Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-nwzlb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T09:24:45.270Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Sociality as a defensive response to the threat of loss

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Tim Johnson
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany tjohnson@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Mikhail Myagkov
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA myagkov@darkwing.uoregon.edu
John Orbell
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA jorbell@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Get access

Abstract

Laboratory research studying behavior in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game is consistent with the commonplace perception that social exchange is risky. Although they often do cooperate, people also often defect. Thus, the decision to enter a PD game with a stranger, about whom one has no good basis for predicting behavior, is a bet on cooperation. Many investigators have explored a range of cognitive processes and individual differences putatively bearing on the choice to enter such games, but few have asked how people perceive, assess, and respond to social risk in general. That is what we ask here. From the well known finding that people are risk-averse in the domain of gains and risk-tolerant in the domain of losses, we predict that, with game incentives constant, people will be more willing to enter social relationships when game payoffs are framed as losses than when they are framed as gains. We tested this prediction in a student population playing PD games. Results strongly supported the prediction, suggesting that human sociality may have evolved more as a defensive response to the possibility of loss than as an opportunistic attempt to capture gain.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.Camerer, C., and Hogarth, R., Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
2.Caporael, L., Dawes, R., Orbell, J., and van de Kragt, A., “Selfishness examined: Cooperation in the absence of egoistic incentives,” Behavioral and Brain Science, December 1989, 12:683699.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3.Dawes, R. and Thaler, R., “Anomalies: Cooperation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1988, 2:187197.Google Scholar
4.Ledyard, J., “Public goods: A survey of experimental research,” in The Handbook of Experimental Economics, Kagel, J. H. and Roth, A. E., eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 111194.Google Scholar
5.Orbell, J. and Dawes, R., “Social welfare, cooperators' advantage and the option of not playing the game,” American Sociological Review, December 1993, 58:787800.Google Scholar
6.Mulford, M., Orbell, J., Shatto, C., and Stockard, J., “Physical attractiveness, opportunity, and success in everyday exchange,” American Journal of Sociology, May 1998, 103:15651592.Google Scholar
7.Schuessler, R., “Exit threats and cooperation under anonymity,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1989, 33:728749.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8.Yamagishi, T., “Exit from the group as an individualistic solution to the free rider problem in the United States and Japan,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1988, 24:530542.Google Scholar
9.Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A., “The psychology of preferences,” Scientific American, January 1982, 246:160173.Google Scholar
10.Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., and Tversky, A., eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
11.Ellsberg, D., “Risk, ambiguity and the Savage axioms”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1961, 75:643669.Google Scholar
12.Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J., “Origins of domain specificity: The evolution of functional organization” in Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, Hirschfeld, L. A. and Gelman, S. A., eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 85116.Google Scholar
13.Pinker, S., The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking Press, 2002).Google Scholar
14.Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J., “Cognitive adaptations for social exchange” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J., eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 163228.Google Scholar
15.Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, Byrne, R. W. and Whiten, A., eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
16.Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations, Whiten, A. and Byrne, R. W., eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).Google Scholar