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Scientific Reports Dec 2021The present study serves to test whether cooperation and moral punishment are affected by cognitive load. Dual-process theories postulate that moral behavior is...
The present study serves to test whether cooperation and moral punishment are affected by cognitive load. Dual-process theories postulate that moral behavior is intuitive which leads to the prediction that cooperation and moral punishment should remain unaffected or may even increase when cognitive load is induced by a secondary task. However, it has also been proposed that cognitive control and deliberation are necessary to choose an economically costly but morally justified option. A third perspective implies that the effects of cognitive load may depend on the specific processes involved in social dilemmas. In the present study, participants played a simultaneous Prisoner's Dilemma game with a punishment option. First, both players decided to cooperate or defect. Then they had the opportunity to punish the partners. In the cognitive-load group, cognitive load was induced by a continuous tone classification task while the no-load group had no distractor task. Under cognitive load, cooperation and moral punishment decreased in comparison to the no-load condition. By contrast, hypocritical and antisocial punishment were not influenced by the dual-task manipulation. Increased cognitive load was associated with a bias to punish the partners irrespective of the outcome of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, suggesting that punishment was applied less purposefully in the cognitive-load condition. The present findings are thus in line with the idea that the availability of cognitive resources does not always have a suppressive effect on moral behaviors, but can have facilitating effects on cooperation and moral punishment.
Topics: Adult; Cognition; Cooperative Behavior; Female; Humans; Male; Morals; Prisoner Dilemma; Punishment; Young Adult
PubMed: 34969946
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-04217-4 -
Journal of Theoretical Biology Apr 2017The role of punishment in the maintenance of cooperation has been emphasized recently. However, the maintenance of punishment is not an obvious consequence because...
The role of punishment in the maintenance of cooperation has been emphasized recently. However, the maintenance of punishment is not an obvious consequence because punishment itself is also a public good; it is costly to perform and hence vulnerable to exploitation. For example, cooperative punishers, who help others and punish free riders, are disadvantageous in competition against pure cooperators, who cooperate but do not punish free riders. In addition, pure punishers, who do not help others but punish free riders, have been considered to be selfish in conventional models, because they do not perform cooperation. Instead, here we assume that performing either cooperation or punishment is sufficient to avoid accusation from others because not only cooperators but also pure punishers contribute to their society by reducing a threat of free riders. Under such an assumption, we analyzed the evolutionary dynamics of pure cooperators, pure punishers and free riders. We first showed that cooperation is never maintained in a well-mixed population. When the population is spatially structured, however, oscillatory rock-paper-scissors dynamics among those strategies appear. We further find that a stable polymorphism of the three strategies is attained when mutation is introduced. Our results indicate that cooperation and punishment can be stably maintained even when one cannot perform cooperation and punishment at the same time, and provide insights about the coexistence of cooperation and punishment in real societies.
Topics: Algorithms; Computer Simulation; Cooperative Behavior; Game Theory; Humans; Interpersonal Relations; Models, Psychological; Punishment; Social Behavior
PubMed: 27880875
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2016.11.012 -
Child Psychiatry and Human Development Dec 2022A substantial proportion of youth with anxiety disorders shows comorbid behavioral (anger) problems. Such comorbid profile is associated with low treatment effectiveness...
A substantial proportion of youth with anxiety disorders shows comorbid behavioral (anger) problems. Such comorbid profile is associated with low treatment effectiveness and negative (longterm) outcomes. This study was therefore designed to examine trait factors that may promote anger responding in adolescents. By presenting participants (N = 158, mean age = 15.7, 56% female) with a series of common anger-eliciting situations, we tested whether high reward sensitivity would be associated with anger via perceived non-reward, and high punishment sensitivity via perceived threat. In line with the hypotheses, an indirect effect of reward sensitivity on anger was found via perceived non-reward, and an indirect effect of punishment sensitivity on anger via perceived threat. The latter association also had an indirect effect via perceived non-reward. High punishment and reward sensitivity may thus set adolescents at risk for developing (comorbid) anger problems via heightened threat and non-reward perceptions.
Topics: Adolescent; Anger; Female; Humans; Male; Punishment; Reward
PubMed: 34100184
DOI: 10.1007/s10578-021-01191-w -
Nature Communications Jun 2021Whether maximizing rewards and minimizing punishments rely on distinct brain systems remains debated, given inconsistent results coming from human neuroimaging and...
Whether maximizing rewards and minimizing punishments rely on distinct brain systems remains debated, given inconsistent results coming from human neuroimaging and animal electrophysiology studies. Bridging the gap across techniques, we recorded intracerebral activity from twenty participants while they performed an instrumental learning task. We found that both reward and punishment prediction errors (PE), estimated from computational modeling of choice behavior, correlate positively with broadband gamma activity (BGA) in several brain regions. In all cases, BGA scaled positively with the outcome (reward or punishment versus nothing) and negatively with the expectation (predictability of reward or punishment). However, reward PE were better signaled in some regions (such as the ventromedial prefrontal and lateral orbitofrontal cortex), and punishment PE in other regions (such as the anterior insula and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). These regions might therefore belong to brain systems that differentially contribute to the repetition of rewarded choices and the avoidance of punished choices.
Topics: Adult; Animals; Brain; Brain Mapping; Cerebral Cortex; Cognitive Neuroscience; Conditioning, Operant; Female; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Middle Aged; Neuroimaging; Prefrontal Cortex; Punishment; Reward
PubMed: 34099678
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23704-w -
Scientific Reports Feb 2017The vigor with which humans and animals engage in a task is often a determinant of the likelihood of the task's success. An influential theoretical model suggests that...
The vigor with which humans and animals engage in a task is often a determinant of the likelihood of the task's success. An influential theoretical model suggests that the speed and rate at which responses are made should depend on the availability of rewards and punishments. While vigor facilitates the gathering of rewards in a bountiful environment, there is an incentive to slow down when punishments are forthcoming so as to decrease the rate of punishments, in conflict with the urge to perform fast to escape punishment. Previous experiments confirmed the former, leaving the latter unanswered. We tested the influence of punishment in an experiment involving economic incentives and contrasted this with reward related behavior on the same task. We found that behavior corresponded with the theoretical model; while instantaneous threat of punishment caused subjects to increase the vigor of their response, subjects' response times would slow as the overall rate of punishment increased. We quantitatively show that this is in direct contrast to increases in vigor in the face of increased overall reward rates. These results highlight the opposed effects of rewards and punishments and provide further evidence for their roles in the variety of types of human decisions.
Topics: Behavior; Humans; Punishment; Reaction Time; Regression Analysis; Reward
PubMed: 28205567
DOI: 10.1038/srep42287 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Sep 2016Our species is routinely depicted as unique in its ability to achieve cooperation, whereas our closest relative, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), is often characterized...
Our species is routinely depicted as unique in its ability to achieve cooperation, whereas our closest relative, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), is often characterized as overly competitive. Human cooperation is assisted by the cost attached to competitive tendencies through enforcement mechanisms, such as punishment and partner choice. To examine if chimpanzees possess the same ability to mitigate competition, we set up a cooperative task in the presence of the entire group of 11 adults, which required two or three individuals to pull jointly to receive rewards. This open-group set-up provided ample opportunity for competition (e.g., freeloading, displacements) and aggression. Despite this unique set-up and initial competitiveness, cooperation prevailed in the end, being at least five times as common as competition. The chimpanzees performed 3,565 cooperative acts while using a variety of enforcement mechanisms to overcome competition and freeloading, as measured by (attempted) thefts of rewards. These mechanisms included direct protest by the target, third-party punishment in which dominant individuals intervened against freeloaders, and partner choice. There was a marked difference between freeloading and displacement; freeloading tended to elicit withdrawal and third-party interventions, whereas displacements were met with a higher rate of direct retaliation. Humans have shown similar responses in controlled experiments, suggesting shared mechanisms across the primates to mitigate competition for the sake of cooperation.
Topics: Aggression; Animals; Cooperative Behavior; Female; Humans; Male; Pan troglodytes; Punishment; Reward; Video Recording
PubMed: 27551075
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1611826113 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Nov 2023
Topics: Punishment; Reward
PubMed: 37906642
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2312950120 -
Psychopharmacology Jul 2014The serotonin (5-HT) system has been reported to be involved in decision-making. A key component of this neurotransmitter system is the 5-HT1A receptor, and research is... (Clinical Trial)
Clinical Trial
RATIONALE
The serotonin (5-HT) system has been reported to be involved in decision-making. A key component of this neurotransmitter system is the 5-HT1A receptor, and research is beginning to show how this receptor can influence decision-making. However, this relationship has rarely been studied in humans.
OBJECTIVES
This study assessed whether individual variability in 5-HT1A availability correlates with decision-making in healthy volunteers.
METHODS
We measured regional availability of the 5-HT1A receptor in the hippocampal complex and striatum using positron emission tomography and correlated this with performance on two decision-making tasks measuring sensitivity to probability, rewards and punishments and temporal discounting, respectively.
RESULTS
No relationship between decision-making behaviour and 5-HT1A availability in the striatum was found. However, a positive correlation was detected between participants' 5-HT1A availability in the hippocampal complex and their sensitivity to the probability of winning. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between the degree to which participants discounted future rewards and 5-HT1A availability in the hippocampal complex.
CONCLUSIONS
These data support a role for the 5-HT1A receptor in the aberrant decision-making that can occur in neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression.
Topics: Adult; Corpus Striatum; Decision Making; Delay Discounting; Female; Hippocampus; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Positron-Emission Tomography; Probability; Punishment; Receptor, Serotonin, 5-HT1A; Reward
PubMed: 24429872
DOI: 10.1007/s00213-013-3426-9 -
International Journal of... Jun 2009Earlier studies have demonstrated that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with aberrant sensitivity to rewards and punishments. Although some...
Earlier studies have demonstrated that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with aberrant sensitivity to rewards and punishments. Although some studies have focused on real-life decision making in children with ADHD using the Iowa gambling task, the number of good deck choices, a frequently used index of decision-making ability in the gambling task, is insufficient for investigating the complex decision-making strategies in subjects. In the present study, we investigated decision-making strategies in ADHD children, analyzing T-patterns with rewards, with punishments, and without rewards and punishments during the gambling task, and examined the relationship between decision-making strategies and skin conductance responses (SCRs) to rewards and punishments. We hypothesized that ADHD children and normal children would employ different decision-making strategies depending on their sensitivity to rewards and punishments in the gambling task. Our results revealed that ADHD children had fewer T-patterns with punishments and exhibited a significant tendency to have many T-patterns with rewards, thus supporting our hypothesis. Moreover, in contrast to normal children, ADHD children failed to demonstrate differences between reward and punishment SCRs, supporting the idea that they had an aberrant sensitivity to rewards and punishments. Therefore, we concluded that ADHD children would be impaired in decision-making strategies depending on their aberrant sensitivity to rewards and punishments. However, we were unable to specify whether large reward SCRs or small punishment SCRs is generated in ADHD children.
Topics: Adolescent; Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity; Child; Decision Making; Feedback, Psychological; Female; Games, Experimental; Humans; Male; Neuropsychological Tests; Punishment; Reward
PubMed: 19452602
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2009.01.007 -
Journal of Experimental Psychology.... Dec 2022Genetic essentialism is a set of beliefs holding that certain categories have a heritable, intrinsic, and biological basis. The current studies explore people's genetic...
Genetic essentialism is a set of beliefs holding that certain categories have a heritable, intrinsic, and biological basis. The current studies explore people's genetic essentialist beliefs about criminality, how such essentialism relates to beliefs about appropriate punishment, and the kinds of judgments and motivations that underlie these associations. Study 1 validated a novel task, in which respondents estimated how possible it would be for a child to inherit criminal behavior from a sperm donor with whom they had no contact. Studies 2-4 used this task to address how genetic essentialist beliefs related to the harmfulness of a crime and the harshness of recommended punishment. Results indicated a tendency to essentialize both low- and high-harm crimes, though genetic essentialism was higher for more harmful crimes. Moreover, genetic essentialist beliefs predicted recommendations for harsher punishments, with retributive and protective motivations, as well as perceptions of recidivism risk, partially mediating this association. Further, Studies 3 and 4 found that genetic essentialism positively predicted support for harsh punishments such as the death penalty, as well as support for directing financial resources more toward law enforcement and less toward social support. Lay theories about criminality may have profound implications for decisions about appropriate punishment for wrongdoers, as well as broader policy decisions about crime, punishment, and resource allocation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Child; Male; Humans; Punishment; Social Perception; Semen; Criminal Behavior; Judgment
PubMed: 35758988
DOI: 10.1037/xge0001240