Young children share the spoils after collaboration

Egalitarian behavior is considered to be a species-typical component of human cooperation. Human adults tend to share resources equally, even if they have the opportunity to keep a larger portion for themselves. Recent experiments have suggested that this tendency emerges fairly late in human ontogeny, not before 6 or 7 years of age. Here we show that 3-year-old children share mostly equally with a peer after they have worked together actively to obtain rewards in a collaboration task, even when those rewards could easily be monopolized. These findings contrast with previous findings from a similar experiment with chimpanzees, who tended to monopolize resources whenever they could. The potentially species-unique tendency of humans to share equally emerges early in ontogeny, perhaps originating in collaborative interactions among peers.     

重建社会实践

《重建社会实践》是F.伽塔里应《交往世界》杂志的稿约所写的一篇文章,也是作者临终前留给人类的最后一份礼物。面对霸权主义横行、唯科技主义泛滥、人口暴增、能源危机、环境污染、贫富悬殊、集权制度和恐怖主义等一系列国际问题,伽塔里提出了“重建社会实践”的方案。这是一个从政治、经济、法律、科技、心理、生态等多方面统筹兼顾的全球性协调治理的方略。今天读来仍然是那么发人深思。     

The Dominance,Prestige, and Leadership Account of Social Power Motives

The power motive predicts influential social behaviour; however, its heterogeneous conceptualisations have produced inconsistent results. To overcome this problem, we developed and validated a unitary taxonomy of social power motives based on established delineations of social hierarchies: the dominance, prestige, and leadership account. While we could measure these motives both reliably and distinctively (study 1), we also showed they strongly related to a common power desire (study 2). Assessing their nomological networks (studies 3 and 4), we demonstrated distinct associations between the dominance motive (D: wanting to coerce others into adhering to one's will) and anger and verbal aggression; the prestige motive (P: wanting to obtain admiration and respect) and the fear of losing reputation and claiming to have higher moral concerns; the leadership motive (L: wanting to take responsibility in and for one's group) and emotional stability and helping behaviour. Furthermore, while D uniquely predicted agonistic/retaliatory behaviour in dictator games (study 5), L uniquely predicted the attainment of higher employment ranks in various professions (study 7). Finally, at least to some degree, P and L related positively, and D negatively to prosocial donating behaviour (study 6). This taxonomy represents a novel and powerful approach to predicting influential social behaviour. © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology     

How Reliably Do Eye Parameters Indicate Internal Versus External Attentional Focus?

Eye behavior is increasingly used as an indicator of internal versus external focus of attention both in research and application. However, available findings are partly inconsistent, which might be attributed to the different nature of the employed types of internal and external cognition tasks. The present study, therefore, investigated how consistently different eye parameters respond to internal versus external attentional focus across three task modalities: numerical, verbal, and visuo-spatial. Three eye parameters robustly differentiated between internal and external attentional focus across all tasks. Blinks, pupil diameter variance, and fixation disparity variance were consistently increased during internally directed attention. We also observed substantial attentional focus effects on other parameters (pupil diameter, fixation disparity, saccades, and microsaccades), but they were moderated by task type. Single-trial analysis of our data using machine learning techniques further confirmed our results: Classifying the focus of attention by means of eye tracking works well across participants, but generalizing across tasks proves to be challenging. Based on the effects of task type on eye parameters, we discuss what eye parameters are best suited as indicators of internal versus external attentional focus in different settings.     

Asymmetric goal contagion: Social power attenuates goal contagion among strangers

Goal contagion is an important interpersonal process. As people spontaneously infer and adopt others' goals, goals can be said to “flow” among individuals. We find that possessing power attenuates goal contagion, especially for high perspective takers. In a pilot study (N = 157), we first affirmed the interpersonal nature of goal contagion by establishing that high (vs. low) perspective takers were more likely to engage in goal contagion. We then tested the moderating role of power in two studies. In both neutral (Study 1, N = 179) and low power (Study 2, N = 304) conditions, we replicated the pattern in the pilot study. In the high power conditions, however, neither low nor high perspective takers engaged in goal contagion. Our findings suggest that goals flow asymmetrically from the powerful to the powerless, which may constitute an important means through which power hierarchy and group cohesion are maintained.     

Does the experience of presence restore self-control?

A wide range of research suggests that the exertion of self-control is a limited resource or constrained by a motivational shift. Less attention, however, has been given to the question how self-control capacity can be restored. This study examined whether this restoration can be achieved by “presence,” the perceptual illusion of non-mediation. We suggest that the adoption of the mediated reference systems creates a “holiday from self” and restores self-control capacity. Depleted participants who saw an immersive video clip performed better in a subsequent self-control task than participants who saw a non-immersive video clip or were in a waiting group. But the concrete mechanism remains open: Self reported presence did not serve as a mediator.     

Social Change: Toward an Informed and Critical Understanding of Social Justice and the Capabilities Approach in Community Psychology

Community psychology has long been concerned with social justice. However, deployments of this term are often vague and undertheorized. To address this weakness in the field's knowledge body we explored John Rawls's theory of social justice and Amartya Sen's economic theory of the capabilities approach and evaluated each for its applicability to community psychology theory, research, and action. Our unpacking of the philosophical and political underpinnings of Rawlsian theory of social justice resulted in identifying characteristics that limit the theory's utility in community psychology, particularly in its implications for action. Our analysis of the capability approach proposed by Amartya Sen revealed a framework that operationalizes social justice in both research and action, and we elaborate on this point. Going beyond benefits to community psychology in adopting the capabilities approach, we posit a bi‐directional relationship and discuss how community psychology might also contribute to the capabilities approach. We conclude by suggesting that community psychology could benefit from a manifesto or proclamation that provides a historical background of social justice and critiques the focus on the economic, sociological, and philosophical theories that inform present‐day conceptualizations (and lack thereof) of social justice for community psychology.