Where Are the Workers? From Great Resignation to Quiet Quitting

Where Are the Workers? From Great Resignation to Quiet Quitting. Dain Lee, Jinhyeok Park & Yongseok Shin. NBER Working Paper 30833. January 2023. DOI 10.3386/w30833

Abstract: To better understand the tight post-pandemic labor market in the US, we decompose the decline in aggregate hours worked into the extensive (fewer people working) and the intensive margin changes (workers working fewer hours). Although the pre-existing trend of lower labor force participation especially by young men without a bachelor's degree accounts for some of the decline in aggregate hours, the intensive margin accounts for more than half of the decline between 2019 and 2022. The decline in hours among workers was larger for men than women. Among men, the decline was larger for those with a bachelor's degree than those with less education, for prime-age workers than older workers, and also for those who already worked long hours and had high earnings. Workers' hours reduction can explain why the labor market is even tighter than what is expected at the current levels of unemployment and labor force participation.

Why do humans make so many laws? On the origin of laws by natural selection.

On the origin of laws by natural selection. Peter De Scioli. Evolution and Human Behavior, January 9 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2023.01.004

Abstract: Humans are lawmakers like we are toolmakers. Why do humans make so many laws? Here we examine the structure of laws to look for clues about how humans use them in evolutionary competition. We will see that laws are messages with a distinct combination of ideas. Laws are similar to threats but critical differences show that they have a different function. Instead, the structure of laws matches moral rules, revealing that laws derive from moral judgment. Moral judgment evolved as a strategy for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action—rather than by hierarchy or faction. For this purpose, humans can create endless laws to govern nearly any action. However, as prolific lawmakers, humans produce a confusion of contradictory laws, giving rise to a perpetual battle to control the laws. To illustrate, we visit some of the major conflicts over laws of violence, property, sex, faction, and power.

Introduction

Let us ponder down a path from the evolution of the human mind all the way to laws, governments, and societies. On such a long trek, we may become lost and separated at times but remember we are here to enjoy the views and to invigorate ourselves by struggling with immense perplexities. If we discover anything of use, it will be more than we could have hoped.

We will travel light to keep a brisk pace and focus on ideas and arguments. Set aside for a moment the heavy jargon and weighty traditions that have amassed on these subjects. Rest assured, we will return at the end to review numerous literatures under Notes. The Notes follow the sections of the article and review literature on each topic in order.

Modern societies depend on governments. Governments are made of laws. Therefore, if we can understand how and why an animal, Homo sapiens, makes so many laws about so many things, we will have come a long way toward our destination.

Partisanship on Social Media: In-Party Love Among American Politicians, Greater Engagement with Out-Party Hate Among Ordinary Users

Partisanship on Social Media: In-Party Love Among American Politicians, Greater Engagement with Out-Party Hate Among Ordinary Users. Xudong Yu, Magdalena Wojcieszak & Andreu Casas. Political Behavior, Jan 8 2023. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-022-09850-x

Abstract: Americans view their in-party members positively and out-party members negatively. It remains unclear, however, whether in-party affinity (i.e., positive partisanship) or out-party animosity (i.e., negative partisanship) more strongly influences political attitudes and behaviors. Unlike past work, which relies on survey self-reports or experimental designs among ordinary citizens, this pre-registered project examines actual social media expressions of an exhaustive list of American politicians as well as citizens’ engagement with these posts. Relying on 1,195,844 tweets sent by 564 political elites (i.e., members of US House and Senate, Presidential and Vice-Presidential nominees from 2000 to 2020, and members of the Trump Cabinet) and machine learning to reliably classify the tone of the tweets, we show that elite expressions online are driven by positive partisanship more than negative partisanship. Although politicians post many tweets negative toward the out-party, they post more tweets positive toward their in-party. However, more ideologically extreme politicians and those in the opposition (i.e., the Democrats) are more negative toward the out-party than those ideologically moderate and whose party is in power. Furthermore, examining how Twitter users react to these posts, we find that negative partisanship plays a greater role in online engagement: users are more likely to like and share politicians’ tweets negative toward the out-party than tweets positive toward the in-party. This project has important theoretical and democratic implications, and extends the use of trace data and computational methods in political behavior.

Discussion

Our project examined social media expressions of American politicians as well as users’ engagement with these tweets to offer comprehensive evidence on the effects of positive and negative partisanship on elites and citizens. We offer three noteworthy findings. First, American politicians are more likely to express support toward their own party than to speak out against the opponents, indicating that the overall charge of partisanship for these elites is positive when they discuss politics on social media. This robust pattern emerges when comparing the total number of tweets praising the in-party with that of tweets criticizing the out-party and also calculating the proportion of elite accounts/elites that post more tweets expressing in-party favorability than those expressing out-party negativity. Although many scholars observe that negative partisanship is on the rise in the US (e.g., Abramowitz & Webster, 2016; Iyengar et al., 2012), our evidence suggests that positive partisanship still dominates political expressions of American politicians on Twitter, so—at least in this context—our findings are more optimistic than the general observations. However, we note that a large share of elite tweets attacks the opposition, an issue we address in more detail below. Because we analyzed an exhaustive set of 564 political elites, identified all their tweets mentioning the in-party and the out-party, and employed validated classifiers to analyze those tweets, we are confident that our results are a robust and accurate representation of political expressions by American politicians on Twitter.

Second, in an exception to this general pattern, we find that politicians who are ideologically more extreme are more likely to express negative partisanship than their more moderate counterparts: the former group is most motivated to attack the out-party. This largely holds for two measures of extremity and is consistent with prior literature that ideological polarization contributes to negative feelings toward the opposition (Abramowitz & Webster, 2018; Webster & Abramowitz, 2017). Combined with the fact that negative partisanship does not trail by a large margin, it implies that if the ideological division between the two parties keeps widening, negative partisanship may increase and may outstrip positive partisanship in elite opinion expressions. Moreover, in line with previous evidence that threats to party identity strengthen negative partisanship (Amira et al., 2021), members of the party in the opposition—i.e., Democrats—show greater negative partisanship than those of the ruling party and they become less negative toward the out-party after winning the House back in the 2018 midterm election. This finding suggests that negative partisanship may be used by the opposition as a tool to unite the party and against the common enemy (Bankert, 2022), yet more research on the temporal variations in and factors influencing positive and negative partisanship among politicians is needed to shed more light on this consequential finding.

Third, despite the overall dominance of positive partisanship among the elites, it is negative partisanship that drives ordinary citizens’ liking and sharing of elite messages. Tweets that attack the out-party receive more likes and retweets than those that favor the in-party. Although this contradicts previous finding that citizens penalize politicians for attacking the out-party (Costa, 2021), the inconsistency could be due to different methodologies and different demographics of the general public vs. (politically active) Twitter users. That said, we suspect our finding is not constrained to Twitter. Extensive work has established that “negativity bias” holds across studies, cultures, samples, and in divergent contexts (e.g., Ito et al., 1998; Soroka et al., 2019; Trussler & Soroka, 2014). More specific to our work, although the most politically active Twitter users follow in-party accounts, are more sorted, and have colder feelings toward the out-party than average Twitter users (Pew, 2019a), which could partly explain our finding, the very same characteristics apply to politically active and interested citizens in general (Levendusky, 2009), whether on Twitter or not. Lastly, a recent study (Rathje et al., 2021) found similar patterns across Twitter and Facebook, suggesting that greater engagement with out-party animosity is not unique to Twitter users.

When interpreting the results, several limitations need to be noted. First, as the data were collected before the 2020 election, it is unclear if these patterns would emerge after Joe Biden became the president. It is possible that Twitter suspending the account of Donald Trump and other events may have changed the nature of elite expressions. Second, as the American political system, media system, and party structures are unique, the findings of our study should not be generalized to other countries. More international and comparative research should be done to test whether politicians and citizens in different countries behave similarly or differently.

Third, we focus on tweets that explicitly mention the two parties and key politicians but do not account for policies, media organizations, or other factors associated with a party. It is very challenging to construct a comprehensive and unbiased list of political topics discussed from 2016 to 2020, and assessing how politicians talk about policies and other things is an important task for future work.

Fourth, we do not know the partisan affiliations of those users who engaged with elite tweets. We are interested in the more foundational evidence about elite expressions and citizen engagement; the questions surrounding political homophily are secondary and cannot be tested in our data. We speculate that users are more likely to engage with messages attacking the out-party because they primarily follow and interact with likeminded others (e.g., Eady et al., 2019; Mosleh et al., 2021; Wojcieszak et al., 2022). But regardless of this ideological consistency, our evidence shows that negativity toward the out-party, per se, is engaging and gets more attention (see also Rathje et al., 2021). In short, although the specific mechanisms behind these engagements cannot be disentangled in our data, we suspect it is the mere negativity combined with ideological consistency. It is likely that tweets negative toward the out-party infuriate out-party members, yet there are no reasons for those users to like and share these tweets (i.e., the behaviors we examined). Future work should explore whether out-party members are activated by such posts and fight back by commenting and quote tweeting.

Despite these limitations, our findings have important implications for American politics. To begin with, although elite expressions are mainly positive, the difference between the strength of positive and negative partisanship is not substantial. Some of the most powerful and most widely followed politicians, such as Trump and Biden, are also the ones who are most negative toward the out-party. Donald Trump post 440% (162 vs. 30) and Joe Biden post 294% (563 vs. 143) more tweets negative toward the out-party than tweets positive toward the in-party, respectively. Therefore, out-party negativity may actually reach a larger audience than in-party positivity. If we simply use the number of followers as a rough indicator of readership (e.g., if a politician has one million followers and they post two out-party attacks, then we assume that these tweets are read two million times), overall, tweets attacking the out-party are read 27% more than tweets praising the in-party, although the former is outnumbered by the latter.Footnote20

As importantly, negative partisanship may be amplified through citizen-elite interactions and through other means of communication. In our data, citizens reward politicians for attacking the opposition with more likes and shares, encouraging politicians to express out-party hostility more fiercely; and more exposure to elite tweets attacking the out-party may, in turn, generate greater citizen engagement and enhance out-party hostility among citizens. In fact, tweets sent by extreme in-party elites—who are most negative toward the out-party—are also more likely to be shared (Wojcieszak et al., 2022). Other work also shows that news organizations are more likely to cover extreme politicians than moderate politicians (Wagner & Gruszczynski, 2018). This amplification, by social media users, journalists, and news organizations, may further increase the general perception that American elites are hostile toward the other side. Questions as to whether users’ preferences for out-party negativity on social media are further exacerbated by Twitter’s algorithmFootnote21 or whether elite communication as mediated through mainstream media is more or less negative compared to social media are important directions for future work.

These two factors—the most powerful politicians are very negative toward the out-party and elite negative partisanship may be amplified by users and media—may ultimately create “illusion of polarization” in that citizens encounter a greater share of negative than positive elite information and expressions. Again, however, our over-time evidence systematically shows that this is an illusion, in that most elites, most of the time, post information and opinions that are not negative towards their political opponents. After accounting for the number of followers, the modal tone of the political elites is positive—politicians who mostly post positive tweets, as a whole, have 58% more followers than politicians who are mainly negative. Simply, the positive majority is not as influential and popular as the negative minority (e.g., an average negative politician has 43% more followers than an average positive politician).

We hope these findings inspire further research on the political use of social media, research that investigates the dynamics between politicians, media, and citizens using actual behavioral data and ideally, across different platforms. Only then will we be able to have a complete overview of the social media ecosystem, correctly identify problems, and come up with solutions.

The idea of pay transparency is to give workers the ability to renegotiate away pay discrepancies, but it actually shifts the bargaining power from the workers to the employer, naking wages more equal but lower

Pay-transparency laws do not work as advertised. The Economist, Jan 5 2023. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/05/pay-transparency-laws-do-not-work-as-advertised

Which is a pity, as California and Washington have just adopted them

Labour advocates champion pay-transparency laws on the grounds that they will narrow pay disparities. But research suggests that this is achieved not by boosting the wages of lower-paid workers but by curbing the wages of higher-paid ones. A forthcoming paper by economists at the University of Toronto and Princeton University estimates that Canadian salary-disclosure laws implemented between 1996 and 2016 narrowed the gender pay gap of university professors by 20-30%. But there is also evidence that they lower salaries, on average. Another paper by professors at Chapel Hill, Cornell and Columbia University found that a Danish pay-transparency law adopted in 2006 shrank the gender pay gap by 13%, but only because it curbed the wages of male employees. Studies of Britain’s gender-pay-gap law, which was implemented in 2018, have reached similar conclusions.

Another misconception about pay-transparency laws is that they strengthen the bargaining power of workers. A recent paper by Zoe Cullen of Harvard Business School and Bobby Pakzad-Hurson of Brown University analysed the effects of 13 state laws passed between 2004 and 2016 that were designed to protect the right of workers to ask about the salaries of their co-workers. The authors found that the laws were associated with a 2% drop in wages, an outcome which the authors attribute to reduced bargaining power. “Although the idea of pay transparency is to give workers the ability to renegotiate away pay discrepancies, it actually shifts the bargaining power from the workers to the employer,” says Mr Pakzad-Hurson. “So wages are more equal,” explains Ms Cullen, “but they’re also lower.”

Rolf Degen summarizing... Widely touted psychology study, suggesting, in essence, that the rich are jerks, bites the dust in another, sophisticated replication failure

Jung, M. H., Smeets, P., Stoop, J., & Vosgerau, J. (2023). Social status and unethical behavior: Two replications of the field studies in Piff et al. (2012). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Jan 2023. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001333

Abstract: Prominent social psychologists and major media outlets have put forward the notion that people of high socioeconomic status (SES) are more selfish and behave more unethically than people of low SES. In contrast, other research in economics and sociology has hypothesized and found a positive relationship between SES and prosocial and ethical behavior. We review the empirical evidence for these contradictory findings and conduct two direct, well-powered, and preregistered replications of the field studies by Piff and colleagues (2012) to test the relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior. Unlike the original findings, we find no evidence of a positive relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior in the two field replication studies.

People are more strongly persuaded by self-generated arguments than by arguments of others, particularly if they find argument generation easy

Persuasive Benefits of Self-Generated Arguments: Moderation and Mechanism. Mengran Xu, Duane T. Wegener. Social Psychological and Personality Science, January 6, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221146612

Abstract: We aimed to derive a more systematic understanding of the persuasive advantages of self- versus other-generated arguments. Through three initial data collections (Ntotal = 492) and another two large preregistered studies (Ns = 528 and 496), we found that when people experienced a low level of difficulty (measured or manipulated) generating the arguments, self-generated arguments were more persuasive than other-generated arguments. However, when people experienced a high level of difficulty (measured or manipulated), the typical self-persuasion advantage was reduced significantly. Factor analyses identified perceptions of argument quality as a plausible and replicated mediator of the persuasive advantage of self-generated over other-generated arguments.

General Discussion

Through three initial data collections, a large preregistered replication measuring generation difficulty, and a preregistered study manipulating generation difficulty, we found that difficulty in generating the arguments reduced the self-persuasion advantage. To better understand reasons self-generated arguments might be more persuasive (when generation is easy), we examined an array of relevant perceptions of the arguments and of the process of generating (vs. receiving) them. Consistently across studies, when the difficulty of argument generation/reception was not particularly high, self-generated arguments were viewed as stronger, which then also uniquely predicted persuasion by those arguments. There was also some potential additional role for perceptions of knowledge fit.

Theoretical Implications

The current work offers several theoretical insights. First, it helps one better understand the long-standing effects of self-generated arguments. Researchers had observed that the self-persuasion advantage did not always happen, and some had speculated that difficulty in argument generation might play a role (e.g., Mann, 1967). Some prior work examined the meta-cognitive consequences of ease of generation (e.g., Müller et al., 2017; Wänke et al., 1997) without directly comparing reactions to the same self-generated and other-generated arguments or examining the perceptions of the arguments potentially responsible for such effects. Identifying difficulty as a moderator is important, as it also speaks to reasons why cognitive role-playing might sometimes be less effective than emotional role-playing (Mann, 1967). Participants might have had an easier time generating arguments for topics used in emotional role-playing (e.g., quitting smoking) than for topics used in the research on cognitive role-playing (e.g., justifying the number of commercial movie theaters that will be in business 3 years from now).

Traditional research mostly offered speculations on why active argument generation is more effective than passive argument reception. The current work identified perceived argument quality as a primary factor contributing to self-persuasion, with knowledge fit possibly being a secondary contributor. By using a wide spectrum of argument quality, novelty, and liking measures closely tied to perceptions of the arguments, we conceptually replicated previous results and buttressed previous arguments that perceptions of overall argument quality were at least partly responsible for persuasive advantages of self-generated over other-generated arguments (cf. Greenwald & Albert, 1968), even when controlling for knowledge fit (cf. Baldwin et al., 2013).

It is worth noting that Baldwin et al. (2013) argued that argument convincingness came from the extent to which the arguments match the participants’ own concerns on the issue. In the current work, this sense of match versus mismatch might have been captured to some degree by the knowledge fit factor. When constraining our EFA models to two factors, knowledge fit did load with the perceptions of argument quality. However, when allowing for a three-factor solution, knowledge fit loaded separately, and it was the argument quality perceptions that served as the primary mechanism responsible for self-generation effects. However, it remains possible that our measures of knowledge fit reflected more of a cognitive fit (i.e., the way the person thinks about the issue) than in the Baldwin et al. (2013) research (i.e., addressing the person’s concerns on the issue). To the extent that the various perceptions of knowledge fit play a role, however, the current work suggests that their contributions might rely on their connections to perceptions of the overall argument quality.

Limitations and Future Directions

All studies showed the same difficulty by generation interaction pattern, but there was also a consistent pattern across all studies, such that participants with relatively negative attitudes at Time 1 (i.e., those who generated counter-attitudinal arguments) showed a more pronounced difficulty by generation interaction compared with those with relatively positive initial attitudes. However, favorability of initial attitudes did not moderate the difficulty by generation patterns on the mediators. This consistent pattern is not what one would predict based on Briñol et al. (2012). However, the attitudes in the current research were likely quite different from those in Briñol et al. (2012). Briñol et al. (2012) used a familiar topic (tuition increase/decrease) for which people likely had rather strong, well-formed attitudes. In contrast, the topic we chose for our studies was more in line with the classic self-persuasion literature—something quite novel for participants. When participants were initially unfavorable toward the disappearance of paper money, this might simply reflect that they had more room to be convinced otherwise (even with the same perceptions of the mediators). This might have allowed participants with less favorable attitudes to show the most pronounced two-way interaction between difficulty and generation conditions, whereas more well-formed attitudes might have reduced self-persuasion. It would be worthwhile for future work to explore the potential moderators of when generating arguments for a somewhat counter-attitudinal position results in more versus less impact of the generated arguments.

In addition, the current difficulty moderation might relate to research on mere thought effects. Although the traditional effect of mere thought was to polarize attitudes, moderation can occur when people are required to think longer and experience more difficulty in generating new supportive thoughts, creating less confidence in those thoughts and less persuasion by them (Clarkson et al., 2011; cf. Tormala et al., 2007). Because it seemed odd to consider generation difficulty as influencing confidence in thoughts toward other-generated arguments, we did not assess confidence in thoughts. However, future research could have participants generate cognitive responses to the arguments and assess confidence in those thoughts. This could raise a host of intriguing questions, such as whether thought confidence is necessary for the effects of perceived argument quality.

When Psychotherapy Fails (which happens regularly)

When Psychotherapy Fails. Brechje Dandachi-FitzGerald, Henry Otgaar & Harald Merckelbach. Chapter in Toward a Science of Clinical Psychology pp 301–319. January 1 2023. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-14332-8_16

Abstract: Psychotherapy aims to make patients better. As is true for any type of treatment, psychotherapy regularly fails to achieve this goal. Therapeutic failures may take many forms, and the list of possible reasons for failure is similarly extensive. As we will explain in this chapter, there is no conclusive definition of psychotherapeutic failure. Also, failures are sometimes inevitable and thus, cannot always be blamed on the therapist. This chapter is about failures, mistakes, adverse events, and disappointing outcomes during or after psychotherapy. Obviously, these are uncomfortable topics, as it is far more glorious to discuss treatment successes. Still, much can be done about psychotherapeutic failures, but remedies start with acknowledging that harmful therapy effects and therapeutic failures do exist and are important research subjects in their own right.

People who positively judge positive emotions experience better psychological health; those who negatively judge negative emotions experience worse psychological health

Willroth, Emily C., Gerald Young, Maya Tamir, and Iris Mauss. 2023. “Judging Emotions as Good or Bad: Individual Differences and Associations with Psychological Health.” PsyArXiv. January 6. doi:10.31234/osf.io/3ds84

Abstract: People differ in their initial emotional responses to events, and we are beginning to understand these responses and their pervasive implications for psychological health. However, people also differ in how they think about and react to their initial emotions (i.e., emotion judgments). In turn, how people judge their emotions – as predominantly positive or negative – may have crucial implications for psychological health. Across five MTurk and undergraduate samples collected between 2017 and 2022 (total N=1,647), we investigated the nature of habitual emotion judgments (Aim 1) and their associations with psychological health (Aim 2). In Aim 1, we found four distinct habitual emotion judgments that differ according to the valence of the judgment (positive or negative) and the valence of the emotion being judged (positive or negative). Individual differences in habitual emotion judgments were moderately stable across time and were associated with, but not redundant with, conceptually related constructs (e.g., affect valuation, emotion preferences, stress mindsets, meta emotions) and broader traits (i.e., extraversion, neuroticism, trait emotions). In Aim 2, positive judgments of positive emotions were uniquely associated with better psychological health and negative judgments of negative emotions were uniquely associated with worse psychological health concurrently and prospectively, above and beyond the other types of emotion judgments, and above and beyond conceptually related constructs and broader traits. This research gives insight into how people judge their emotions, how these judgments relate to other emotion-related constructs, and their implications for psychological health.

Individuals’ beliefs that they can infer trust and trustworthiness from appearance are unfounded

Attributions of Trust and Trustworthiness. Rick K. Wilson & Catherine C. Eckel. Political Behavior, Jan 5 2023. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-022-09855-6

Abstract: This study examines whether individuals can accurately predict trust and trustworthiness in others based on their appearance. Using photos and decisions from previous experimental trust games, subjects were asked to view the photos and guess the levels of trust and trustworthiness of the individuals depicted. The results show that subjects had little ability to accurately guess the trust and trustworthiness behavior of others. There is significant heterogeneity in the accuracy of guesses, and errors in guesses are systematically related to the observable characteristics of the photos. Subjects’ guesses appear to be influenced by stereotypes based on the features seen in the photos, such as gender, skin color, or attractiveness. These findings suggest that individuals’ beliefs that they can infer trust and trustworthiness from appearance are unfounded, and that efforts to reduce the impact of stereotypes on inferred trustworthiness may improve the efficiency of trust-based interactions.

Motivations to reciprocate cooperation and punish defection are calibrated by estimates of how easily others can switch partners

Motivations to reciprocate cooperation and punish defection are calibrated by estimates of how easily others can switch partners. Sakura Arai, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides. PLoS One, April 19, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267153

Abstract: Evolutionary models of dyadic cooperation demonstrate that selection favors different strategies for reciprocity depending on opportunities to choose alternative partners. We propose that selection has favored mechanisms that estimate the extent to which others can switch partners and calibrate motivations to reciprocate and punish accordingly. These estimates should reflect default assumptions about relational mobility: the probability that individuals in one’s social world will have the opportunity to form relationships with new partners. This prior probability can be updated by cues present in the immediate situation one is facing. The resulting estimate of a partner’s outside options should serve as input to motivational systems regulating reciprocity: Higher estimates should down-regulate the use of sanctions to prevent defection by a current partner, and up-regulate efforts to attract better cooperative partners by curating one’s own reputation and monitoring that of others. We tested this hypothesis using a Trust Game with Punishment (TGP), which provides continuous measures of reciprocity, defection, and punishment in response to defection. We measured each participant’s perception of relational mobility in their real-world social ecology and experimentally varied a cue to partner switching. Moreover, the study was conducted in the US (n = 519) and Japan (n = 520): societies that are high versus low in relational mobility. Across conditions and societies, higher perceptions of relational mobility were associated with increased reciprocity and decreased punishment: i.e., those who thought that others have many opportunities to find new partners reciprocated more and punished less. The situational cue to partner switching was detected, but relational mobility in one’s real social world regulated motivations to reciprocate and punish, even in the experimental setting. The current research provides evidence that motivational systems are designed to estimate varying degrees of partner choice in one’s social ecology and regulate reciprocal behaviors accordingly.

4 Discussion

4.1 Evidence that motivational systems are designed for social ecologies with varying levels of partner choice

Ancestral variation in the availability of cooperative partners would have favored the evolution of motivational systems that treat partner choice as a continuous variable. Motivations to keep valuable cooperative partners and abandon unrewarding ones should be up-regulated in response to the perception that others can easily switch partners.

Here we tested the hypothesis that an individual’s motivations to reciprocate and punish are calibrated by that person’s estimate of the degree to which others in their local social ecology can exercise partner choice. This estimate is captured by measures of relational mobility [50]. The higher an individual’s relational mobility score, the more opportunities they believe others have to leave unsatisfying relationships for better ones.

We assessed motivations to trust, reciprocate, defect, punish, and switch partners by allowing people to cooperate for mutual benefit with a new individual. The results showed that motivations to reciprocate and punish tracked participants’ perceptions of relational mobility. The more partner choice they thought others in their social ecology could exercise, the more they reciprocated their partner’s trust and the less they paid to punish their partner—even when that partner had defected.

Providing incentives for desirable partners to stay in the relationship is the proposed function of these motivational calibrations. If that is correct, then people who have the opportunity to switch partners will be more likely to stay with a partner who reciprocates their trust and more likely to leave one who punishes them. After two rounds, half the participants were asked if they wanted to keep their current partner or switch to someone new. Holding all else equal, having been defected on more than quadrupled the odds that they wanted to switch and having been punished tripled the odds they would choose to leave. These were the two biggest independent predictors of switching decisions. The desire to leave a partner who punished was especially strong for participants who returned 40%—a response that creates a positive payoff for both parties that is almost equal. These individuals were almost 10 times more likely to want a new partner.

4.1.1 Are priors about social ecology updated by information about the situation or the person?

Perceptions of relational mobility are based on a huge database of experiences in a local social ecology—sometimes a lifetime’s worth. For this reason, we proposed that relational mobility serves as an estimate of the prior probability that others in one’s social ecology can exercise partner choice. It is a best guess before you learn what your partner is like—the situation participants faced in round 1.

If relational mobility in your social ecology is used to estimate a partner’s outside options when you know nothing else about that person, then its effect on cooperative motivations should be reduced (or eliminated) by data about that specific person’s value as a cooperative partner—to yourself and others. The evidence indicates that participants in both societies updated this prior based on first-hand knowledge of their partner’s willingness to cooperate and reluctance to punish. Once participants had experienced how their partner behaved in round 1, relational mobility no longer predicted how much they trusted, reciprocated, or punished in round 2, in either the US or Japan. The behavior of the sham partner in round 1 (and, of course, in round 2) did predict their responses. The only behavior that relational mobility continued to influence was antisocial punishment. The belief others in your social ecology can easily switch partners tempered—but did not eliminate—antisocial punishment. (See S5 Appendix.)

The results suggest that estimates of partner choice based on social ecology are updated based on properties of the person with whom one is interacting. But are these estimates updated in response to cues about a temporary situation one is facing—ones unrelated to the partner’s value as a cooperator? It is not clear that they should be.

Delton et al. [35] examined the evolution of motivations to cooperate in Bayesian agents who knew the base rate of one-shot interactions in their population and updated this prior based on a cue about the immediate situation they were facing. The cue reflected the probability that they would never interact again with their current partner. These Bayesian agents evolved a strong disposition to cooperate even when they rationally believed the interaction was one-shot. Selection favored agents who behaved as if they would repeatedly interact with their current partner even when they knew this was unlikely. Agent-based models also show that meeting a new individual once was a good cue that you will meet them again in ancestral social ecologies [64]. Every participant in our study was exposed to this ancestrally-reliable cue to a shadow of the future: They interacted with their partner for two rounds.

We did, however, provide a verbal cue relevant to partner choice in the temporary situation that they were facing. Half the participants were told they would be interacting with the same partner in every round (i.e., they were engaged in a repeated interaction with this person). The other half were told they could change partners after two rounds (i.e., their current partner can refuse to interact with them repeatedly). If this verbal cue is used to (temporarily) update their prior probability that a newly encountered person can exercise partner choice, their motivations to cooperate or punish might shift in response.

There was little evidence that participants in round 1 used this situational cue to update a prior that was based on their social ecology. Being told whether they would have the opportunity to switch partners had no effect on how much participants punished defections by their partner: Higher relational mobility in their local social ecology predicted less punishment, regardless of condition or society. The cue did have an effect on how much American participants reciprocated their partner’s trust, however. Although average levels of reciprocation were similar in both conditions, higher relational mobility predicted more reciprocation when Americans were told they and their partner could part ways after two rounds, but not when they were told that all of their interactions would be with the same partner.

Japanese participants did not respond to this cue at all: Their estimates of relational mobility predicted more reciprocation (and less punishment) to the same extent in both conditions. That is, there was no evidence that people in Japan updated their prior hypothesis about relational mobility based on the situational cue we provided. If they did, the change was too small to influence their willingness to reciprocate or punish.

If this result generalizes to other cues about a temporary situation, it suggests that the benefits of opportunistic behavior in the short term were generally outweighed by the risk of losing a valuable, long-term cooperative partner.

4.2 What is the function of punishment in dyadic reciprocal cooperation?

What, if anything, is the adaptive function of motivations to pay a cost to punish a defecting partner? This was not a rare response: Of participants who were trusters in round 1, 44% punished when the responder defected. It is usually assumed that the function of punishing defectors is to elicit more cooperation from them in the future—especially when they do not have the option to change partners.

People who believe others in their social ecology have fewer options to switch partners did pay more to punish defectors: Low relational mobility scores predicted paying more to punish. But there was no evidence that punishment succeeded in eliciting greater cooperation from participants. Quite the contrary: Participants who were punished for returning 0–40% in round 1 did not respond by sending more points as truster in round 2. Indeed, they returned fewer points as truster (β = -.22, p = .0002), and this effect was particularly pronounced for those who had provided a positive payoff by returning 40% in round 1, β = -.41, p = .0001 (vs. β = -.12, p = .099 for those who provided a negative payoff in round 1; see S5 Appendix). Moreover, those who were punished in round 1 were more likely to retaliate by punishing their partner in round 2 (S5 Appendix; for similar results, see [65, 66]).

Not only did punishment fail to elicit more cooperation from punished partners, but it also drove them away. When partner switching was possible, having been punished was one of the biggest independent predictors of wanting to change partners. Driving away defectors might be a function of punishment, of course—when they were not punished, ~70% of people who returned 0–40% wanted to remain with their accommodating partner (~68% of those who returned 0–30%; ~71% of those returning 40%). Although participants in this study could prevent future interactions at lower cost by simply deciding to switch after round 2, avoiding unrewarding partners may be more difficult in real life, especially when they want to continue cooperating with you.

Krasnow et al. [57] suggest that punishing defection signals a willingness to continue cooperating with your current partner, but on more favorable terms. Using a paradigm similar to the TGP, they found that participants who punished a defecting partner in the first round were 11 times more likely to cooperate than defect in the second one (switching was not an option). This pattern was not apparent in our study: Participants who punished a defecting partner did not return more in round 2 than those who did not (39.28% vs. 35.18%, t (226.99) = 1.41, p = .160), and they were not more likely to want to remain with their partner—indeed, the more points participants paid to punish the partner, the more—although slightly—they wanted to switch (OR = 1.02; 95% CI = [1.01, 1.03]). (Note, however, that a participant’s decision to stay did not ensure a continuing interaction in our study; the partner also had the option to leave, and punished ones were likely to do so.)

Our results showing that retaliatory punishment was common—~45% of those who were punished in round 1 retaliated in round 2—suggest an alternative explanation. In Krasnow et al. [57], participants who punished defectors in round 1 may have cooperated in round 2 to avoid (very costly) retaliatory punishment by their partner. Those who did not punish partners who succumbed to the temptation to cheat in round 1 may have assumed their partner would “reciprocate” by not punishing when them when they did the same in round 2.

Motivations to punish did not reflect the participant’s own commitment to stay in the relationship, but they were up-regulated by estimates that partners might have few outside options: Lower relational mobility in one’s social ecology did predict amount paid to punish defectors. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that motivations to punish evolved to deter bad treatment in the future by partners who do not seem to value your welfare [67]. Defecting now may be a reliable cue that this partner does not value your welfare sufficiently, and punishment was overwhelmingly directed at defectors. In ancestral social ecologies, partners who part ways now may nevertheless have to cooperate again in the future [64, 67, 68]. Punishment may have evolved as a warning, to deter bad treatment by defectors who may darken your door in the future.

4.3 Micro and macro effects of social ecology

We measured two variables regarding participants’ real-life social ecology of partner choice. First, we measured participants’ perceptions of their partner choice ecology with the relational mobility scale [50]. Second, we recruited participants from two societies in which average relational mobility scores are typically high (US) versus low (Japan). This lets us see whether behavior at the individual level scales up to explain differences between nations.

Within each society, the motivations of individuals were calibrated by their perceptions of other people’s relational mobility: the number of opportunities they believe that others have to form new relationships. Moreover, the pattern of calibration was universal: Within each society, higher relational mobility scores predicted more reciprocation and less punishment. Individual-level effects tracked individual perceptions of the local social ecology.

What about group-level differences? The concept of relational mobility was built from Yamagishi’s seminal work on general trust: a cognitive bias to assume that newly encountered people will treat you with benevolence rather than exploitation [69, 70]. General trust varies across nations; scores on the standard survey measure are higher in the US than Japan, for example. Where general trust is higher, people are more willing to risk cooperating with strangers who could, if untrustworthy, profit at their expense. The benefit of trusting strangers is that it allows people to discover better cooperative partners, giving them more outside options. The resulting increase relational mobility then tempers the risk of trusting strangers: The threat that a good partner will leave for a better outside option can deter exploitive behavior and increase benevolence.

With this in mind, we compared average behavior in the US and Japan. As in other studies, perceptions of relational mobility were higher in the US than Japan (RM others: 4.12 vs. 3.57, t (1028.2) = 13.76, p = 10−16; RM self: 4.20 vs. 3.37, t (1030.8) = 18.71, p = 10−16). That is, the average American believes others have more outside options than the average person from Japan does. Moreover, as Yamagishi’s view of general trust predicts, when participants had no prior experiences with their partners, American trusters risked more points on a stranger than Japanese participants did (Trust: 59 vs. 50.6, t (502.55) = 2.9, p = .004). And trusting strangers usually paid off: Most responders delivered a positive payoff in both societies (US 67%, JP 76%).

Did the perception that others have more outside options lead the average American to reciprocate more and punish less than the average person from Japan? No. Not only did Americans return less, on average, than Japanese participants, but more of them exploited their partner’s trust by delivering a negative payoff (US 33% vs. JP 24%). Americans were also more punitive, not less: They paid more to punish their partners, even when controlling for all other factors (including whether their partner defected). And, despite less reciprocation and more punishment at the macro-level, Americans were more likely to stay with their partner than Japanese participants (all else equal).

Within each society, individual differences in reciprocation and punishment were associated with individual differences in perceptions of relational mobility, but this did not translate into group-level differences between the US and Japan. Assuming that individual differences fully explain group-level differences is called the ecological fallacy [71–73]. The data clearly show that the micro-level effect of individuals’ perceptions of relational mobility and the macro-level effect of society were independent of one another. The individual-level psychological calibrations and the group-level differences between nations coexist, rather than one producing the other.

Features of the social ecology other than relational mobility could be responsible for the differences in group-level calibrations between the US and Japan (see e.g., [56, 74]). That Japanese participants were less punitive than Americans is contrary to findings that Japan (or East Asian countries in general) has “tighter” norms than the US which, when broken, elicit great censure [75, 76], but perhaps consistent with studies showing greater motivations to avoid rejection in people in Japan than the US [74]. Our data cannot speak to these explanations of the group-level differences we found.

4.4 Limitations and future directions

Motivations responded when participants learned how the partner treats them, but the partner switching instructions influenced Americans only (and not much at that). This could be because repeated interactions—with interruptions between—were common ancestrally, making long-run estimates of social ecology a more reliable basis for calibration than cues about a fleeting situation. The other possibility is that a cue delivered online was too divorced from real life, devoid of psychophysical cues typical of social isolation versus community. Future studies might enhance the salience of the situational cue, perhaps by including visual displays showing many versus few alternative partners (avatars or faces), or by giving participants prior experiences of a desirable partner leaving for a better one or an unrewarding partner staying.

A person with fewer outside options than others in their local ecology may feel they need to reciprocate more and punish less. We did adapt the relational mobility scale to ask about the self; although self and other scores were correlated r (515) = .60 (p = 10−16) in the US and r (516) = .50 (p = 10−16) in Japan, we calculated whether RM self < RM other for each participant. In Japan, 67% of participants felt their outside options were worse than those of other people, compared to 44% in the US. And, in both countries, those who felt they have fewer outside options returned more points than those who felt their options were better than or equal to others, but the difference in points returned was not significant. A better measure in the future might be to ask, for each RM question, whether people feel they have more, the same, or fewer options than others in their society.

Dyadic cooperation may be affected by other aspects of the social ecology as well, such as how likely others will be to take advantage of you [69]. Punishment as a deterrent may be up-regulated in ecologies where the probability of being exploited are higher, as they were in the US in this study. Perceptions of these probabilities would be a fruitful variable to assess.

Lastly, our participants were from either the US or Japan, two populous, large-scale industrialized societies. Objectively speaking, most people in these countries are free to associate with anyone they like, and they are surrounded by strangers, each of whom is a potential new partner. It would be fruitful to extend the current line of research to smaller societies in which the actual—not only perceived—possibility of partner choice is more limited.

Drawing on a unique survey we examine how German citizens view the practice of discussing politics in everyday life, and what determines these attitudes; we find that only a minority appreciates talking about politics

Do people like to discuss politics? A study of citizens’ political talk culture. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Manuel Neumann. European Political Science Review, January 4 2023. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-political-science-review/article/do-people-like-to-discuss-politics-a-study-of-citizens-political-talk-culture/20CA901679A2167657AAA51A1C808D67

Abstract: As deliberative democracy is gaining practical momentum, the question arises whether citizens’ attitudes toward everyday political talk are congruent with this ‘talk-centric’ vision of democratic governance. Drawing on a unique survey we examine how German citizens view the practice of discussing politics in everyday life, and what determines these attitudes. We find that only a minority appreciates talking about politics. To explain these views, we combine Fishbein and Ajzen’s Expectancy-Value Model of attitudes toward behaviors with perspectives from research on interpersonal communication. Individuals’ interest in politics emerges as the only relevant political disposition for attitudes toward everyday political talk. Its impact is surpassed and conditioned by conflict orientations and other enduring psychological dispositions, as well as contextual circumstances like the closeness of social ties and the amount of disagreement experienced during conversations. The beneficial effect of political interest dwindles under adverse interpersonal conditions. The social dimension of everyday political talk thus appears to outweigh its political dimension.

More confirmation of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis: Sons from high-status families achieve higher educational outcomes than daughters, while daughters from low-status families surpass sons

Parental background and daughters’ and sons’ educational outcomes – application of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. Janne Salminen, Hannu Lehti. Journal of Biosocial Science, January 6 2023. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/parental-background-and-daughters-and-sons-educational-outcomes-application-of-the-triverswillard-hypothesis/47FD4388B618EB5E078336813FEB71E3

Abstract: This study uses Trivers-Willard hypothesis to explain the differences in daughters’ and sons’ educational outcomes by parental background. According to the Trivers-Willard hypothesis (TWH), parental support and investments for sons and daughters display an asymmetrical relationship according to parental status because of the different reproductive advantage of the sexes. It predicts that high-status parents support sons more than daughters, and low-status parents support daughters more than sons. In modern societies, where education is the most important mediator of status, the TW hypothesis predicts that sons from high-status families will achieve higher educational outcomes than daughters. Using cohorts born between 1987 and 1997 from the reliable full population Finnish register data that contain the data of over 600.000 individuals, children’s educational outcomes were measured using data on school dropout rate, academic grade point average (GPA), and general secondary enrollment in their adolescence. OLS and sibling fixed-effect regression that permitted an examination of opposite-sex siblings’ educational outcomes within the same family were applied. Sons with high family income and parental education, compared to daughters of the same family, have lower probability of dropping out of school and are more likely to enroll into academic secondary school track. In families with low parental education or income daughters have lower probability for school dropout and enroll more likely to academic school track related to sons of the same family. The effect of family background by sex can be interpreted to support TWH in dropout and academic school track enrollment but not in GPA.

Discussion

This study investigated whether parental socioeconomic resources influence sons and daughters differently. The biosocial theory – the Trivers-Willard hypothesis – which states that parents with high social status invest more in sons compared to low-status parents who invest more in daughters, was applied. Sibling fixed-effects regression models were utilised by observing how parental education and family income influence sons’ and daughters’ GPA, dropout rates from secondary school and general secondary enrollment with reliable Finnish register data.

The results show that parental education has a stronger positive effect on sons’ educational outcomes than daughters in all three measured outcomes. Family income has an even more pronounced effect for dropping out from secondary education and for general secondary enrollment. However, family income did not influence the GPA based on the siblings’ sex. These results are in line with previous studies that have studied TWH in the United States (Hopcroft, Reference Hopcroft2005; Hopcroft & Martin, Reference Hopcroft and Martin2016; Pink, Schaman, & Fieder, Reference Pink, Schaman and Fieder2017). Additionally, the results support the claim that boys are more sensitive to family’s resources than girls in terms of educational outcomes (Autor et al. Reference Autor, Figlio, Karbownik, Roth and Wasserman2019; Brenøe & Lunberg, Reference Brenøe and Lundberg2018).

The result that found the largest Trivers-Willard effect for general secondary enrollment compared to dropout and GPA indicates that parents may guide children’s educational decision-making process. Thus, parents probably give guidance to their children according to their own human and economic capital; however, this study adds that the guidance can be different for sons and daughters depending on family conditions. The biosocial mechanism explains why family conditions influence differently for sons’ and daughters’ education.

Limitations

Although we can obtain reliable information with register data, there are still some limitations despite large dataset and objective information. We were not able to obtain information about the exact nature of parental behavior for children’s benefit. The lack of direct measure of parental investment is the one limitation and thus it is difficult to observe exact mechanism between parental resources and child’s educational outcome.

However, previous studies show that parental SES and the amount of investment correlates highly (see Tanskanen & Danielsbacka, Reference Tanskanen and Danielsbacka2019). Further, the results show that parental education and family income had the strongest TWH effect on general secondary enrollment compared to dropout and GPA. Thus, it can be stated that the results of the study reflect parental investments in the form of human capital accumulation of the children, because children continue to pursue higher education very likely after general secondary education that leads to higher income and socioeconomic status in adulthood. However, parents may have lower possibilities to influence children’s risks of school dropout. Avoiding school dropout does not necessarily lead to high status in adulthood, but children who avoid dropout and continue secondary schooling avoid low status and income in adulthood. GPA is determined highly by children’s intelligence and other non-cognitive traits that parents find very difficult to influence in Finland due to the absence of private schools. It has been shown, for example, that individuals’ variations in GPA are largely explained by genes but not shared environmental effects such as family background (Nielsen, Reference Nielsen2006). Finnish schools that have very low variance and thus show low inequality of learning outcomes can even amplify the genetic effects and reduce the effects of parents and thus that of TWH on GPA.

This study could not control for health and psychiatric variables. Thus, the results may reflect the fact that boys have more learning difficulties than girls (for example in the case of ADHD and other neurotypical disabilities), particularly among low status families; however, the study controlled for GPA that considers at least some of the effect of learning disabilities.

The findings come from a Finnish birth cohort born in 1987–1997. This cohort has experienced relatively high equality of opportunity in school context and the egalitarian welfare state has supported their families throughout their childhood. For these cohorts, all education levels have been free of charge. The funding of the schools and universities are based on governmental finance. There is no private school at any education level. According to the Global Gender Gap Report (2021), Finnish society is the second most gender-egalitarian country in the world and on average, women are better educated than men. However, previous studies have shown that parental education rather than family income is associated with education and later social status in Nordic countries (Elstad & Bakken, Reference Elstad and Bakken2015; Erola et al., Reference Erola, Jalonen and Lehti2016) Surprisingly, the study still found that higher family income decreases the educational disadvantage for boys. Because this effect was found in the Nordic welfare context it suggests that in other countries with different institutional context that includes tuition fees, the effect of the family income could be even stronger. If TWH is seen as universal it should be influential despite the institutional context. The results support this interpretation because the effect is found also in contexts where parental resources should not matter for children’s education. This indicates that parents’ and children’s evolutionary adaptations that mold their cognitive architecture (biases) and behavior are effective in modern societies. Additionally, the result of family income is surprising because in contemporary western societies experience an abundance of resources that leads to high investment in all children (Hopcroft, Reference Hopcroft2005). It can be argued that the logic of the TWH is problematic because high status males do not have a higher probability to reproduce than high status females on an average in all modern societies due to the use of contraception (Hopcroft, Reference Hopcroft2005). However, this argument has not gained empirical support because previous studies show that still in many modern societies high status men have higher probability to have more children than lower status men (Nisén et al. Reference Nisén, Martikainen, Myrskylä and Silventoinen2018; Nettle & Pollet Reference Nettle and Pollet2008; Weeden et. al. Reference Weeden, Abrams, Green and Sabini2006; Lappegård & Rønsen Reference Lappegård and Rønsen2013; Hopcroft Reference Hopcroft2019). Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge while applying evolutionary explanations that individuals usually do not consciously try to increase their (inclusive) fitness and maximize the number of offspring as standard rational theories used in social science would assume. Instead, it is assumed that humans have cognitive mechanisms that guide them to put effort into things that would have tended to increase (inclusive) fitness during evolutionary history (Hrdy, Reference Hrdy2011). In an evolutionary framework, parental investments are defined as any investment by the parent in a child that increases the child’s likelihood to survive and hence reproductive success at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in another child (Trivers, Reference Trivers

1972). Thus, parental investments mean parental behavior, for example parental care, that increases a child’s inclusive fitness. Therefore, future research should analyze parental behavior by combining register and survey data to get an even more thorough picture of TWH.