Power, social values and their role directing ‘the orchestra of heuristics’ in social dilemmas

Understanding when and why people cooperate is fundamental to understanding many of the phenomena that characterize human societies – from unconditional kindness to corruption; from perfect compliance with the rules to a full-blown tragedy of the commons. One well-established way to study this core question in Behavioral Economics is to zoom in on social decision-making itself via controlled laboratory studies. Such research has shown that decision-makers often solve complex social problems by way of mental shortcuts, triggered for example by the presence of (irrelevant) social cues, or offered by individuals’ deeply rooted social values. Yet, to this day many factors known to influence social decision-making are still mostly studied in isolation. Therefore, this dissertation set out to investigate the heuristic effects of several factors – power, eye cues and social values – on key facets of cooperative behavior, with attention for the possible interplay between these factors in steering social decision-making. Importantly, while power imbalances are such a prominent aspect of our social context, the impact of power on social decision-making remains grossly under-studied. Hence, a second prominent question in this dissertation is: how does feeling powerful influence the choices a person makes in social interactions? Moreover, a third important goal of this dissertation is to shed light on some of the underlying layers of the decision-making process that can offer invaluable insights: emotions (via objective FaceReader measures) and brain activation (via functional neuro-imaging techniques). The presented dissertation investigates these questions by combining multidisciplinary methods in 3 controlled laboratory studies. One of the overarching findings of this dissertation is that higher subjectively experienced power has an overall negative main effect on several key facets of cooperative behavior (trust, reciprocity, costly punishment, and fairness preferences). Interestingly, one study revealed that power’s effect on fairness preferences also depends on a person’s social values – and that this finding is paralleled in differential brain activation. Yet, our studies also reveal that we should not expect the same interactions to hold in all situations, and that different mental shortcuts may operate in parallel at the same time.

Publication year:2021

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

Accessibility:Open