Welfare tradeoff psychology is present in children and adults

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.

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (4I) ◽  
pp. 535-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Ali Khan

Harberger introduced his influential 1971 essay with the following words. This paper is intended not as a scientific study, nor as a review of the literature, but rather as a tract - an open letter to the profession, as it were - pleading that three basic postulates be accepted as providing a conventional framework for applied welfare economics. The postulates are: (a) The competitive demand price for a given unit measures the value of that unit to the demander; (b) The competitive supply price for a given unit measures the value of that unit to the supplier; and (c) When evaluating the net benefits or costs of a given action (project, programme, or policy), the costs and benefits accruing to each member of the relevant group (e.g., a nation) should normally be added without regard to the individual(s) to whom they accrue.


Author(s):  
Alba Colombo ◽  
Jaime Altuna ◽  
Esther Oliver-Grasiot

Popular festivities and traditional events are important moments in which symbolic content, deep emotions and community solidarity are developed. However, there has been little research on the relationship between such events and their social networks and the power relations within these networks. This paper explores the ability of community events and networks to reflect and strengthen social context. Rather than observing the capacity of the event to generate a network, we focus on identifying how the event network is constructed, and how it creates relationships between the different groups, or nodes, within broader social networks. The case analysed is the Correfoc de la Mercè, a traditional firework event in Barcelona involving the Colles de diables, or Catalan popular fire culture groups. Our findings show that there is a bidirectional link or a mutual dependence between the groups (or nodes) and the event, which also support the development of shared social and symbolic capital.


Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman

This is the first data chapter. In this chapter, respondents who are described as true believers in the gender structure, and essentialist gender differences are introduced and their interviews analyzed. They are true believers because, at the macro level, they believe in a gender ideology where women and men should be different and accept rules and requirements that enforce gender differentiation and even sex segregation in social life. In addition, at the interactional level, these Millennials report having been shaped by their parent’s traditional expectations and they similarly feel justified to impose gendered expectations on those in their own social networks. At the individual level, they have internalized masculinity or femininity, and embody it in how they present themselves to the world. They try hard to “do gender” traditionally.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teruyoshi Kobayashi ◽  
Mathieu Génois

AbstractDensification and sparsification of social networks are attributed to two fundamental mechanisms: a change in the population in the system, and/or a change in the chances that people in the system are connected. In theory, each of these mechanisms generates a distinctive type of densification scaling, but in reality both types are generally mixed. Here, we develop a Bayesian statistical method to identify the extent to which each of these mechanisms is at play at a given point in time, taking the mixed densification scaling as input. We apply the method to networks of face-to-face interactions of individuals and reveal that the main mechanism that causes densification and sparsification occasionally switches, the frequency of which depending on the social context. The proposed method uncovers an inherent regime-switching property of network dynamics, which will provide a new insight into the mechanics behind evolving social interactions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 718
Author(s):  
Thomas Dolmark ◽  
Osama Sohaib ◽  
Ghassan Beydoun ◽  
Kai Wu

Absorptive capacity is a common barrier to knowledge transfer at the individual level. However, technology absorptive capacity can enhance an individual’s learning behaviour. This study investigates that technology readiness, the tools for knowledge sources, social influences, and social networks influence an individual’s absorptive capacity on an adaptation of the individual learning behaviour. A quantitative approach is used to assess the presence of a causal relationship from the constructs mentioned above. Data were collected from university students in Australia to examine the hypotheses. With 199 responses, a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach was used for the analysis. The results generated mixed findings. Individual’s technological belief in optimism and innovation and social influences had a significantly weaker effect on individual absorptive capacity, which in turn had a significantly weaker impact on their learning behaviour.


2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick A. R. Jones ◽  
Helen C. Spence-Jones ◽  
Mike Webster ◽  
Luke Rendell

Abstract Learning can enable rapid behavioural responses to changing conditions but can depend on the social context and behavioural phenotype of the individual. Learning rates have been linked to consistent individual differences in behavioural traits, especially in situations which require engaging with novelty, but the social environment can also play an important role. The presence of others can modulate the effects of individual behavioural traits and afford access to social information that can reduce the need for ‘risky’ asocial learning. Most studies of social effects on learning are focused on more social species; however, such factors can be important even for less-social animals, including non-grouping or facultatively social species which may still derive benefit from social conditions. Using archerfish, Toxotes chatareus, which exhibit high levels of intra-specific competition and do not show a strong preference for grouping, we explored the effect of social contexts on learning. Individually housed fish were assayed in an ‘open-field’ test and then trained to criterion in a task where fish learnt to shoot a novel cue for a food reward—with a conspecific neighbour visible either during training, outside of training or never (full, partial or no visible presence). Time to learn to shoot the novel cue differed across individuals but not across social context. This suggests that social context does not have a strong effect on learning in this non-obligatory social species; instead, it further highlights the importance that inter-individual variation in behavioural traits can have on learning. Significance statement Some individuals learn faster than others. Many factors can affect an animal’s learning rate—for example, its behavioural phenotype may make it more or less likely to engage with novel objects. The social environment can play a big role too—affecting learning directly and modifying the effects of an individual’s traits. Effects of social context on learning mostly come from highly social species, but recent research has focused on less-social animals. Archerfish display high intra-specific competition, and our study suggests that social context has no strong effect on their learning to shoot novel objects for rewards. Our results may have some relevance for social enrichment and welfare of this increasingly studied species, suggesting there are no negative effects of short- to medium-term isolation of this species—at least with regards to behavioural performance and learning tasks.


2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Lyons

By some estimates, more than half of prison inmates in America have a drug or alcohol problem (Mumola and Karberg 2006). Existing models of treatment for these individuals, both inside and outside prison, have typically focused on the individual addict. These interventions often neglect the users' families and communities, and view poverty and marginalization as tangential to recovery—which is seen instead purely as an individual, internal process. This perspective defines addiction as a brain disease, and emphasizes the need of recovering addicts to learn new skills and to take personal responsibility for their actions and lives (Committee on Addictions of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 2002). These models, though a marked improvement over the idea of drug addiction as a moral failing, place an over-riding emphasis on the individual at the expense of the economic and social context.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110036
Author(s):  
Dai O’Brien

In the field of Deaf Geographies, one neglected area is that of the individual deaf body and how individual deaf bodies can produce deaf space in isolation from one another. Much of the work published in the field talks about collectively or socially produced deaf spaces through interaction between two or more deaf people. However, with deaf children increasingly being educated in mainstream schools with individual provisions, and the old social networks and institutions of deaf communities coming under threat by the closure of deaf clubs and changing work practices, more research on the way in which individuals can produce their own deaf spaces and navigate those spaces is needed. In this paper, I outline two possible theoretical approaches, that of Lefebvre’s productive gestures to produce social space, and Bourdieu’s habitus, capital and hexis. I suggest that these theories can be productively utilised to better understand the individual basis of the production of deaf spaces.


Author(s):  
Amanda Cox ◽  
Yeslam Al-Saggaf ◽  
Kate McLean

Social networking users are presented with a plethora of profile and privacy settings; most of which are left defaulted. As a result, there is little understanding of the fields that make up the user profile, the privacy settings available to safeguard the user, and the ramifications of not changing the same. Concerns relating to the unprecedented quantities of Personally Identifiable Information being stored need to be addressed. By employing a risk matrix to a social media profile, a user could be alerted to the potential dangers of the information being contained within the profile. By adapting this tool, the risks to the individual user of a social media profile will be minimised.


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