scholarly journals Trustworthiness is Distinct from Generosity in Children

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorsa Amir ◽  
W. Shelby Parsons ◽  
Richard Evan Ahl ◽  
Katherine McAuliffe

Interpersonal trust is a key component of cooperation, helping support the complex social networks found across societies. Trust typically involves two parties, one who trusts by taking on risk through investment in a second party, who can be trustworthy and produce mutual benefits. To date, the developmental literature has focused primarily on the trustor, meaning we know little about the ontogeny of trustworthiness. Whereas trusting can be motivated by self-interest, one-shot trustworthiness is more squarely situated in the prosocial domain, involving a direct trade-off between self-interest and others’ interests. However, this raises the question of whether trustworthiness is distinct from generosity. In this pre-registered study, we examine the origins of trustworthiness using an intuitive version of the Trust Game, in which a first party invests resources in a second party who can split the gains. We recruited N = 118 five-to-eight year-old American children (Mage = 6.94, n = 59 girls, 57% White, 88% of parents with Bachelor’s degree or higher), split between the Trustworthiness condition, where another party’s investment is instrumental for obtaining greater resources, and the Generosity condition, where the other party is a passive recipient. We found that children in the Trustworthiness condition shared significantly more resources than those in the Generosity condition. Further, children in the Trustworthiness condition predicted that the first party expected them to share a greater number of resources. Overall, these results demonstrate that trustworthiness is distinct from generosity in childhood, and suggest that children spontaneously grasp and engage in a key aspect of cooperation.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Margoni ◽  
Elena Nava ◽  
Luca Surian

Most cooperative interactions involve the expectation of mutual reciprocation and are based on interpersonal trust. Thus, understanding when and how humans acquire interpersonal trust can help unveiling the origins and development of children’s cooperative behavior. Here, we investigated whether prior socio-moral information about trading partners modulates the choice of preschool- (4-5 years) and school-age children (7-8 years) to share their own goods in a child-friendly version of the Trust Game. In this game, the trustee partner can repay the child’s initial investment or keep everything and betray the trustor. In two studies, we addressed whether trust is modulated by trustees exhibiting prosocial versus antisocial behaviors (Study 1, ‘helpers and hinderers’), or respect-based versus fear-based power (Study 2, ‘leaders and bullies’). Preschoolers trusted the leader more than the bully, and trusted the hinderer less than a neutral agent, but did not yet trust the helper more than the hinderer. The tendency to trust helpers more than hinderers increased with age as a result of the increased propensity to trust the prosocial agent. In Study 3, a group of preschoolers played the Dictator Game, a measure of pure generosity, with the same agents used for Study 1. Sharing rates were reliably lower than in Study 1, suggesting that the rates of investment in the trust game cannot be due solely to altruistic or indirect reciprocity motives. Overall, these findings indicate that, by age five, children understand complex cooperative exchanges and start relying on socio-moral information when deciding whom to trust.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhea M Howard ◽  
Annie C. Spokes ◽  
Samuel A Mehr ◽  
Max Krasnow

Making decisions in a social context often requires weighing one's own wants against the needs and preferences of others. Adults are adept at incorporating multiple contextual features when deciding how to trade off their welfare against another. For example, they are more willing to forgo a resource to benefit friends over strangers (a feature of the individual) or when the opportunity cost of giving up the resource is low (a feature of the situation). When does this capacity emerge in development? In Experiment 1 (N = 208), we assessed the decisions of 4- to 10-year-old children in a picture-based resource tradeoff task to test two questions: (1) When making repeated decisions to either benefit themselves or benefit another person, are children’s choices internally consistent with a particular valuation of that individual? (2) Do children value friends more highly than strangers and enemies? We find that children demonstrate consistent person-specific welfare valuations and value friends more highly than strangers and enemies. In Experiment 2 (N = 200), we tested adults using the same pictorial method. The pattern of results successfully replicated, but adults’ decisions were more consistent than children’s and they expressed more extreme valuations: relative to the children, they valued friends more and valued enemies less. We conclude that despite children’s limited experience allocating resources and navigating complex social networks, they behave like adults in that they reference a stable person-specific valuation when deciding whether to benefit themselves or another and that this rule is modulated by the child’s relationship with the target.


Author(s):  
Joshua May

This chapter considers remaining empirical challenges to the idea that we’re commonly motivated to do what’s right for the right reasons. Two key factors threaten to defeat claims to virtuous motivation, self-interest (egoism) and arbitrary situational factors (situationism). Both threats aim to identify defective influences on moral behavior that reveal us to be commonly motivated by the wrong reasons. However, there are limits to such wide-ranging skeptical arguments. Ultimately, like debunking arguments, defeater challenges succumb to a Defeater’s Dilemma: one can identify influences on many of our morally relevant behaviors that are either substantial or arbitrary, but not both. The science suggests a familiar trade-off in which substantial influences on many morally relevant actions are rarely defective. Arriving at this conclusion requires carefully scrutinizing a range of studies, including those on framing effects, dishonesty, implicit bias, mood effects, and moral hypocrisy (vs. integrity).


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 2767 ◽  
Author(s):  
Víctor Yepes ◽  
José V. Martí ◽  
José García

The optimization of the cost and CO 2 emissions in earth-retaining walls is of relevance, since these structures are often used in civil engineering. The optimization of costs is essential for the competitiveness of the construction company, and the optimization of emissions is relevant in the environmental impact of construction. To address the optimization, black hole metaheuristics were used, along with a discretization mechanism based on min–max normalization. The stability of the algorithm was evaluated with respect to the solutions obtained; the steel and concrete values obtained in both optimizations were analyzed. Additionally, the geometric variables of the structure were compared. Finally, the results obtained were compared with another algorithm that solved the problem. The results show that there is a trade-off between the use of steel and concrete. The solutions that minimize CO 2 emissions prefer the use of concrete instead of those that optimize the cost. On the other hand, when comparing the geometric variables, it is seen that most remain similar in both optimizations except for the distance between buttresses. When comparing with another algorithm, the results show a good performance in optimization using the black hole algorithm.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 183449092097475
Author(s):  
Na Zhao ◽  
Kaiqiang Xu ◽  
Ling Sun

This study examined the link between residential mobility and interpersonal trust building. Study 1 revealed a negative association between residential mobility and trust by measuring personal residential-mobility history. Study 2 demonstrated that participants who were momentarily primed with mobility showed a lower investment than participants in the control group in a trust game. The results of Study 3 showed that need for closure moderated the link between residential mobility and trust-building intention. Specifically, lower need-for-closure people had a significantly lower trust tendency in the mobility group than in the stable group. These findings illuminate the underlying influence of need for closure in the link between residential mobility and trust.


Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Tyler Horan

Social media influencers-individuals who utilize various forms of network power on social networks occupy a unique identity space. On the one hand, their network power is often tied to their social identity as creators of engaging material. On the other hand, their ability to promote commercial products and services steps outside the traditionally distinct commercial–social, occupational–personal divides. In this work, the network morphologies of influencers are explored in relation to their delivery of sponsored and non-sponsored content. This article explores how the disclosure of content as ‘sponsored’ affects audience reception. We show how that the promotion of content on social media often generates higher levels of engagement and receptiveness amongst their audience despite the platform’s assumption of organic non-commercial relationships. We find that engagement levels are highest among smaller out-degree networks. Additionally, we demonstrate that sponsored content not only returns a higher level of engagement, but that the effect of sponsorship is relatively consistent across out-degree network sizes. In sum, we suggest that social media audiences are not sensitive to commercial sponsorship when tied to identity, as long as that performance is convincing and consistent.


2012 ◽  
Vol 367 (1599) ◽  
pp. 2108-2118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Barrett ◽  
S. Peter Henzi ◽  
David Lusseau

Understanding human cognitive evolution, and that of the other primates, means taking sociality very seriously. For humans, this requires the recognition of the sociocultural and historical means by which human minds and selves are constructed, and how this gives rise to the reflexivity and ability to respond to novelty that characterize our species. For other, non-linguistic, primates we can answer some interesting questions by viewing social life as a feedback process, drawing on cybernetics and systems approaches and using social network neo-theory to test these ideas. Specifically, we show how social networks can be formalized as multi-dimensional objects, and use entropy measures to assess how networks respond to perturbation. We use simulations and natural ‘knock-outs’ in a free-ranging baboon troop to demonstrate that changes in interactions after social perturbations lead to a more certain social network, in which the outcomes of interactions are easier for members to predict. This new formalization of social networks provides a framework within which to predict network dynamics and evolution, helps us highlight how human and non-human social networks differ and has implications for theories of cognitive evolution.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emerta Aragie

By developing a model that describes the Kenyan coffee value chain, this study evaluates opportunities emanating from four scenarios representing productivity gains in the various value chain stages of the coffee sector and additional three scenarios reflecting shifts in market situations. Results show that productivity-enhancing policies have stronger effects on coffee output and export performance if they target the milling stage of the value chain. Export subsidy and favourable external marketing conditions also have stronger effects, distributed comparably across the various value chain stages. We, however, found that these gains in the coffee sector come at the expense of other cash crops such as cotton, tea, sugar and tobacco. The approach followed in this study is relevant as this trade-off between coffee and the other cash crop sectors may not be visibly shown using standard value chain approaches.


1988 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 981-982
Author(s):  
Kerry C. Martin ◽  
Jay Hewitt

Men and women were presented descriptions of two dyadic work groups. In both groups, one member of the dyad did approximately two-thirds of the work. For one of the groups, subjects were asked to imagine that they were the worker of high productivity while for the other group subjects were asked to imagine that they were impartial observers. Subjects were asked to divide the rewards among the two workers for both groups. Men and women did not differ in allocation of reward when acting as impartial observers. When subjects imagined themselves as the worker of high productivity, men gave themselves a greater share of the reward than did women. It was concluded that the results were consistent with the self-interest explanation of sex differences in allocation of reward.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyriakos Avgouleas ◽  
Emmanouil Sarris ◽  
George Gougoulidis

The economical and operational implications of poor alignment are indisputable for the propulsion shafting system of a commercial vessel. This holds true for naval vessels as well, although far less documented in the technical literature. This paper addresses some of the challenges associated with the proper alignment of a high-speed naval craft, which has been in service for many years. Laser bore-sighting was performed on a Guided Missile Fast Patrol Boat resting on a docking cradle. The measured bearing offsets were input to a FEA model of the shafting system to calculate bearing reactions and detect potential misalignment issues. Subsequent decisions regarding corrective measures take into account the results computed by the numerical model, experience from sister ships, the available documentation from the building yard and several other factors which are discussed in the paper. The solutions proposed are targeted towards a balanced trade-off between cost effectiveness and out-of-service time on one hand, and the risk of potential damage from misalignment on the other hand, which would seriously disrupt the ship’s operational availability. Practical aspects and lessons identified in the process are also presented, which demonstrate the distinct differences in alignment strategy of a high-speed naval craft compared to a typical commercial vessel.


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