Sex differences in cooperation: a meta-analytic review of social dilemmas

Although it is commonly believed that women are kinder and more cooperative than men, there is conflicting evidence for this assertion. Current theories of sex differences in social behavior suggest that it may be useful to examine in what situations men and women are likely to differ in cooperation. Here, we derive predictions from both sociocultural and evolutionary perspectives on context-specific sex differences in cooperation, and we conduct a unique meta-analytic study of 272 effect sizes-sampled across 50 years of research-on social dilemmas to examine several potential moderators. The overall average effect size is not statistically different from zero (d = -0.05), suggesting that men and women do not differ in their overall amounts of cooperation. However, the association between sex and cooperation is moderated by several key features of the social context: Male-male interactions are more cooperative than female-female interactions (d = 0.16), yet women cooperate more than men in mixed-sex interactions (d = -0.22). In repeated interactions, men are more cooperative than women. Women were more cooperative than men in larger groups and in more recent studies, but these differences disappeared after statistically controlling for several study characteristics. We discuss these results in the context of both sociocultural and evolutionary theories of sex differences, stress the need for an integrated biosocial approach, and outline directions for future research.     

To Whistleblow or Not to Whistleblow: Affective and Cognitive Differences in Reporting Peers and Advisors

Traditional whistleblowing theories have purported that whistleblowers engage in a rational process in determining whether or not to blow the whistle on misconduct. However, stressors inherent to whistleblowing often impede rational thinking and act as a barrier to effective whistleblowing. The negative impact of these stressors on whistleblowing may be made worse depending on who engages in the misconduct: a peer or advisor. In the present study, participants are presented with an ethical scenario where either a peer or advisor engages in misconduct, and positive and the negative consequences of whistleblowing are either directed to the wrongdoer, department, or university. Participant responses to case questions were evaluated for whistleblowing intentions, moral intensity, metacognitive reasoning strategies, and positive and negative, active and passive emotions. Findings indicate that participants were less likely to report the observed misconduct of an advisor compared to a peer. Furthermore, the findings also suggest that when an advisor is the source of misconduct, greater negative affect results. Post-hoc analyses were also conducted examining the differences between those who did and did not intend to blow the whistle under the circumstances of either having to report an advisor or peer. The implications of these findings for understanding the complexities involved in whistleblowing are discussed.

     

Decision noise: An explanation for observed violations of signal detection theory

In signal detection theory (SDT), responses are governed by perceptual noise and a flexible decision criterion. Recent criticisms of SDT (see, e.g., Balakrishnan, 1999) have identified violations of its assumptions, and researchers have suggested that SDT fundamentally misrepresents perceptual and decision processes. We hypothesize that, instead, these violations of SDT stem from decision noise: the inability to use deterministic response criteria. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we present a simple extension of SDT—the decision noise model—with which we demonstrate that shifts in a decision criterion can be masked by decision noise. In addition, we propose a new statistic that can help identify whether the violations of SDT stem from perceptual or from decision processes. The results of a stimulus classification experiment—together with model fits to past experiments—show that decision noise substantially affects performance. These findings suggest that decision noise is important across a wide range of tasks and needs to be better understood in order to accurately measure perceptual processes.     

Alternative Approaches for Measuring Values: Direct and Indirect Assessments in Performance Prediction

Two general approaches have been used to measure human values. In one approach, a direct approach, people are asked to endorse value statements. In the other approach, an indirect approach, people are asked to make choices indicative of their values. The intent of the current study was to compare these two general approaches to the measurement of values. Initially, 195 undergraduates were asked to complete both a direct measure and an indirect measure of their values before starting work on three performance tasks: an entrepreneurial task, a consulting task, and a marketing task. When scores on these performance tasks were regressed on the value measures, it was found that both types of measures yielded effective prediction. The indirect measures, however, appeared to yield better prediction and better discrimination of cross-task performance differences than the direct measures. The implications of these findings with respect to the identification and assessment of values are discussed.     

Heidegger’s Temple: How Truth Happens When Nothing is Portrayed

In his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger discusses three examples of artworks: a painting by Van Gogh of peasant shoes, a poem about a Roman fountain, and a Greek temple. The new entry on Heidegger’s aesthetics in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, written by Iain Thomson, focuses on this essay, and Van Gogh’s painting in particular. It argues that Heidegger uses Van Gogh’s painting to set art, as the happening of truth, in relation to ‘nothing’, which is a key term in Heidegger’s essays leading up to The Origin of the Work of Art. This paper extends a similar analysis to the Greek temple as a way of offering an exposition of Heidegger’s concerns in the essay. It begins by briefly outlining Thomson’s argument that Heidegger relates Van Gogh’s painting to ‘nothing’, and indicating the way this argument can be extended to the Greek temple. It then discusses three ways in which ‘nothing’ can open up the significance of the temple as a work of art in which truth happens: (1) it is not concerned with objective representation; (2) it depicts the primal strife of earth and world, concealing and unconcealing; (3) it is fundamentally historical.     

Reconsidering the two-second decay hypothesis in verbal working memory

A common belief in the study of short-term memory is that the verbal trace decays around two seconds after it is encoded. This belief is typically assumed to follow from the finding that in immediate serial recall, the time required to rapidly articulate a span-length list is around two seconds. Empirically, this belief is in opposition to a broad set of findings across a number of domains that establish mean decay times to be longer than two seconds. Theoretically, the available computational and mathematical models of immediate serial recall do not address this issue directly, because they typically rely on other mechanisms in addition to decay to account for forgetting. As such, they may show that decay times can be longer than two seconds, but they fail to show that they cannot be as short as two seconds. We address the issue directly and set a lower bound on mean trace decay times, even under the limiting assumption that all forgetting is due to trace decay. We do this by presenting a simple item-based model of trace decay that allows us to estimate values of mean trace duration. For a set of words whose span-length lists can be rapidly articulated in about two seconds, the model offers a conservative estimate for their mean decay times of around four seconds. Both the experimental and theoretical evidence show that items in verbal working memory decay considerably slower than the two-second decay hypothesis claims.