Boundaries of reciprocity: Incompleteness of information undermines cooperation

Past research has revealed that people have a strong tendency to respond to others' cooperative behavior with cooperation and to others' noncooperative behavior with noncooperation. Yet it is unclear whether or not this tendency still holds when people have only incomplete information about their interaction partner's past behavior. To address this question, we designed a new paradigm - a coin allocation paradigm - in which participants were provided with incomplete information about another person's degree of cooperative behavior (i.e., coin allocations to the participant). Consistent with our hypotheses, two experiments revealed that incompleteness of information undermines both expectations about another person's cooperation as well as one's own cooperation. Moreover, complementary analyses indicated that the detrimental effects of incompleteness of information on cooperation were mediated by expectations of other's cooperation. We suggest that a relatively strong belief in self-interest serves to fill in the blanks when information is incomplete, which undermines expectations of other's cooperation as well as one's own cooperative behavior.     

The impact of television,print, and audio on children's recall of the news.

Recent research has shown that children remember more from television news than from print news, a finding that has been explained by the extra mnemonic support offered by redundant television pictures (the dual‐coding hypothesis). The present study was designed to examine three alternative explanations, which attribute children's superior recall of television news to (a) underutilization of the print medium, (b) a recall advantage of listening compared with reading, and imperfect reading ability. A sample of 192 fourth and sixth graders was presented with children's news stories, either in (a) their original television form, (b) a bare print version, a print version supplemented with photo material or in (d) an audio version. Results indicated that the television presentation was remembered better than any of the other three versions. The results of the study were consistent with the dual‐coding hypothesis, whereas no support was found for the alternative explanations tested in the study.     

Beyond the information given: The power of a belief in self‐interest

How do we interpret other's behavior when we lack important pieces of information? Do we give the other the benefit of the doubt, believing that the other behaves in a fair manner? Or do we “fill in the blanks” with self‐interest? To address these questions, we designed a new method—the dice‐rolling paradigm—in which participants observed another person assigning outcomes by rolling two dice and allocating one of them to the participant, who only had information about one of the two dice. Using different baselines, the results revealed that participants underestimated the outcomes the other allocated to the participants, and overestimated the outcomes the other allocated to self, indicating that people assume self‐interest from others when information is incomplete. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.