem to indicate that primary and secondary psychopathy are associated with the F1/F2 distinction (Levenson et al., 1995), future studies may analyze a more homogenous sample of psychopathy measures or look for an interaction between the psychopathy scales and their factor structures (Malterer et al., 2010, Poythress et al., 2010).

Two additional moderators pertain to the measurements used to assess psychopathic traits levels. The clinical utility and factor structure of the different psychopathy measures have been compared extensively (Cooke and Michie, 2001, Drislane et al., 2014, Flórez et al., 2020, Hare, 1985, Hare, 1996, Hare, 2003; Hare & Neumann, 2006; Tsang et al., 2018), but there is little insight as to the relevance of these differences for cooperative behavior. Our findings suggest that differences in psychopathy measures do not differentially account for the relationship between psychopathy and cooperation and conflicts with the limited evidence of psychopathy measures contributing to differences in findings of cooperation in psychopathic individuals (Rilling et al., 2007). We observed the same null effect for the moderator splitting psychopathy scales into those neglecting and those incorporating positive aspects of psychopathy. This finding goes against the notion that scales incorporating positive aspects of psychopathy may do better at accounting for positive behavioral outcomes, such as cooperation.

At last, our analysis revealed no significant differences in the association of psychopathic traits and cooperative behavior in the Ultimatum and the Dictator game. The non-significant moderating effect of game suggests that individuals with elevated psychopathic traits tend to disregard important differences between paradigms in their pursuit to obtain valuable outcomes. Individuals low on psychopathic traits are thought to incorporate the knowledge of potential retaliative actions in their decision-making. As such, paradigms where participants may be punished motivate cooperative behavior. The finding that individuals with elevated psychopathic traits tend not to incorporate that knowledge can be explained by affective and cognitive accounts of psychopathy. The former may argue that a lower experience of fear alters motivational contingencies in individuals with elevated psychopathic traits (Lykken, 1995). Attentional accounts, on the other hand, account for the finding by suggesting that peripheral cues, in this case the affective reactions of the other agent, tend to be disregarded by individuals high on psychopathic traits (R. K. B. Hamilton et al., 2015).

4.2. Offer Size

Results for the analysis of offer sizes in social economic decision-making games indicate a significant negative association with psychopathic traits. As such, individuals with elevated levels of psychopathy tend to propose lower offers. It should be noted that results from the file drawer analyses give reason to question the robustness of the effect and suggest that the effect may be susceptible to publication bias. Therefore, we are cautious with drawing firm conclusions. Our observation aligns with the extant literature documenting violations of social norms and reduced concern for the welfare of others in individuals with psychopathic tendencies (Chang et al., 2011, *Gillespie et al., 2013, Hare, 1996, Hare, 1998, Harpur et al., 1989, *Mokros et al., 2008). Interestingly, some studies suggested that individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits have a different sense of fairness and proposed that this could explain antisocial choices in social economic games (e.g., Driessen et al., 2021; Osumi & Ohira, 2010). This notion is supported by findings showing that individuals with elevated levels of psychopathic traits not only pose lower offers but also accepted more unfair offers and perceived unfair offers as being less unfair (*Osumi and Ohira, 2010, *Vieira et al., 2014). A first study that investigated the role of fairness considerations in social economic decision-making and compared it with potential other motivations combined a new social economic game with computational modeling and showed that psychopathy was indeed negatively associated with inequity-aversion (Driessen et al., 2021). Competing theories have been suggested as to why psychopathic traits are associated with reduced cooperative and general moral behavior (Chang et al., 2011, *Driessen et al., 2021, Glenn et al., 2009, *Gong et al., 2019, van Baar et al., 2020). While our present results fail to differentiate between guilt-aversion and inequity-aversion motives of offering behavior, recent methodological advancements have made it possible to differentiate between distinct moral decision strategies by combining new experimental tasks with computational modeling (*Driessen et al., 2021, *Gong et al., 2019, van Baar et al., 2019). The approach of computational modelling to the behavioral strategy proves a promising way of discerning between different strategies and obtaining more detailed insight into the motivations for cooperative or defective behavior.

Regarding the moderation analysis, none of the moderators showed a significant effect. The moderator ‘game’ is particularly interesting, as it captures the trade-off between immediate and delayed reward. This follows from the fundamental difference between the UG and DG, the latter of which allows for reciprocal actions of the opponent. As such, individuals can maximize immediate rewards in the DG without sacrificing long-term gains, a strategy that is bound to fail in a UG, where the opponent may punish offers that are perceived to be unfair. Our findings indicate that individuals scoring high on psychopathic traits make small offers in general. This suggests that these individuals do strive for immediate reward and do not, or to a lesser extent, incorporate the potential retaliating acts of the other player in their behavioral choices. A potential explanation for this finding could be that individuals scoring high on psychopathy are not sensitive to the reciprocal nature of the social economic interaction. However, previous studies suggested that these individuals are aware of the social context and understand other’s expectations, but just don’t utilize this knowledge in their social decision-making (e.g., Gong et al., 2019). An alternative explanation for our finding could be that a high sensitivity to reward in these individuals drives risky and antisocial decision-making. Previous studies have suggested that individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits are characterized by a tendency to excessively pursue appetitive stimuli, and proposed that this excessive behavioral activation could be a key component underlying antisocial behavior in these individuals (R. J. R. Blair et al., 2004; Buckholtz et al., 2010; Foulkes et al., 2014; Gorenstein & Newman, 1980; Hare, 1972; Pujara et al., 2013). This excessive pursuit of rewards may render individuals with psychopathic tendencies less likely to process peripheral information, such as the presence or absence of potential punishment. This could explain the observed absence of differences in offering behaviour across paradigms. Yet, the differences between paradigms imply that similar behavioral choices may yield different outcomes. To address the outcome of social economic decision-making games more directly, we turn toward an examination of the total gains obtained.

4.3. Total gain

The results for the analysis of total gain in social economic decision-making indicated that psychopathic traits are unrelated to the total gain obtained in social economic decision-making games. Yet, our findings lack scope to draw comprehensive conclusions about the adaptive value of particular psychopathic traits (Bronchain et al., 2020, Meloy et al., 2018). Whereas our findings preclude conclusions about the sensitivity to reward itself, they are relevant to the efficacy in achieving desired gains. Arguably, one would expect increased effort in obtaining rewards that are highly valued. However, this does not necessarily translate to increased efficacy in obtaining said rewards, and our findings indicate that psychopathic individuals are not more successful at achieving monetary rewards (R. J. R. Blair, 2008; Buckholtz et al., 2010; Cleckley, 1941; Everitt et al., 2008; Fowles, 1980; Gorenstein & Newman, 1980; Lykken, 1957; Pujara et al., 2013). However, findings of the moderator analyses demonstrated that the type of game significantly moderated the effect of psychopathy on total gain. More specifically, individuals with elevated levels of psychopathic traits appeared to obtain a higher outcome in games that exclude the possibility of an opponent retaliating on the current or later trials. This is in line with our other finding showing that psychopathic traits are linked to lower offers across all games and provides further insight into the efficacy of such a strategy. Posing a low offer in the Dictator game results in a higher gain, while posing a low offer in the Ultimatum or Prisoner Game increases the risk of retaliation by the opponent and therefore potentially results in a lower gain. Thus, the significant moderator effect of game on the relation between psychopathy and total gain could be explained by the risk of retaliation in the social economic decision-making games. Based on the current findings we could not conclude whether individuals scoring low on psychopathic traits, or community-dwelling individuals in general, do not adapt at all or do adapt to a lesser extent.

The question whether psychopathy scales that incorporate positive aspects of the personality construct are better at accounting for positive outcomes, such as cooperation, was addressed in the moderation analysis. Our findings indicate no significant moderation effect of scales including or discarding positive aspects of psychopathy. However, it is worth noting, that we did observe a negative trend in said moderation. Nevertheless, the moderation did not reach significance, and we conclude that although some scales do incorporate positive aspects of psychopathy, they demonstrate no greater utility at predicting the total gain of psychopathic individuals.

Finally, we should note that the proportion of the variance in study estimates concerning total gain that is due to heterogeneity was high (Deeks, 2011). Accordingly, any interpretation of these results should be taken with care. Several explanations can be devised for this observation. It is possible that total gain in social economic decision-making games vary greatly across the studies. This seems plausible, given that we observe many differences in social economic decision-making paradigms, some of which are more generous in the allocation of rewards, whereas others are more restricted. Alternatively, it is possible that results are biased, and the resulting conclusions are flawed. Whereas we consider the former to be more plausible, the following conclusions should be taken with care and further research into the amount of total gain in social economic decision-making games is warranted (Deeks, 2011).

Overall, the pattern of results indicated that individuals scoring high on psychopathy are less likely to engage in cooperative behavior and have the tendency to pose low offers regardless of the risk of retaliation by the opponent. The latter finding suggests that these individuals fail to consider potential retaliative acts of others. In line with these findings, while there was no overall effect of psychopathy on the total gain, we did find that individuals scoring high on psychopathy are more likely to end up with large gains in games where opponents do not get a chance to retaliate. Taken together, the results demonstrate that the social economic behavior of psychopaths is a result of many interacting factors.

4.4. Quality assessment and limitations

Note, however, that there is substantial heterogeneity amid study findings and the degree to which cooperative behavior can be explained by psychopathic traits is inconsistent between experiments. Another limitation follows from the relatively small set of studies on social economic decision-making of psychopathic individuals. More research is required to separate the effects of psychopathy across different economic games, as well as investigate differences in social economic decision making in clinical and pre-clinical data. These nuanced effects are of great interest and future research may utilize recent methodological developments outlined in the present review.

Our quality assessment showed 81.25% of the included studies to be of moderate quality, with another 12.5% and 6.25% being of good or poor quality, respectively. Several methodological weaknesses were common across all studies and may negatively influence the reliability of observed findings. First, most studies failed to report any form of sample size justification. Said ad-hoc justifications relate to the probability of correctly rejecting a null hypothesis, given a particular effect size, alpha level, and sample size (Tressoldi, 2012). Failure to consider these factors can result in inflated type one error rates, incidences where the null hypothesis is incorrectly rejected. Considering that the importance of power analyses has been stressed for over half a decade, it is troubling to see it being disregarded in many of the included papers (Cohen, 1969, Cohen, 1992). Another frequent issue are missing specifications of exclusion criteria. Exclusion criteria allow for judgments of external validity and comparisons of samples across studies. Moreover, it has been suggested that more theory-driven exclusion criteria are needed to solve the false-positive problem in psychopathy (Rosenberg Larsen, 2018). Although the mere specification of exclusion criteria in itself does not equate more theory-driven decisions, it is a move in the right direction and allows for comparisons across studies. In the present analysis, frequent failure to report exclusion criteria generally reduces the quality of observed evidence and may have contributed to the high rates of heterogeneity that we have observed across studies (Patino & Ferreira, 2018).

4.5. General Summary and Discussion

Marked interpersonal deficits are considered fundamental to the construct psychopathy. Several studies have documented the social behavior in relation to psychopathic traits across a variety of social economic decision-making games and aimed to obtain insight into the drives and motivations of social behavior of individuals who demonstrate elevated psychopathic traits. The present meta-analysis offers the first comprehensive review of psychopaths’ choice behavior in social economic games. In doing so, we were able to incorporate a larger variety of factors that are relevant to the social economic choices of individuals and allow for more meaningful assessments of behavior and behavioral motives. Our findings demonstrated that elevated psychopathic traits are associated with less cooperative behavior and lower offers across social economic paradigms. Both effects are reflected in our contemporary understanding of psychopathy as being characterized by marked social deficits and disregard for others. Moreover, our findings suggest that psychopathic individuals ignore the potential retaliative acts of opponents in their behavioral choices challenge. This might be explained by their engagement in risky decision-making to obtain a high reward. At last, our findings concerning the gains in social economic decision-making games indicate that, overall, individuals with elevated psychopathic traits are no better at obtaining them. However, when we make a distinction based on the type of game, our findings demonstrate that individuals scoring high on psychopathy obtain higher gains in games where opponents lack the option to retaliate. Taken together, we could argue that the risky and antisocial strategy adopted by individuals scoring high on psychopathic traits is successful in situations where one has full control over the outcome, but not in situations where reciprocity plays a role. Thus, as psychopathic traits turn out to benefit the level of success only in certain situations, our findings challenge the idea of successful psychopathy (Lasko and Chester, 2021, Palmen et al., 2018, Persson and Lilienfeld, 2019). Our findings summarize existing research on social economic decision-making in psychopathy and supports the idea that personality traits have substantial predictive power in the field of economics and can help us better understand economic behavior across strategic contexts (Borghans et al., 2008, Engelmann et al., 2019). It further demonstrates directions for future research, which should devote attention to more refined behavioral drives and consider the complexity of social economic environments.

Competing theories have been suggested as to why psychopathic traits are associated with reduced cooperative behavior in social economic contexts (Chang et al., 2011, *Driessen et al., 2021, Glenn et al., 2009, *Gong et al., 2019, van Baar et al., 2020). One prominent line of thinking incorporates the idea that people typically generate beliefs about what others expect from us and suggests that people are motivated to cooperate to avoid feelings of guilt for not living up to another’s expectations. Studies showed that psychopathy is negatively associated with such a guilt-averse motivation (K. S. Blair et al., 2006; Cleckley, 1964; Seara-Cardoso et al., 2016, Gong et al., 2019). An alternative theory proposes that fairness considerations motivate cooperative behavior in humans. According to this theory, people value the equity in outcome between themselves and another person and are often willing to sacrifice some of their own payout to ensure more equitable outcomes with others. Studies on the role of fairness considerations during social economic decision-making in psychopathy have yielded mixed results. Until recently, there were no direct comparisons between these two hypotheses as traditional social economic decision-making paradigms do not allow us to differentiate between guilt and fairness considerations. That is, the two motivations typically result in similar behavioral patterns in such paradigms. However, there have been some promising developments in this direction and studies have gone beyond the general characteristics of social environments to gather insight into the drives and motives of cooperative behavior as a function of psychopathic traits (*Driessen et al., 2021, *Gervais et al., 2013, *Gong et al., 2019, van Baar et al., 2019). Recent methodological advancements have made it possible to differentiate between distinct moral decision strategies by combining new experimental tasks with computational modeling (*Driessen et al., 2021, *Gong et al., 2019, van Baar et al., 2019). The approach of computational modelling to the behavioral strategy proves a promising way of discerning between different strategies and obtaining more detailed insight into the motivations for cooperative or defective behavior.

Following the same trend of increasing the specificity at which different strategies can be detected, different approaches have been utilized to discern reward learning from social decision-making (e.g., Martins et al., 2022; Sul et al., 2015). Sul and colleagues (2015) developed a new instrumental learning task (i.e., prosocial learning task) that helps disentangle prosocial from self-oriented learning. By splitting participants in conditions where obtaining points would benefit the self or another individual, the researchers were able to investigate individual differences in prosociality specifically. Several studies have demonstrated that self- and other-regarding choices are critically involved in determining prosocial behavior (Cutler et al., 2021, Lockwood et al., 2017, Piva et al., 2019, Sul et al., 2015). These findings emphasize the importance of adopting more rigorous scientific methods in order to better understand human decision-making.

It is important to acknowledge a potential limitation when considering the results of the present review. The studies included differed in samples (forensic vs. non-forensic), conceptualization of the construct of psychopathy, and used social economic decision-making games. In general, social economic decision-making games are designed to resemble real-life behavior in social situations. Therefore, it is essential that individuals believe in the legitimacy of these interactions and attach value to the potential outcomes, both social and economic. Hypothetical scenarios lack the consequences for actual social and economic outcomes that real social economic decisions have. Therefore, an expected increase in social desirability may cause an inflation in effect sizes of studies using hypothetical rather than behavior-contingent designs (Moshagen et al., 2011, Thielmann et al., 2016). Games during which participants are aware that their decisions will not influence their monetary payout encourage a shift toward more cooperative behavior as it comes at no actual cost to the individual. This effect is even stronger for selfish individuals (e.g., Hilbig et al., 2015). Therefore, under the assumption that psychopathic individuals tend to cooperate less across social economic decision-making games, it may be reasonable to assume that hypothetical games diminish the negative association and lead to a decline in observed effect sizes. The same is true for studies where participants are not made aware of the hypothetical nature of the task. The extent to which experimenters manage to convince participants of the legitimacy of the social economic interaction may similarly affect the willingness to cooperate. Nevertheless, Thielmann et al. (2020) concluded that perception does not confound the results on personality and prosocial behavior, reporting merely a small effect of deception on study outcomes. Accordingly, this limitation does not necessarily warrant concern, considering that a small minority of participants was aware of the hypothetical nature.

4.6. Conclusion

The current study presents meta-analytical findings concerning the relationship of psychopathic traits and social economic decision-making. The results show that psychopathy is associated with reduced cooperative behavior across social economic decision-making paradigms, while such behavior leads to high gains only in situations that do not require reciprocal interactions. While these findings improve our understanding of how variations in psychopathy scores are linked to the ability to adapt to task characteristics, we also emphasize the need for studies that go beyond the general characteristics of social environments to gather insight into the underlying motivations of cooperative behavior as a function of psychopathic traits.

Particularly in women, the Dark Tetrad facets were associated with social media use

Social media use and personality: Beyond self-reports and trait-level assessments. Lennart Freyth, Bernad Batinic, Peter K. Jonason. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 202, February 2023, 111960. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2022.111960

Highlights

• Narcissistic and Machiavellian facets correlated with Instagram use intensity.

• The HEXACO models showed (almost) no links to objective social media usage.

• Particularly in women, the Dark Tetrad facets were associated with social media use.

Abstract: We investigated how objective, behavioral data on social media use was correlated with the Dark Tetrad facets and the HEXACO traits. We tracked usage time and usage session of social media users (N = 243), considering Instagram to be a visual social medium compared to Facebook and, therefore, to be related to “dark” personality characteristics (i.e., short-term mating, antisocial attitudes). Additional to bivariate correlations, we controlled the Dark Tetrad facets for the HEXACO model and vice versa using partialed correlations, and found that agentic extraversion, self-entered antagonism, and Machiavellian tactics, but not the HEXACO traits, were correlated with Instagram usage time and sessions. We observed no personality correlations with Facebook use. In women, more facets were associated with Instagram use, while in men only boldness was linked to it. We discuss the findings in the light of short-term mating and antisocial behavior on social media (e.g., niche specialization, cyberstalking). Disentangling the Dark Tetrad traits helped refine previous findings.

Keywords: Dark tetradHEXACOInstagramSocial mediaBehavioral dataFacets

3. Discussion

Previous research on personality and social media use has at least two shortcomings. It relied mainly on self-reported data of social media use and analyzed either the Dark Triad traits or the Big Five traits, which made it hard to uncover exact associations and to compare both. Thus, we correlated behavioral data of the two largest social networks—Instagram and Facebook—with the Dark Tetrad facets and the HEXACO traits instead of the Dark Triad and the Big Five traits to refine previous research.

In general, the Dark Tetrad facets—but not the HEXACO traits—were associated with Instagram use. Whereas both taxonomies were almost completely uncorrelated with Facebook use. These findings were underlined by the partialed correlations, confirming H1 partially (i.e., agentic extraversion, neurotic narcissism; H1a for time but not for sessions) and H2 (i.e., Machiavellian tactics), but not H3 (i.e., meanness, disinhibition) and H4 (i.e., indirect sadism). We observed a different pattern among women in whom numerous dark facets showed stronger associations with Instagram usage time and particularly sessions-confirming H1b, H2, H3b, and H4 only for women, whereas only bold men used Instagram longer and more frequently. This supports the difference of Instagram of a highly visual social media app (Marengo et al., 2018) when compared to Facebook, which developed into a general platform with different interactions and more text-based interactions. Indicating, the link between Instagram use and the Dark Tetrad facets supports the assumption of using mating tactics on visual social media such as Instagram but not on Facebook. Interestingly, we could not identify an overall link between disinhibition and Instagram usage time or sessions (rejecting H3, limiting H3b to women). Probably our outcome markers did not match with previous ones, or objective Instagram data did not match the concrete behavior (e.g., phubbing; Grieve & March, 2021). What we could find was a relationship between Instagram use and indirect sadism, but only in women. This might be a consequence of antisocial online behaviors (Moor & Anderson, 2019), or-more specific-a result of intimate partner cyberstalking, a mating strategy to avoid mating mistakes (March, Szymczak, Di Rago, & Jonason, 2022).

Relationships between personality and social media usage intensity were almost completely limited to the Dark Tetrad facets. Probably, because high-scoring individuals are looking for mating purposes online (Fox & Rooney, 2015) and prefer the environment because of more possible mating success there (i.e., better fitness pay-offs, niche specialization; Penke & Jokela, 2016). Remarkable, exploitative, callous men (i.e., meanness; Jonason et al., 2009) spend less time online, while mild (i.e., boldness) psychopathic tactics (Jonason et al., 2014) are associated with more time spent and sessions on Instagram. Along with this, highly emotional women, use Instagram for a longer time than men, highlighting potential tactics used in this visual social media. Noteworthy, several facets were only linked to increased usage in women (e.g., self-centered antagonism), a finding that could be interpreted as mating tactics in modern, liberal societies with smaller sex differences. Particularly as we provide a German and not Anglo-American sample (Schmitt, 2005). Future researchers should investigate if visual social media might provide a safe environment for women to engage in (more) short-term mating (Baranowski & Hecht, 2015). These and general, upcoming challenges for society might emerge as usage time increases (Hodes & Thomas, 2021).

3.1. Limitations and conclusions

Despite our use of a tracked sample of sufficient size, our study has several limitations. Different Dark Tetrad facets could be chosen, yet we consider the ones picked best for an independent and holistic view of the taxonomy. This way, we could refine results on everyday sadism (Moor & Anderson, 2019), but the link between Instagram usage times and sessions with physical sadism instead of indirect sadism—in women and not in men—needs further investigation. Future research should investigate sex differences in personality and associated objective social media use with larger sample sizes to clarify our observed tendencies. Low internal consistency scores of the HEXACO traits are common among short scales, especially when using heterogeneous items (Rammstedt & Beierlein, 2014) to measure a complex but unidimensional construct or trait (Schmitt, 1996). However, we would suggest using long-versions for further research. Last, we only captured usage intensity objectively, upcoming research should investigate people's concrete behaviors on top and combine them with intensity and personality for analyses. And those studies should use experimental designs.

We show the importance of disentangling the Dark Tetrad traits when trying to understand their role in understanding objective social media use. Visual social media was used more intensely by people high in agentic extraversion, self-centered antagonism, and Machiavellian tactics but not by mean or impulsive individuals. Sex differences were not only observed in personality, but manifested in associated usage, too. While women with high Dark Tetrad facets used Instagram more intensely, only bold men did. The use of Instagram, as a visual social media, differs substantially from Facebook use regarding its users' personality characteristics, potentially for mating purposes on top of solely antisocial online behaviors. The findings are consistent with and sharpen previous research as only the Dark Tetrad traits, not the HEXACO traits, were associated with visual social media use. Like light attracts moths, social media seems to attract antisocial personalities.

Children distributed fewer rewards to high performers who were motivated by the pursuit of profit

The profit motive: Implications for children’s reasoning about merit-based resource distribution. Shuai Shao, Jingrong Huang, Li Zhao, Gail D. Heyman. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Volume 226, February 2023, 105563. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105563

Highlights

• Judgments about how to reward high performers were examined among 6- to 11-year-olds.

• Intrinsically-motivated performers were compared to performers motivated by profit.

• Participants distributed less to the high performers who were motived by profit.

• With age, the distributions were increasingly sensitive to the motive information.

• Wariness of individuals who have a profit motive may have its origins in childhood.

Abstract: How to distribute resources in a fair way is a fundamental source of conflict in human societies. A central dilemma that people begin to grapple with during childhood is the extent to which individuals should be rewarded based on merit at the expense of equality. The current study examined children’s reasoning about this dilemma by testing whether they are sensitive to information about the motives of highly productive people when determining whether they should receive extra compensation. Across two studies, children (6- to 11-year-olds, total N = 143) judged high performers to be less deserving of extra resources when they were motivated by profit rather than being intrinsically motivated, and this pattern was more pronounced among the older children. The findings demonstrate that, with age, children increasingly consider motives when deciding whether productivity should be rewarded and that the tendency of adults to view profit motives as problematic has origins during childhood.

Keywords: Profit motiveUlterior motivesIntrinsic motivationExtrinsic motivationResource allocation

General discussion

The current research examined the effects of motives for performance on children’s judgments about the extent to which people should be rewarded based on merit. In addressing this question, we hypothesized that high performers motivated by profit would be seen as less worthy of extra rewards than intrinsically motivated high performers. We found evidence for this systematic tendency by 7 years of age in Study 1, and it was highly robust among 10- and 11-year-olds in both studies. These results show for the first time that information about ulterior motives can have implications for children’s merit-based distribution decisions.

Notably, older children in Study 2 tended to preferentially reward intrinsically motivated high performers over profit-motived high performers even when they had the option to reward both equally. We also found evidence that older children thought that profit-motived high performers should be given no extra rewards at all (Study 2) or even should be penalized (Study 1) relative to typical performers. This provides the first evidence that there may be a profit motive penalty that erases any notion that merit should be rewarded.

Our findings of a profit motive penalty are similar to anti-profit beliefs that have been observed among adults. For example, Bhattacharjee and colleagues (2017) found that profit-seeking businesses were viewed as harmful and immoral even when they were able to bring about salient social benefits. Our results suggest that children showed a similar pattern of reasoning by as young as 7 years, as indicated by the findings of Study 1 in which profit-driven high performers were rewarded less than typical performers despite their higher level of contribution to the class.

Our findings of age-related change are in line with the developmental research showing age-related changes in reasoning about ulterior motives. For example, Heyman and colleagues (2014) found that when judging people’s prosocial behaviors, 8- to 10-year-olds recognized ulterior motives associated with reputational enhancement, but 6- and 7-year-olds did not. Taken together, these findings suggest that children become increasingly sensitive to the implications of a broad range of ulterior motives during middle childhood and that, with age, children increasingly view individuals who hold such motives as both less altruistic and less worthy of being rewarded.

Our findings contribute to research on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation given that the profit motive is a form of extrinsic motivation. Previous research in this area has mainly focused on the behavioral consequences of extrinsic rewards and motivations (see Deci et al., 1999, for a review). For example, Ulber and colleagues (2016) showed that rewarding children for their prosocial behaviors attenuated their subsequent costly sharing. Good and Shaw (2022) showed that this distinction could also have evaluative implications; by 6 years of age, children showed a preference for an individual who was intrinsically motivated over one who was extrinsically motivated by reputational gain. The current work extends these findings by showing that the negative evaluative implications apply to another type of extrinsic motive—the motive for profit.

The current research also enriches the moral development literature by showing the important role of intentions in judgments and decision making. Previous research has documented that even young infants are sensitive to other agents’ intentions (Geraci et al., 2022, Hamlin, 2013, Kanakogi et al., 2017, Strid and Meristo, 2020). In particular, considerations of helpful or harmful intentions emerge within the first year of life (e.g., helping: Hamlin, 2013; distributing: Geraci et al., 2022). Our results, along with those of Good and Shaw (2022), build on these findings by showing that intentions that have no salient moral valence can also have evaluative implications. Our research is also in line with research showing that intentions, but not outcomes, are central to children’s moral judgments (Cushman et al., 2013, Killen et al., 2011).

One critical question that needs further exploration is why children and adults dislike or even penalize profit motives. It is likely that profit motives can signal selfishness and therefore are viewed as incompatible with societal good (Bhattacharjee et al., 2017). This may occur because the negative implications of profit motives are more salient in daily life than the positive implications (Bhattacharjee et al., 2017). In addition, it should be noted that the current research does not distinguish between rewarding high effort versus high productivity, which will be important to examine in future research (Noh et al., 2019).

It is worth noting that the current research was conducted in China. One important question to address in future research is the extent to which our findings are culturally specific versus generalizable. At least some prior findings on children’s resource allocation suggest that there may be cross-cultural differences. For example, a recent study showed that when recipients differed in their productivity, children from more individualistic cultures were more likely to distribute rewards equitably than children from collectivist cultures (Huppert et al., 2019). This may be because collectivist cultures tend to emphasize consideration of what is beneficial to the group (Triandis, 1989). However, it is also possible that there is a greater focus on rewarding individual achievement among children in China than in the West given that Chinese school culture is highly competitive and success is commonly defined in terms of relative achievement (Zhao & Heyman, 2018).

In sum, we examined whether children’s beliefs about rewarding merit-worthy behavior depend on the motive of the individual exhibiting the behavior. We found that children perceive profit-driven high performers to be less deserving of rewards than intrinsically motivated high performers and that, with age, motive information increasingly affects children’s judgments. These findings advance our understanding of deservingness in resource allocation and the development of intention-based judgments and decision making. They also provide evidence that the concerns about profit motives observed in adults have developmental roots and can be understood in terms of intuitive ways of thinking about motives that emerge early in life.

Listening speaks to our intuition while reading promotes analytic thought

Geipel, J., & Keysar, B. (2022). Listening speaks to our intuition while reading promotes analytic thought. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Nov 2022. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001316

Abstract: It is widely assumed that thinking is independent of language modality because an argument is either logically valid or invalid regardless of whether we read or hear it. This is taken for granted in areas such as psychology, medicine, and the law. Contrary to this assumption, we demonstrate that thinking from spoken information leads to more intuitive performance compared with thinking from written information. Consequently, we propose that people think more intuitively in the spoken modality and more analytically in the written modality. This effect was robust in five experiments (N = 1,243), across a wide range of thinking tasks, from simple trivia questions to complex syllogisms, and it generalized across two different languages, English and Chinese. We show that this effect is consistent with neuroscientific findings and propose that modality dependence could result from how language modalities emerge in development and are used over time. This finding sheds new light on the way language influences thought and has important implications for research that relies on linguistic materials and for domains where thinking and reasoning are central such as law, medicine, and business.

People's impressions of others' traits became increasingly unfavorable over time, while their impressions of their own traits improved

Perceived changes in trait attributions to others and the self. David M. Sanbonmatsu, Taylor Adams & Paul H. White. The Journal of Social Psychology, Nov 16 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2136060

Abstract: A study was conducted to examine the perceived changes in the impressions of others or self on 133 trait dimensions. Attributions to others were reportedly more negative over time whereas attributions to self were more positive over time. Perceived changes in others’ traits appear to be guided by basic behavioral inference processes. Trait beliefs about others tend to be revised when the traits are common and disconfirming behavior is infrequent and more diagnostic. Positive trait impressions of others change more frequently because they are more prevalent and because negative behaviors (that disconfirm positive attributions) are less frequent and more diagnostic than positive behaviors. In contrast, revisions of trait impressions of the self appear to be driven heavily by self-evaluation motivations such as the desire to see self-improvement. The favorableness of changes in trait self-concepts were positively correlated with self-esteem. The consequences of the observed patterns of attributional change for interpersonal relations are discussed.

Keywords: Attributioncorrespondent behaviorself-conceptdisconfirmation

Rolf Degen summarizing... The amount of time people objectively spent using social media was unrelated to their subjective self-reports, casting considerable doubt on previous research findings that almost always rely on self-reports

Assessing the validity of self-report social media use: Evidence of No relationship with objective smartphone use. Tamsin Mahalingham, Peter M. McEvoy, Patrick J.F. Clarke. Computers in Human Behavior, November 17 2022, 107567. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107567

Abstract: Social media use research remains dominated by self-report measures, despite concerns they may not accurately reflect objective social media use. The association between commonly employed self-report measures and objective social media use remains unclear. The aim of this study was to determine the degree of association between an objective and commonly employed subjective measures of social media use. The study specifically examined a single-estimate self-report measure, a problematic social media use scale, and objective use derived from smartphone data, in a sample of 209 individuals. The findings showed a very weak non-significant relationship between the objective measure and the single-estimate measure, (r = −.04, p = .58, BF10 = 0.18), and a weak significant relationship between the objective measure and the problematic social media use scale (r = .19, p = .01, BF10 = 3.04). These findings converge with other recent research to suggest there is very little shared variance between subjective estimates of social media use and objective use. This highlights the possibility that subjective social media use may be largely unrelated to objective use, which has implications for ensuring the rigor of future research and raising potential concerns regarding the veracity of previous research.

All over the world, the percentage of people in pain increased from 26.3 in 2009 to 32.1 in 2021

Pain trends and pain growth disparities, 2009-2021. LucíaMacchia. Economics & Human Biology, November 16 2022, 101200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2022.101200

Abstract: Physical pain is a major public health concern. Yet evidence on trends in physical pain around the world barely exists. Using nationally representative data from 146 countries (N = 1.6 million respondents), this paper finds that, all over the world, the percentage of people in pain increased from 26.3 in 2009 to 32.1 in 2021. This rising trend was present in both higher- and lower-income countries. This article also documents pain disparities: In the worldwide population, pain grew faster among women, the less educated, and the poor. Although the aggregate level of pain was greater among the elderly (> 60 years old), the growth in pain was faster among the younger (< 35 years old). These findings hold after controlling for sociodemographic factors. Disparities of pain growth in higher- and lower-income nations and potential explanatory factors are also discussed. Understanding how the level of pain varies over time and across demographic groups is crucial to evaluate and shape public health policies.

Introduction

Physical pain is a common health problem with vast individual, economic, and social consequences. Pain influences people’s health, wellbeing, and risk of mortality (Smith et al., 2018, Zajacova et al., 2021a), the economy and the healthcare system (Frießem et al., 2009, Gaskin and Richard, 2012), and the individual’s immediate social environment, such as the family and the workplace (Bendelow and Williams, 1995, de Vaan and Stuart, 2019, Dueñas et al., 2016). Understanding the growth and the distribution of pain growth in society is crucial to improving citizens’ welfare and the public health system. Yet evidence on pain trends and pain growth disparities in the worldwide population barely exists. This paper uses nationally representative data from146 countries (N = 1.6 million respondents) to examine pain trends between 2009 and 2021, potential explanations for these trends, and sociodemographic disparities in pain growth.

Later analyses show that the percentage of people in pain around the world increased from 26.3 in 2009 to 32.1 in 2021. Approximately, an extra half a billion people were in pain in 2021 as compared to 2009. Pain grew faster in countries with lower (vs higher) median age, lower (vs higher) healthcare spending, lower (vs higher) general government spending, and higher (vs lower) stress. This article also shows that pain growth is unequally distributed: The growth in physical pain was faster among women, the younger, the less educated, and the poor.

People artificially inflated the moral value of personality traits they had been led to believe they possessed

Vonasch, Andrew, and Bradley A. Tookey. 2022. “Self-serving Bias in Moral Character Evaluations.” PsyArXiv. November 16. doi:10.31234/osf.io/su79g

Abstract: Are people self-serving when moralizing personality traits? Past research has used cross sectional methods incapable of establishing causality, but the present research used experimental methods to test this. Indeed, two experiments (N = 669) show that people self-servingly inflate the moral value of randomly assigned personality traits they believe they possess, and even judge other people who share those same traits as more moral, warm, and competent than those who do not. We explain various methodological challenges overcome in conducting this research, and discuss implications for both psychology and philosophy.

The more one has ghosted, the more they have been ghosted themselves, with the reverse also being true that the more one has ghosted, the more they ghost others

To Ghost or To Be Ghosted: An Examination of the Social and Psychological Correlates Associated with Ghosting. Jacqueline M. Di Santo et al. EvoS Journal, Nov 2022. https://evostudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Di-Santo-et-al.-2022-Vol12Iss1.pdf

Abstract: This paper examines the modern phenomenon known as “ghosting,” which can be defined as avoiding another individual (such as a family member, friend, or partner) by suddenly cutting off communication without providing an explanation. From an evolutionary perspective, given that our ancestors lived in small-scale societies, cutting ties with others would have had devastating consequences. To address variables connected with this kind of outcome, we conducted a study with 292 participants (M age = 21.45, SD = 4.19; 26% male, 72.6% female, .3% not listed, 1% preferred not to say). Significant correlations were found between scales measuring particular psychological constructs (e.g., adult attachment, sociosexuality) and ghosting experiences. A regression analysis found that specific constructs independently predicted ghosting experiences. A notable finding was that the more one has ghosted, the more they have been ghosted themselves, with the reverse also being true that the more one has ghosted, the more they ghost others. Overall, in examining the social and psychological correlates associated with ghosting, our findings suggest that those who had been ghosted and those who had ghosted others had a proclivity toward relatively difficult social, emotional, and psychological functioning compared to those with fewer ghosting experiences.

Keywords: Dark Triad, Light Triad, Ghosting, Estrangement, Big Five, Adult Attachment, Sociosexuality

Those higher in cognitive ability have a higher incidence of realism and pessimism in their expectations and a lower incidence of unrealistic optimism

Dawson, Christopher. 2022. “Cognitive Ability and Looking on the B/right Side of Life.” PsyArXiv. November 15. doi:10.31234/osf.io/3q4xp

Abstract: Evidence claims that looking on the bright side of life is a hallmark of high cognition. Our claim is those with high cognition—as measured by a broad range of cognitive skills, including memory, verbal fluency, fluid reasoning and numerical reasoning—tend to look more on the right side. Using data from a large nationally representative UK sample (N=36,540), we find that those higher in cognitive ability have a higher incidence of realism and pessimism in their expectations and a lower incidence of unrealistic optimism. We operationalize unrealistic optimism as the difference between a person's financial expectation and the financial realization that follows, measured annually over a decade. Our results suggest that the well documented negative consequences of unrealistic optimism may be a side product of the true driver, lower cognitive ability. However, even those high in cognition are found to display significant errors in judgement.

Men with pedophilia who committed child sexual offenses on average had a 47 mm3 smaller hypothalamus per side

Hypothalamic volume in pedophilia with or without child sexual offense. Melanie Storch, Maria Kanthack, Till Amelung, Klaus M. Beier, Tillmann H. C. Krueger, Christopher Sinke, Henrik Walter, Martin Walter, Boris Schiffer, Stephanie Schindler & Peter Schoenknecht. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Nov 12 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00406-022-01501-w

Abstract: The hypothalamus regulates sexual behavior and is simultaneously associated with aggression and violence. Consequently, this brain region is relevant in research of pedophilia and child sexual offenses (CSO). The distinction between these two phenomena is of great importance and was the object of consideration of this study. We analyzed exclusively men, including 73 pedophilic offenders who committed CSO, an equal number of people with pedophilia but without such offenses, and 133 non-pedophilic, non-offending subjects who formed the control group. All data were collected in a multicenter in vivo study and analyzed using a semi-automated segmentation algorithm for 3-Tesla magnetic resonance images. Men with pedophilia who committed CSO on average had a 47 mm3 smaller hypothalamus per side than people without committed CSO. This effect was driven by both the group of non-offending people with pedophilia and the control group. By contrast, the exploratory comparison of pedophilic persons without CSO with the control group showed no significant difference. The present study demonstrates a deviant hypothalamic structure as a neurobiological correlate of CSO in pedophiles, but not in people with pedophilia who have not committed CSO. Thus, it strengthens the argument to distinguish between sexual offending and paraphilic sexual preferences.

Discussion

Child sexual offenders show hypothalamic volume reduction

In agreement with our first hypothesis of a reduction of hypothalamus volume in CSO, we observed a hypothalamic reduction in persons with pedophilia who committed CSO. The effect was evident in both hypothalamic hemispheres in absolute volumes and after correction for the two confounders ICV and age separately and simultaneously after outlier exclusion. Following contrasts confirmed our hypotheses that the effect was driven by the control as well as the P-CSO group. In our study CSO is related to hypothalamic volume reduction in pedophilic men and this effect is driven by the control group as well as the pedophilic non-offender group.

Significance was initially lost after simultaneous correction for ICV and age in the global univariate group comparisons of hypothalamus volumes and reemerged after excluding the statistical outliers. This suggests suppression effects due to multicollinearity and a sensitivity of the parametric models to non-normal outliers. The statistical outliers could not be explained by variations in clinical characteristics, measurement, or sampling. To account for the known sensitivity of parametric tests to outliers, we reported results before and after excluding statistical outliers for the purpose of transparency and reliability.

Since one contrast of volume reduction was not significant in the right hypothalamus, we may expect that the effect is more prominent on the left side. This would be consistent with the findings of a volume reduction of the right amygdala [24] and a functional connectivity between the right amygdala and the left hypothalamus in pedophilic offenders [65]. Blinding the rates to the hemispheres minimized the likelihood that the algorithm was applied differently.

Pedophilic participants both with and without histories of committed CSO consumed material depicting child sexual abuse, indicating the alteration in hypothalamic structure appears to be associated with implementation of CSO at the behavioral level. Our findings corroborate studies highlighting the hypothalamus and its subsequent cascades and regulatory mechanisms in violence [13,14,15,16,17]. Furthermore, our results are consistent with previous studies that focused on sexual violence against children and showed an activity reduction in the hypothalamus in pedophilic offenders [27] and acquired pedophilia and CSO after hypothalamic damages [18,19,20]. More precisely our findings possibly confirm our initial assumption that a reduced hypothalamic volume may indicate a reduced HPA axis activity. The deficit of glucocorticoids, induced by the hypofunction of this axis, may be related to aggression and CSO through epigenetic changes in the prefrontal cortex [31, 32]. In our sample Kruger et al. [37] found no cortisol reduction in CSO, but it is not unlikely that this may be due to methodological limitations, such as measuring at different times, despite cortisol levels fluctuating throughout the day.

Voxel-based morphometry studies are less sensitive for small structures, such as the hypothalamus [66]. For this reason, this analyses of this area [23,24,25,26] may not have yielded results. Additionally, except for Schiffer et al. [25], the field strengths of the MRIs were lower in the mentioned studies and the sample sizes were smaller.

No significant differences in non-offending people with pedophilia

In contrast to the results regarding CSO, we found no significant difference in exploratory comparisons of left or right hypothalamic volumes between non-offending pedophilic men and the control group. This was in line with our expectations. Differences remained non-significant even with correction for ICV and/or age. This suggests an unchanged hypothalamic macrostructure in non-offending people with pedophilia. Interestingly, there was no gradually progressive increase in hypothalamic volume between the groups (e.g. P + CSO < P-CSO < controls), not even descriptively. Thus, the P-CSO group does not appear to be an intermediate stage between pedophilic offenders and the control group. Contrary to our conclusions previous studies attributed structural changes of the hypothalamus or other brain regions to pedophilia [22, 23, 26]. It can be speculated that their results were influenced by sexual offenders.

General assessments of the observed hypothalamus volumes

The bilateral hypothalamus volumes measured in vivo with a total mean of 1543 mm³ (SD = 146.6 mm³) are slightly higher than the volumes previously measured with the same method (1427 mm³ to 1478 mm³) [52]. However, this was to be expected, as our sample consisted exclusively of men and a sexual dimorphism of the hypothalamus, postulated to be larger in men, has been shown before [67,68,69,70,71]. Furthermore, the correlations of hypothalamic volume with age and ICV are consistent with previous reports [66, 67, 72, 73]. The P + CSO group also had the lowest ICV. This finding has to be questioned in future studies by exploring several distinct brain regions involved in control of behaviour and sexual functioning.

Strengths and limitations

Probably one of the greatest strengths of this study is the distinction between offenders and non-offenders and thus also the fundamental distinction between offenders and people with pedophilia. A disadvantage is that the classification regarding the offender status was necessarily dependent on the self-reporting of the participants, which risks a probability of false statements in, theoretically, both directions. Attempts have been made to mitigate this by ensuring anonymity. Balancing too many or too few exclusion criteria is difficult as excluding individuals with specific diagnoses or medications increases homogeneity at the cost of generalizability. The distribution of lifetime mental and personality disorder diagnoses was significantly different between all groups and the hypothalamic volume may be affected by these. Violent crimes other than CSO, which were not exclusion criteria, may have influenced the results. Even though the sample size is large compared to previous studies in the subject area, it is not sufficient to calculate an equivalence test [64] between the hypothalamus volumes of pedophilic non-offenders and the control group. Since the study is designed cross-sectionally, no conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn. Unbalanced sample distribution among different locations and thus scanner models may have an effect on the GM-TPMs. The evaluated 3-Tesla MR images provided a strong basis for measurements of the brain structures, but a higher field strength would reduce the partial volume effect. Manual segmentation at submillimeter resolution is the most accurate method for this, which is unfortunately hardly feasible for higher case numbers such as in our study due to high time expenditure.

Our large-scale multicenter sample consisted of only men; therefore we can only draw conclusions about males. However, men are most relevant for the research on sexual violence against children, as they are the major group of offenders [74]. To answer whether the results are not only valid for people with pedophilia who committed CSO, but also for CSO in general, exploring non-pedophilic CSO subjects is needed. The structural analysis was based on group comparisons and cannot serve as a basis for a diagnostic criterion or to draw reliable conclusions about individuals.

To our knowledge, no other study has accurately investigated the structure of the hypothalamus in pedophilia with or without CSO. In addition to theoretical considerations about understanding of the neurobiological underpinnings of CSO in pedophilia, the study may add to additional impact in the future, as trait markers of risk factors for committing CSO are needed to stimulate early in the clinical course specific sexual therapeutic treatment which covers more than general psychotherapeutic intervention. The present results need to be replicated in further studies and assessed in relation to, for example, endocrinological and behavioral functions before practical implication can be raised. Implementing an equivalence test would be an important challenge for future studies to discuss the hypothesis of similar brain structures in pedophilic non-offenders and subjects of a control group. However, the required sample sizes for the populations of interest are difficult to realize. Further studies are warranted using functional brain imaging to investigate emotional processing according to the development of pedophilia or CSO over the lifespan. Another interesting question to examine is whether the hypothalamic volume reduction can also be found in a (large) non-pedophilic CSO group to clarify whether our results apply explicitly to the P + CSO group or are valid for CSO exclusively.

The topics of pedophilia and CSO are undeniably emotionally charged. Research such as ours not only provides a better understanding of neural mechanisms underlying pedophilia and CSO, but also contributes to education and public discussion about these matters, rather than reinforcing threats to child welfare with silence and stigmatization.

We like to imagine that those from the opposite political camp are more susceptible to misleading media content than those from our own side

Perceived Influence of Partisan News and Online News Participation: Third-person Effect, Hostile Media Phenomenon, and Cognitive Elaboration. Seungsu Lee and Kyungmo Kim. Communication Research, November 13, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502221127494

Abstract: This study suggests a unified framework to examine the third-person perception (TPP) in the context of partisan news use. By amalgamating social identity theories with the elaboration likelihood model or the heuristic-systematic model, Study 1 investigates the role of message features (source cues and content slant), targets (in-group vs. out-group), and audience characteristics (political identity and elaboration) on TPP. Two online experiments conducted in the US and South Korea show that differences between pro- and counter-attitudinal content are larger when the target is an out-group member. TPP is also amplified when audiences have high elaboration. Study 2 explores the interplay between TPP and the hostile media phenomenon (HMP) on news sharing and commenting online. The result reveals that TPP reduces news sharing/commenting intention by decreasing perceptions of news quality. In addition, HMP strengthens the indirect effect of TPP on news sharing/commenting for out-group members, but mitigates it for in-group members.

Rolf Degen summarizing... A vast majority of all people experience persuasion fatigue, the frustrating realization that others are too dumb to bow to the wisdom of their arguments

‘Persuasion Fatigue’ Is a Unique Form of Social Frustration: When people argue, a kind of frustration called persuasion fatigue can cloud their judgment and harm relationships. Nathan Ballantyne, Jared Celniker, Peter Ditto. Scientific American, November 14, 2022 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/persuasion-fatigue-is-a-unique-form-of-social-frustration

Excerpts, full text in the link above:

[...]
 

One common scene plays out as follows. You want to convince a friend or a family member of something you know they disagree with you about, so you share information and walk through your reasoning with them. They reject your case. Undaunted, you brush up on the issue and try again, optimistic that more facts will shift the other person’s thinking. You repeat yourself—maybe more loudly and slowly. But your audience remains unmoved.

How do you react when your powers of persuasion fail? You might dismiss the person who doesn’t heed your arguments as biased, dimwitted or otherwise out of touch with reality. You naturally feel your own logic is irresistible. You might decide to stop talking about that particular issue. You might even cut ties. Indeed, these unresolved debates can contribute to social estrangement and parent-child breakups.

The whole experience may feel like trying to guide someone on a journey when they refuse to follow. They drag their heels, wander off in the wrong direction and throw away the map you made for them. We have coined a term, persuasion fatigue, to describe this unique form of frustration.

In ongoing research, we are investigating the consequences of this experience. Our initial findings—still unpublished—suggest that persuasion fatigue is widespread. Of 600 people in the U.S. who participated in recent studies, 98 percent reported having experienced this fatigue, sparked by discussions of topics such as politics, religion and health. Our work also suggests that most people believe debates hit dead ends because the other person in the conversation was at fault.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and we’re hoping our data will begin to answer important questions about this phenomenon. But in the meantime, there’s a notable pattern emerging. Persuasion fatigue may make it harder to successfully navigate challenging conversations.

Past research demonstrates that feeling frustrated can make you more resistant to changing your mind. We think it may also diminish your ability to recognize why your arguments don’t succeed. Feeling burned-out could obscure whether your audience is open to persuasion and, if so, how to get your point across better. Persuasion fatigue may also explain why, when debates break down, people tend to blame their conversational opponent. As Mark Twain once wrote, “In all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.” In our findings thus far, for example, people generally reported three times as many reasons why others’ failings led to failed debates rather than their own shortcomings.

When we imagine how things could be, we imagine how things could be better, even though it's easier to come up with ways things could be worse

Mastroianni, Adam, and Ethan Ludwin-Peery. 2022. “Things Could Be Better.” PsyArXiv. November 14. doi:10.31234/osf.io/2uxwk

Abstract: Eight studies document what may be a fundamental and universal bias in human imagination: people think things could be better. When we ask people how things could be different, they imagine how things could be better (Study 1). The bias doesn't depend on the wording of the question (Studies 2 and 3). It arises in people's everyday thoughts (Study 4). It is unrelated to people's anxiety, depression, and neuroticism (Study 5). A sample of Polish people responding in English show the same bias (Study 6), as do a sample of Chinese people responding in Mandarin (Study 7). People imagine how things could be better even though it's easier to come up with ways things could be worse (Study 8). Overall, it seems, human imagination has a bias: when people imagine how things could be, they imagine how things could be better.

The bewildering, complex picture presented by human evolution in the Middle to Late Pleistocene should be seen as a feature, not a bug, reflecting evolutionary processes in all their messy glory

Evolution of Homo in the Middle and Late Pleistocene. Katerina Harvati, HugoReyes-Centeno. Journal of Human Evolution, Volume 173, December 2022, 103279. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2022.103279

Abstract: The Middle and Late Pleistocene is arguably the most interesting period in human evolution. This broad period witnessed the evolution of our own lineage, as well as that of our sister taxon, the Neanderthals, and related Denisovans. It is exceptionally rich in both fossil and archaeological remains, and uniquely benefits from insights gained through molecular approaches, such as paleogenetics and paleoproteomics, that are currently not widely applicable in earlier contexts. This wealth of information paints a highly complex picture, often described as ‘the Muddle in the Middle,’ defying the common adage that ‘more evidence is needed’ to resolve it. Here we review competing phylogenetic scenarios and the historical and theoretical developments that shaped our approaches to the fossil record, as well as some of the many remaining open questions associated with this period. We propose that advancing our understanding of this critical time requires more than the addition of data and will necessitate a major shift in our conceptual and theoretical framework.

Keywords: Homo heidelbergensisNeanderthalsModern human originsSpeciationHybridization

5. Conclusions

While the issues presented and discussed here do not represent the full extent of questions related to human evolution in the Middle to Late Pleistocene, this brief review has shown that, although the human fossil record of Middle Pleistocene Homo is significantly more abundant than it was half a century ago and innovative methodologies have greatly expanded our ability to study it, the greatest gains in our understanding are likely to result from a theoretical and conceptual shift toward more complex and nuanced evolutionary concepts for both species and speciation. Additional challenges include a better understanding of the chronological and paleoenvironmental framework of the Middle to Late Pleistocene, as well as the lack of integrative, synthetic study of the fossil record in its entirety. We expect new fieldwork and fossil discoveries to continue to bring novel insights, and for genomic and paleoproteomic approaches to play a central role in deciphering the record, especially if they can be developed to be applicable in lower latitude and earlier contexts. Gene annotation methods that link genotypes and phenotypes and their modularity in diverse environmental contexts (Gokhman et al., 2017; Brand et al., 2022), as well as evolutionary modeling approaches, will be particularly useful in the absence of a more complete fossil record. However, the envisioned integrative approach will only be possible through broad sharing of fossil data, something which is still rare in paleoanthropology, even after the development and widespread use of scan data, which can be shared digitally much more efficiently among researchers, more than two decades ago (Weber, 2001; Gibbons, 2002; Tattersall and Schwartz, 2002).

In closing, we emphasize that the bewildering, complex picture presented by human evolution in the Middle to Late Pleistocene should be seen as a feature, not a bug, reflecting evolutionary processes in all their messy glory. We look forward to the next unexpected discovery!