Cooperative behaviors are typically investigated using social dilemmas inserted into scenarios with well-known characteristics. Nonetheless, in real life, group members may be uncertain about what ...others will decide (social uncertainty) and the characteristics of the dilemma itself (environmental uncertainty). Previous studies have shown that uncertainty reduces the willingness to cooperate. Dual-process approaches to cooperation have given rise to two different views. Some authors argue that deliberation is needed to overrule selfish motives, whereas others argue that intuition favors cooperation. In this work, our goal was to investigate the role of intuitive mental processing on cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma game involving uncertainty. Our results showed that participants cooperated less with their counterparts as the number of rounds progressed, suggesting a learning process and that intuitive mental processing in the first 50 rounds appears to favor cooperation under both deterministic and stochastic conditions. These results may help clarify the literature's mixed effects regarding cognitive processing manipulation on cooperation. Developing a better understanding of these effects may improve strategies in social problems involving cooperation under uncertainty and cognitive constraints.
Uncertainty has been shown to reduce the willingness to cooperate in various social dilemmas and negatively affect prosocial behavior. However, some studies showed that uncertainty does not always ...decrease prosocial behavior, depending on the type of uncertainty. More specifically, recent research has shown that prosocial behavior tends to increase under impact uncertainty-uncertainty about the consequences for others if they become infected. In addition, researchers have argued that intuition favors prosocial behavior while deliberation leads to selfish behavior. Our study explored how intuitive (time pressure) or deliberate mental processing, under outcome, or impact uncertainty affect prosocial behavior in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our sample consists of 496 participants, and we used a 4 (COVID-19 scenario: Control vs. Impact Uncertainty vs. Worst-Case vs. Indirect Transmission) by 2 (decision time: time delay vs. time pressure) between-subjects design. Results suggest that participants are more inclined to stay at home (prosocial intention) when forced to make their decisions intuitively rather than deliberately. Additionally, we found that uncertainty does not always decrease prosocial behavior. It seems that uncertainty does not affect the prosocial intention in a scenario with a real infectious disease. These findings suggest that the distinction between outcome and impact uncertainty may be due to the realism of experimental stimuli interventions.
Abstract Choice behavior differs depending on how the information about options is presented to the subjects, via either descriptions or experience(1), a phenomenon called the description-experience ...gap. Cumulative Prospect Theory(2) implies overweighting of rare events, but when options are experienced instead of described, the opposite result is found: rare events are underweighted(1,3). Our meta-analysis studied three important factors on the description-experience gap related to Cumulative Prospect Theory: the over-and under-weighting of rare events in description- and experience-based tasks, the task domain and the probability of the rare event. Aside from these three elements, another three additional factors were studied: the existence of a certain option, the description task paradigm and the experience task paradigm. Recently, a meta-analysis on this topic was published(4), which focused on one specific type of experience task paradigm called sampling. In the present meta-analysis, we focused on the other major experience task paradigm –feedback paradigm– and the combination of both paradigms, to see if we could find differential effects between their meta-analytical approach and ours. However, this was not the case, as we found similar results, being the effect consistent across factors and methods. We conclude that the fact that the reference model(2) is a descriptive one, and that the factor most frequently evoked to explain the description-experience gap is sampling biases in the experience-based tasks – which are part of the methodology of the task itself – suggests that the description-experience gap is an irreducible psychological phenomenon (i.e. a phenomenon that does not rely on other psychological mechanisms, but solely on the methodology of the task).
Do people want to be vaccinated against COVID-19? Herd immunity is dependent on individuals' willingness to be vaccinated since vaccination is not mandatory. Our main goal was to investigate people's ...intention to be vaccinated and their intentions to vaccinate their children. Moreover, we were interested in understanding the role of the personal characteristics, psychological factors, and the lockdown context on that decision. Therefore, we conducted an online survey during the lockdown in Portugal (15 January 2021 until 14 March 2021). Participants completed a socio-demographic questionnaire, questions about their intentions of being vaccinated, concerns about the vaccine, a COVID-19 attitudes and beliefs scale, a COVID-19 vaccine attitudes and beliefs scale, and the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) Scale. Our results showed that from the 649 participants, 63% of the participants reported being very likely to have the vaccine, while 60% reported being very likely to vaccinate their children. We conducted two linear regression models, explaining 65% of the variance for personal vaccination and 56% of the variance for children vaccination. We found that the COVID-19 vaccine general beliefs and attitudes were the main determinants of vaccination intention. Additionally, our proposed artificial neural network model was able to predict with 85% accuracy vaccination intention. Thus, our results suggest that psychological factors are an essential determinant of vaccination intention. Thus, public policy decision makers may use these insights for predicting vaccine hesitancy and designing effective vaccination communication strategies.
Human resource management system (HRMS) is an organizational instrument that sends organizational messages to employees. If we consider that HRMS can be an indicator of organization’s involvement ...towards employees’ it is relevant to understand its impact in employees’ organizational commitment and study indicators that can help unravel the black box between HRMS and positive results, associating an emerging approach, sustainable HRMS that relates HRMS with sustainability, having as common features the association with positive results for employees. Recent literature has tested organizational trust (OT) as a relevant indicator in the understanding of this process. There have been studies that have debated and tested OT in managers as a mediator or moderator of HRMS on affective commitment (AOC) and support for both have been found. In this study, we attempt to contribute to the development of the field, by considering the terminological, conceptual and statistical distinction between moderator and mediator, testing two alternative models that may elucidate the relationship between these variables. 1328 valid responses with employees and managers from 21 Portuguese organizations were collected. A factor analysis, a cluster analysis, moderation tests using hierarchical linear regression, pos hoc tests and mediation tests with sequential regressions were performed. HRMS dimensions are mediated (partially or totally) by OT in manager towards AOC. HRMS dimensions (HR relationship with employees, comprehensibility, utility, visibility and distributive justice) influences OT in manager, which, in turn, influences AOC. Regarding moderation, the interaction between distributive justice and OT, pos-hoc tests showed that when distributive justice increases and levels of OT in manager is high, OAC increases rapidly. It seems that the importance of the distributive justice of HRMS only becomes relevant on OAC, if OT in manager is present. This empirical test of the HRMS model also suggests its reframing in two meta-dimensions: A. the agents of HR system, the HR relationship with employees based on their competence, consistent behavior, ability to solve problems and listening to people; and B. the effects of the system itself, possibly Visibility is the most relevant attribute. We suggest that these interactions between HR agents and employees are relevant and may lead to generalizations about the HRMS.
The present work aims improve our understanding of the boundaries of instructional control. It does so by solving contradictory results obtained on two different fields: Three studies conducted on ...the description-experience gap field, showing that instructions are neglected when personal experience is available, and several others conducted on the experimental analysis of behavior paradigm getting to the opposite conclusion. Two factors were studied: the type of schedule, and the relative expected values between options. The present work showed that (1) positive evidence of instructional control was found in a choice task with probability schedules and different expected values between options; (2) negative evidence of instructional control was found in a choice task with VI schedules and similar expected values between options; and (3) these results, together with previous research, suggest that relative expected values are a fundamental factor on understanding the presence of instructional control in choice tasks. We conclude that the relevance of this factor relies on its capacity to make participants’ decisions easier: all else being equal, adding descriptions enables participants to better discriminate optimal behavior in choice tasks.
•Positive evidence of instructional control in a choice task with probability schedules and different expected values.•Negative evidence of instructional control in a choice task with VI schedules and similar expected values.•Relative expected values are a fundamental factor on understanding the presence of instructional control in choice tasks.
Cooperative behaviors are typically investigated using social dilemmas inserted into scenarios with well-known characteristics. Nonetheless, in real life, group members may be uncertain about what ...others will decide (social uncertainty) and the characteristics of the dilemma itself (environmental uncertainty). Previous studies have shown that uncertainty reduces the willingness to cooperate. Dual-process approaches to cooperation have given rise to two different views. Some authors argue that deliberation is needed to overrule selfish motives, whereas others argue that intuition favors cooperation. In this work, our goal was to investigate the role of intuitive mental processing on cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma game involving uncertainty. Our results showed that participants cooperated less with their counterparts as the number of rounds progressed, suggesting a learning process and that intuitive mental processing in the first 50 rounds appears to favor cooperation under both deterministic and stochastic conditions. These results may help clarify the literature's mixed effects regarding cognitive processing manipulation on cooperation. Developing a better understanding of these effects may improve strategies in social problems involving cooperation under uncertainty and cognitive constraints.
The present work aims to reveal contradictory results obtained on two different fields; particularly from two studies conducted on the description-experience gap field showing that descriptions are ...neglected when personal experience is available (1,2), and several others conducted on the instructional control field getting to the opposite conclusion (3–8). To account for this contradiction, we hypothesized that participants from the studies of Jessup, Bishara and Busemeyer (1) and Lejarraga and Gonzalez (2) relied on their experience rather than on the descriptions because of the difficult, demanding nature of the probabilistic descriptions they faced. Enriched descriptions were created in our experiment to assess the contribution of this factor to the differential influence of the descriptions in choice behavior. Nonetheless, our hypothesis did not find support in the results and further research is needed to account for the aforementioned contradiction.
ECS (extracellular space) works as the microenvironment of brain cells. Diffusion through ECS may be described through an effective diffusion coefficient, De, which in turn depends on ECS porosity, ...ɛ, and tortuosity, T. In the present research, diffusion data together with ɛ and T were collected from the specialized literature and analysed to seek a correlation of T versus ɛ. On the basis of De data, upper and lower T boundaries were defined and related to topologically ‘dense’ and ‘loose’ cell arrangement. A possible range for T variation was obtained for ECS, with ɛ ranging from 0.05 to 0.6. A tortuosity index (n) in the form of T and ɛ logarithmic ratio was introduced. This index may be adopted for recalculation of T or ɛ if only one of these parameters is known. As a result of data analysis and modelling, it was concluded that, upon different external conditions, for instance oxygen depletion, the ECS porosity decreases and cells (presumably through membrane rearrangements) adjust the void space to keep the diffusion within a defined range, which gives the living tissue the ability to maintain the diffusion level up to two or more times higher than in conventional granular bed packing. Thus, even with a dramatic ECS decrease, the cellular system is still able to support a given diffusion by decreasing the value of T. The obtained results clearly show the existence of three data clusters: a region of normal brain functioning, both for young and adult brains, for values of ɛ comprised between 0.15 and 0.30, and two regions of abnormal brain behaviour to the left and to the right of the normal region, corresponding to different states (aging, tumours, anoxia, brain death, etc.). The present approach allows defining the optimal range of ɛ and T to assure the best ECS diffusion efficiency for a specified macromolecule. This might be important in brain clinical treatment.
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