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We examine how intergenerational cooperation may emerge in an experimental setting, using a chain-game across participants. In this game (hereafter, “intergenerational cooperation game”), participants are assigned to different positions (“generations”) in the sequence of resource-allocation decisions, whereby the sustainability of following generations are affected by how the preceding generations decide. In addition, we investigate the relationship between intra-generational and inter-generational cooperation, by assigning the same participants to play variations of the sequential two-person prisoner's dilemma (PD) game (e.g., Takahashi & Kameda, 2022a).

In this study, we examine the impact of a punishment system on group members in a nonlinear public goods experiment.

We will examine how collective action can be different between when its participation is mandatory and when voluntary.

Using the information-cascade (“chain”) paradigm, we examine the impact of social information on accuracies of individual answers about politically-nuanced and neural (non-political) issues.

In this study, we examine when people decide to stop observing behaviors of a human model in a MAB experiment.

Humans dislike unequal allocations. Although often conflated, such ‘inequality-averse’ preferences are separable into two elements: egalitarian concern about the variance and maximin concern about the poorest (maximizing the minimum). Recent research has shown that the maximin concern operates more robustly in allocation decisions than the egalitarian concern. However, the real-time cognitive dynamics of allocation decisions are still unknown. Here, we examined participants' choice behaviour with high temporal resolution using a mouse-tracking technique. Participants made a series of allocation choices for others between two options: a ‘non-utilitarian option’ with both smaller variance and higher minimum pay-off (but a smaller total) compared with the other ‘Utilitarian option’. Choice data confirmed that participants had strong inequality-averse preferences, and when choosing non-utilitarian allocations, participants' mouse movements prior to choices were more strongly determined by the minimum elements of the non-utilitarian options than the variance elements. Furthermore, a time-series analysis revealed that this dominance emerged at a very early stage of decision making (around 500 ms after the stimulus onset), suggesting that the maximin concern operated as a strong cognitive anchor almost instantaneously. Our results provide the first temporally fine-scale evidence that people weigh the maximin concern over the egalitarian concern in distributive judgements.

Competition for food resources is widespread in nature. The foraging behaviour of social animals should thus be adapted to potential food competition. We conjectured that in the presence of co-foragers, animals would shift their tactics to forage more frequently for smaller food. Because smaller foods are more abundant in nature and allow faster consumption, such tactics should allow animals to consume food more securely against scrounging. We experimentally tested whether such a shift would be triggered automatically in human eating behaviour, even when there was no rivalry about food consumption. To prevent subjects from having rivalry, they were instructed to engage in a ‘taste test' in a laboratory, alone or in pairs. Even though the other subject was merely present and there was no real competition for food, subjects in pairs immediately exhibited a systematic behavioural shift to reaching for smaller food amounts more frequently, which was clearly distinct from their reaching patterns both when eating alone and when simply weighing the same food without eating any. These patterns suggest that behavioural shifts in the presence of others may be built-in tactics in humans (and possibly in other gregarious animals as well) to adapt to potential food competition in social foraging.

A major problem resulting from the massive use of social media is the potential spread of incorrect information. Yet, very few studies have investigated the impact of incorrect information on individual and collective decisions. We performed experiments in which participants had to estimate a series of quantities, before and after receiving social information. Unbeknownst to them, we controlled the degree of inaccuracy of the social information through ‘virtual influencers’, who provided some incorrect information. We find that a large proportion of individuals only partially follow the social information, thus resisting incorrect information. Moreover, incorrect information can help improve group performance more than correct information, when going against a human underestimation bias. We then design a computational model whose predictions are in good agreement with the empirical data, and sheds light on the mechanisms underlying our results. Besides these main findings, we demonstrate that the dispersion of estimates varies a lot between quantities, and must thus be considered when normalizing and aggregating estimates of quantities that are very different in nature. Overall, our results suggest that incorrect information does not necessarily impair the collective wisdom of groups, and can even be used to dampen the negative effects of known cognitive biases.

Supplemental material, BryantSupplementalMaterial for The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies by Gregory A. Bryant, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Riccardo Fusaroli, Edward Clint, Dorsa Amir, Brenda Chávez, Kaleda K. Denton, Cinthya Díaz, Lealaiauloto Togiaso Duran, Jana Fanćovićová, Michal Fux, Erni Farida Ginting, Youssef Hasan, Anning Hu, Shanmukh V. Kamble, Tatsuya Kameda, Kiri Kuroda, Norman P. Li, Francesca R. Luberti, Raha Peyravi, Pavol Prokop, Katinka J. P. Quintelier, Hyun Jung Shin, Stefan Stieger, Lawrence S. Sugiyama, Ellis A. van den Hende, Hugo Viciana-Asensio, Saliha Elif Yildizhan, Jose C. Yong, Tessa Yuditha and Yi Zhou in Psychological Science

Supplemental material, BryantOpenPracticesDisclosure for The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies by Gregory A. Bryant, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Riccardo Fusaroli, Edward Clint, Dorsa Amir, Brenda Chávez, Kaleda K. Denton, Cinthya Díaz, Lealaiauloto Togiaso Duran, Jana Fanćovićová, Michal Fux, Erni Farida Ginting, Youssef Hasan, Anning Hu, Shanmukh V. Kamble, Tatsuya Kameda, Kiri Kuroda, Norman P. Li, Francesca R. Luberti, Raha Peyravi, Pavol Prokop, Katinka J. P. Quintelier, Hyun Jung Shin, Stefan Stieger, Lawrence S. Sugiyama, Ellis A. van den Hende, Hugo Viciana-Asensio, Saliha Elif Yildizhan, Jose C. Yong, Tessa Yuditha and Yi Zhou in Psychological Science

A number of empirical studies have suggested that individual differences in asocial exploration tendencies in animals may be related to those in social information use. However, because the ‘exploration tendency’ in most previous studies has been measured without considering the exploration-exploitation trade-off, it is yet hard to conclude that the animal asocial ‘exploration-exploitation’ tendency may be tied to social information use. Here, we studied human learning behaviour in both asocial and social multi-armed bandit tasks. By fitting reinforcement learning models including asocial and/or social decision processes, we measured each individual’s (1) asocial exploration tendency and (2) social information use. We found consistent individual differences in the exploration tendency in the asocial tasks. We also found substantive heterogeneity in the adopted learning strategies in the social task: One-third of participants were most likely to have used the copy-when-uncertain strategy, while the remaining two-thirds were most likely to have relied only on asocial learning. However, we found no significant individual association between the exploration frequency in the asocial task and the use of the social learning strategy in the social task. Our results suggest that the social learning strategies may be independent from the asocial search strategies in humans.