Human behavior guided by fast changes in dopamine levels

What happens in the human brain when we learn from positive and negative experiences? To help answer that question and better understand decision-making and human behavior, scientists are studying dopamine.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the brain that serves as a chemical messenger, facilitating communication between nerve cells in the brain and the body. It is involved in functions such as movement, cognition and learning. While dopamine is most known for its association with positive emotions, scientists are also exploring its role in negative experiences.

Now, a new study from researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine shows that dopamine release in the human brain plays a crucial role in encoding both reward and punishment prediction errors. This means that dopamine is involved in the process of learning from both positive and negative experiences, allowing the brain to adjust and adapt its behavior based on the outcomes of these experiences.

The study was published today in Science Advances.

"Previously, research has shown that dopamine plays an important role in how animals learn from 'rewarding' (and possibly 'punishing') experiences. But, little work has been done to directly assess what dopamine does on fast timescales in the human brain," said Kenneth T. Kishida, Ph.D., associate professor of physiology and pharmacology and neurosurgery at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "This is the first study in humans to examine how dopamine encodes rewards and punishments and whether dopamine reflects an 'optimal' teaching signal that is used in today's most advanced artificial intelligence research."

For the study, researchers on Kishida's team utilized fast-scan cyclic voltammetry, an electrochemical technique, paired with machine learning, to detect and measure dopamine levels in real-time (i.e., 10 measurements per second). However, this method is challenging and can only be performed during invasive procedures such as deep-brain stimulation (DBS) brain surgery. DBS is commonly employed to treat conditions such as Parkinson's disease, essential tremor, obsessive-compulsive disorder and epilepsy.

Kishida's team collaborated with Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist neurosurgeons Stephen B. Tatter, M.D., and Adrian W. Laxton, M.D., who are also both faculty members in the Department of Neurosurgery at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, to insert a carbon fiber microelectrode deep into the brain of three participants at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center who were scheduled to receive DBS to treat essential tremor.

While the participants were awake in the operating room, they played a simple computer game. As they played the game, dopamine measurements were taken in the striatum, a part of the brain that is important for cognition, decision-making, and coordinated movements.

During the game, participants' choices were either rewarded or punished with real monetary gains or losses. The game was divided into three stages in which participants learned from positive or negative feedback to make choices that maximized rewards and minimized penalties. Dopamine levels were measured continuously, once every 100 milliseconds, throughout each of the three stages of the game.

"We found that dopamine not only plays a role in signaling both positive and negative experiences in the brain, but it seems to do so in a way that is optimal when trying to learn from those outcomes. What was also interesting, is that it seems like there may be independent pathways in the brain that separately engage the dopamine system for rewarding versus punishing experiences. Our results reveal a surprising result that these two pathways may encode rewarding and punishing experiences on slightly shifted timescales separated by only 200 to 400 milliseconds in time," Kishida said.

Kishida believes that this level of understanding may lead to a better understanding of how the dopamine system is affected in humans with psychiatric and neurological disorders. Kishida said additional research is needed to understand how dopamine signaling is altered in psychiatric and neurological disorders.

"Traditionally, dopamine is often referred to as 'the pleasure neurotransmitter,"' Kishida said. "However, our work provides evidence that this is not the way to think about dopamine. Instead, dopamine is a crucial part of a sophisticated system that teaches our brain and guides our behavior. That dopamine is also involved in teaching our brain about punishing experiences is an important discovery and may provide new directions in research to help us better understand the mechanisms underlying depression, addiction, and related psychiatric and neurological disorders."

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A finer picture of global migration reveals complex patterns

While public discussions often focus on climate change driving people to emigrate, new research published in Nature Human Behaviour shows that net-migration patterns around the world are actually more strongly linked with socio-economic factors. The study also provides a new, high-resolution dataset of net-migration over the past two decades to inform policy-making and fuel further research.

'Our findings don't really match the narrative that's repeated by the public about climate-induced migration,' says Venla Niva, a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University who was lead author of the study. 'When you look at the different factors together, the analysis shows that human development factors are more important drivers than climate.'

Societal factors override climate considerations

The research group, which included researchers from Aalto University, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the University of Bologna, published similar research last year covering the period 1990-2000. The new analysis covers the past two decades, 2000-2019. The high-resolution dataset they prepared makes it possible to answer questions that can't be addressed with coarser data, such as national averages. 'There was a real need for a dataset like this, but it didn't exist. So we decided to make it ourselves,' says Niva. The new dataset is openly available and can be easily explored through an online interactive map.

The team combined birth and death rates with overall population growth to estimate net migration. The role of socio-economics and climate were incorporated through the Human Development Index (HDI) and the aridity index.

By starting with sub-national death and birth ratios and scaling them down to 10 km resolution, the researchers produced a net-migration dataset of unprecedented resolution. This makes it possible to address questions that can't be answered using national aggregates. 'Climate factors don't follow administrative boundaries, so data like this is needed if you want to study these patterns,' explains Niva.

The researchers found high levels of emigration in regions that were on the middle of the scale in both HDI and aridity, such as areas in Central America, northeast Brazil, Central Africa and southeast Asia. 'It's not the poorest of the poor who are fleeing environmental disasters or environmental changes. Migration is an adaptation method used by people who have the capacity to move,' says Niva.

By the same token, areas with a high HDI experienced positive net migration regardless of their climate condition. For example, regions in the Arabian Peninsula, North America, Australia, and the North Mediterranean are net receivers despite their aridity.

'Decision-makers should pay attention to this. Rather than focusing solely on border closures and combating migration, we should work to support and empower individuals in economically disadvantaged countries. That would help reduce the drivers that compel people to migrate in search of better opportunities,' says Matti Kummu, associate professor of global water and food issues at Aalto and senior author of the study.

National averages mask local patterns

The granularity of the new dataset reveals complexities in migration patterns that are hidden when national data is used. 'In France and Italy, for example, there are really interesting differences between north and south, and in Spain there's an east-west difference. There are so many patterns that national experts could look into, and of course the reasons behind them might be different for each country,' says Kummu.

Unexpected patterns also showed up in urban-rural migration. 'There's a very common belief that urban areas are pulling the people from the rural areas, but that wasn't the case everywhere. For example, there are a lot of places for example in Europe where the opposite is true,' says Kummu. Migration from cities to rural areas was also evident in parts of Indonesia, Congo, Venezuela, and Pakistan, and when the analysis is done of the level of communities, the picture becomes even more complex.

'Overall, migration is more complex than people tend to think,' says Niva. 'Our findings contribute to the discussion of where and how migration is happening -- it's not actually a Eurocentric phenomenon, because most migration happens elsewhere in the world.'

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Sociogenomics: The intricate science of how genetics influences sociology

Humans contain multitudes. Each person on the planet contains enough DNA to stretch to Pluto -- several times.

Studying how all this genetic material works, and especially how genes influence human behavior, is an enormously complicated undertaking -- one that's being made easier by the emergence of massive banks of genetic data and complex data science analysis techniques to parse that data.

Robbee Wedow, an assistant professor of sociology and data science in Purdue University's College of Liberal Arts, an adjunct assistant professor of medical and molecular genetics in the Indiana University School of Medicine, and Purdue's inaugural faculty-in-residence at AnalytiXIN/16 Tech in Indianapolis, maps those miles of genes for insights into how genetics interacts with social forces and environments. He uses genetic databases to study how tiny bits of genes called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, affect complex, overarching traits including sexual behavior, educational attainment, socioeconomic status, health behaviors and more.

"We know that social forces like socioeconomic status play a role in influencing a person's life and life outcomes," Wedow said. "But we also know there is a genetic component to every behavior. What we don't understand yet is how these biological forces interact with the environment and what these sorts of interactions might mean for social science -- and what we think we know about social science research to date. We are using well-powered genetic data to do more accurate and replicable social science and to explore what might be possible at the intersection of genetic and behavioral science."

When scientists sequenced the first human genome in 2003, the true scale of genetics started to become apparent. Early geneticists thought that finding a gene for each trait was simply a matter of looking in the right place.

However, DNA bases and genes are not simply keys on a massive piano upon which human lives are played like masterpieces. Instead, DNA operates more like a pipe organ, where stops, switches and pedals can change the way notes sound, mute them or increase their volume. Environment, nutrition, pollution, life experiences and other circumstances can change when and how genes matter for certain outcomes, and even change which places in the genomes matter for those outcomes altogether. There isn't a single gene for a behavioral outcome. Biology isn't destiny: It may lay out the musical score, but musicians are free to improvise and interpret as they play.

The idea, Wedow stresses, is not that these genes control a person's life or destiny. Each SNP, in fact, has a very small effect on an overall outcome like educational attainment. No "Gattaca"-level reading of one's destiny from their genes -- in the style of the dystopian 1990s movie -- is on the horizon. Rather, being able to clarify the genetics of certain behaviors can help scientists understand the nuances of human behavior.

"People think that genetics is always about biology, but in the case of sociogenomics it's more about using the advantages of this new, well-powered data to better understand the outcomes themselves, or about allowing researchers to do more accurate social science and behavioral research," Wedow said. "The social sciences have recently struggled with replicating studies. Oftentimes the sample sizes are too small for rigorous estimates and certainty. That's where the potential of using these huge banks of genetic data for the social sciences comes in. They help us get a much clearer, more certain look at what's really going on."

Analyzing the genetics is only the first step. An American geneticist in the early 1800s could have correlated genetics with educational mastery and concluded that anyone with two X chromosomes tended to have less education. That is not because the chromosomes had anything at all to do with education. Rather, the correlation reflected social and gender biases present in the culture at the time. Similar insights lurk in Wedow's research.

"Sociogenomics isn't necessarily about biology, like some might think," Wedow said. "When someone studies cancer genetics, they are studying it because they want to elucidate the biology of cancer; they want to figure out ways to better diagnose it, track it and treat it. But researchers in the field of sociogenomics want to study the genetics in order to do better social science. No one would ever study sociology without considering socioeconomic status and environment. We want to be able to take genetics into account in the same way."

In a study in volume 7, No. 7 of the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Wedow, his co-corresponding author Andrea Ganna from the University of Helsinki, and his other co-authors looked at 109 survey questions in over 300,000 individuals to examine the ways that people's genes correlated with whether they answered certain questions or left them blank in surveys answered in the UK Biobank. That may sound fairly abstruse, but it fills a gap that the field of sociology has struggled with for decades.

"How do you know what you don't know or how someone might have answered a question if they choose not to answer it?" Wedow said. "It turns out that the genetics of people who either answer the survey question, or do not, overlaps with the genetics of other outcomes like education, income or certain health behaviors."

That means that scientists can use this type of data to get a better understanding of how people who choose not to answer questionnaires might also share similar responses to questions about health or social behaviors. Geneticists can also use the results of this study to correct for bias in genetic studies of any behavioral, psychiatric or medical outcomes.

Read more at Science Daily

Small acts of kindness are frequent and universal, study finds

A study by researchers from UCLA, Australia, Ecuador, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. found that people around the world signal others for assistance every couple of minutes. The research, which examined behaviors in towns and rural areas in several different countries, revealed that people comply with these small requests for help far more often than they decline them. The findings suggest that people from all cultures have more similar cooperative behaviors than prior research has established.

A new study by UCLA sociologist Giovanni Rossi and an international team of collaborators finds that people rely on each other for help constantly.

In the study, published in Scientific Reports, the authors -- who also included researchers at universities in Australia, Ecuador, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. -- explore the human capacity for cooperation. They found that people signal a need for assistance, such as asking someone to pass them a utensil, once every couple of minutes.

And the research revealed that those requests for help do not go unanswered: Across cultures, people comply with these small requests far more often than they decline them. On the rare occasions when people do decline, they explain why.

Those human tendencies -- to help others when needed and to explain when such help can't be given -- transcends cultural differences, suggesting that, deep down, people from all cultures have more similar cooperative behaviors than prior research has established.

The new findings help solve a puzzle generated by prior anthropological and economic research, which has emphasized variation in rules and norms governing cooperation.

For example, while whale hunters of Lamalera, Indonesia, follow established rules about how to share out a large catch, Hadza foragers of Tanzania share their food more out of a fear of generating negative gossip. In Kenya, wealthier Orma villagers are expected to pay for public goods such as road projects. Wealthy Gnau villagers of Papua New Guinea, on the other hand, would reject such an offer because it creates an awkward obligation to reciprocate for their poorer neighbors.

"Cultural differences like these have created a puzzle for understanding cooperation and helping among humans," said Rossi, the paper's first author. "Are our decisions about sharing and helping shaped by the culture we grew up with? Or are humans generous and giving by nature?"

To answer those questions, the authors analyzed over 40 hours of video recordings of everyday life involving more than 350 people in geographically, linguistically and culturally diverse sites -- towns in England, Italy, Poland and Russia, and rural villages in Ecuador, Ghana, Laos and Aboriginal Australia.

The analysis focused on sequences in which one person sent a signal for help, such as asking directly or visibly struggling with a task, and another person responded. The authors identified more than 1,000 such requests, occurring on average about once every two minutes. The situations involved "low-cost" decisions about sharing items for everyday use or assisting others with tasks around the house or village, for example.

Such decisions are many orders more frequent than "high-cost" decisions such as sharing the spoils of a successful whale hunt or contributing to the construction of a village road, the types of decisions that have been found to be significantly influenced by culture.

People complied with small requests seven times more often than they declined, and six times more often than they ignored them. People did sometimes reject or ignore small requests, but a lot less frequently than they complied. The average rates of rejection (10%) and ignoring (11%) were much lower than the average rate of compliance (79%).

The preference for compliance held across all cultures and was unaffected by whether the interaction was among family or non-family members.

People helped without explanation, but when they declined, 74% of the time they gave an explicit reason. That suggests that while people decline helping only for a good reason, they give help unconditionally, without needing to explain why they are doing it.

"A cross-cultural preference for compliance with small requests is not predicted by prior research on resource-sharing and cooperation, which instead suggest that culture should cause prosocial behavior to vary in appreciable ways due to local norms, values, and adaptations to the natural, technological, and socio-economic environment," said N. J. Enfield, the paper's corresponding author and a linguist at the University of Sydney. "These and other factors could in principle make it easier for people to say 'no' to small requests, but this is not what we find."

The findings suggest that being helpful is an ingrained reflex in the human species, Rossi said.

Read more at Science Daily

The relationship between ghosting and closure

Odds are, you know someone who has been ghosted. And according to a new study from the University of Georgia, it can be a haunting experience.

A recent study conducted by researcher and corresponding author Christina Leckfor and University of Mississippi researcher Natasha Wood found nearly two-thirds of participants have ghosted -- ended a relationship by ignoring the other person, without offering a clear explanation -- and have been ghosted.

And as online dating, dating apps and other social technologies grow in popularity, so does the likelihood that someone is left on read after a few dates. Yet despite its frequent occurrence, little is known about why people ghost or the psychological effects of this social phenomenon.

"Ghosting is becoming a common strategy, and it creates an ambiguous situation where one party doesn't really know what's going on," said Leckfor, a doctoral student in the UGA Department of Psychology. "We were interested in what individual differences or personal characteristics might influence a person's intentions to use ghosting. We also wanted to know if people with a high need for closure were less likely to use ghosting, or if they would hurt more after being ghosted."

On the receiving end of a breakup, ghosting was a negative experience for almost all participants. But for individuals who yearn for closure, the negative effects of ghosting are even more profound.

To gauge the effect of a breakup, study participants reflected on a past relationship, either a time they were ghosted or directly rejected, and then answered questions about their psychological needs satisfaction -- feelings of belonging, self-esteem, control and meaningful existence. Ghosted participants had some of the lowest needs satisfaction, meaning they were hit hardest by the rejection, and those who wanted closure reported even lower needs satisfaction.

"For recipients, desire for closure has this magnifying effect. When someone with a high need for closure recalled a time where they were ghosted or directly rejected, it hurt more than if they had a low need for closure," Leckfor said. "But they also felt more positive after recalling times when they were acknowledged by their partner."

In contrast, when someone considered initiating a breakup, the connection between closure and ghosting varied.

"We actually found that people who had a higher need for closure were slightly more likely to intend to use ghosting to end a relationship," Leckfor said. "Even though things may be ambiguous on the recipient side, the person who is ghosting sees it as a distinct end to the relationship. Those results weren't definitive in our study, but they pose an interesting avenue for future research."

And ghosting's not just for dating apps anymore. More than half of the study participants wrote about a time when they were ghosted by a friend, rather than a romantic partner.

"The individuals who were ghosted by a friend reported feeling just as bad about the relationship as those who wrote about a time when they were ghosted by a romantic partner," Leckfor said. "In psychology in general, a lot of literature regarding adult relationships focuses on romantic relationships. This [research] shows that friendships are really important to study as well."

It also relates back to the role of technology in our relationships. There have been several studies on how people initiate, maintain and end relationships without technology, but as more human connectivity moves to social media, dating apps, texting or Zoom, those relationships can change. And individual traits, such as a need for closure, will factor into how we use those technologies.

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Young chimpanzees and human teens share risk-taking behaviors

Adolescent chimpanzees share some of the same risk-taking behaviors as human teens, but they may be less impulsive than their human counterparts, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. The study gets at age-old nature/nurture questions about why adolescents take more risks: because of environment or because of biological predispositions?

"Adolescent chimpanzees are in some sense facing the same psychological tempest that human teens are," said lead researcher Alexandra Rosati, PhD, an associate professor of psychology and anthropology at the University of Michigan. "Our findings show that several key features of human adolescent psychology are also seen in our closest primate relatives."

The researchers conducted two tests involving food rewards with 40 wild-born chimpanzees at a sanctuary in Republic of Congo. The chimpanzees voluntarily participated in the games in order to receive food treats. The research was published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Chimpanzees can live to be 50 years old and experience adolescence at about 8 to 15. Like humans, chimpanzees show rapid changes in hormone levels during adolescence, start forming new bonds with peers, show increases in aggression and compete for social status.

In the first test, adolescent and adult chimpanzees could choose between two containers in a gambling task. One container always contained peanuts, a food that chimpanzees somewhat like. The other container concealed either an unliked food -- a cucumber slice -- or a favorite food -- a banana slice. The chimpanzees could play it safe and get the peanuts, or take a chance for some coveted banana at the risk of ending up with unappetizing cucumber.

The chimpanzees' emotional reactions and vocalizations were recorded, including moans, whimpers, screams, banging on the table or scratching themselves. Saliva samples also were collected to track hormone levels.

During several rounds of the test, adolescent chimpanzees took the risky option more often than adult chimpanzees, but adolescents and adults had similar negative reactions when they received cucumber.

The second test, modeled after the famous "marshmallow test" with human children, examined delayed gratification where chimpanzees could receive one banana slice immediately or wait for one minute to receive three slices.

Both adolescent and adult chimpanzees chose the greater delayed reward at a similar rate. Human teens tend to be more impulsive than adults so they would be more likely to take the immediate reward.

"Prior research indicates that chimpanzees are quite patient compared with other animals, and our study shows that their ability to delay gratification is already mature at a fairly young age, unlike in humans," Rosati said.

However, adolescent chimpanzees weren't happy about waiting for the extra banana slices and they threw more tantrums during the one-minute delay than adult chimpanzees.

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Scientists study tourists to protect great apes

Researchers are protecting great apes from diseases by studying the behaviour and expectations of tourists who visit them.

Humans are great apes, and this close genetic link makes non-human great apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, eastern gorillas, western gorillas and orangutans) vulnerable to our infectious diseases.

In the new study, by an international team including the University of Exeter, NOVA University Lisbon and Ugandan NGO Conservation Through Public Health, almost 1,000 tourists or potential future tourists completed an online questionnaire.

Willingness to comply with disease prevention measures like wearing a facemask varied depending on factors such as nationality, expectations about the visitor experience and whether people thought specific disease-risk measures were effective.

The study was conducted in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the researchers also created the Protect Great Apes from Disease initiative.

"We have developed visitor education and guide-training materials for use in African sites of great ape tourism," said lead author Dr Ana Nuno, of NOVA University Lisbon and the University of Exeter.

"To do so, we first explored what factors seem to affect visitors' compliance with disease mitigation measures.

"This included asking them about their actions on previous visits, their willingness to comply in future and exploring what factors should be promoted to increase their willingness to follow recommendations.

"To do so, we adapted a tool from the health literature which is commonly used for understanding why individuals may or may not act in the face of a threat to health."

Dr Kim Hockings, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall, added: "Through this greater understanding of the visitors to wild African great ape tourism sites, we were able to identify ways of improving measures to reduce disease transmission.

"This is important not only for COVID-19 but other infectious diseases too, particularly at the early stages of future pandemics when information is generally limited but preventive action is required.

"In the face of growing threats from future pandemics, we must minimise disease transmission while ensuring that tourism and research promote long-term support for the conservation of great apes and their habitats as well as maximising benefits for local communities."

The questionnaire was completed by 420 past visitors and 569 potential future visitors (from 58 countries in total) to wild great ape tourism sites in Africa.

When compared to other disease-mitigation measures, visitors expressed less willingness to being vaccinated against COVID-19 (which, at the time the survey was conducted, had only just started being administered to very high-risk groups), wearing a facemask during trekking (although willing when viewing the apes) and quarantine after international travel before visiting great apes.

Believing that each specific measure was effective in preventing disease was key to respondents' willingness to follow that specific recommendation.

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New theory of decision-making seeks to explain why humans don't make optimal choices

A new theory of economic decision-making from Mina Mahmoudi, a lecturer in the Department of Economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, offers an explanation as to why humans, in general, make decisions that are simply adequate, not optimal.

In research published today in the Review of Behavioral Economics, Dr. Mahmoudi theorizes an aspect of relative thinking explaining people may use ratios in their decision-making when they should only use absolute differences. The inverse is also possible.

To explain this behavioral anomaly, Dr. Mahmoudi has developed a ratio-difference theory that gives weight to both ratio and difference comparisons. This theory seeks to more accurately capture the manner by which a boundedly rational decision-maker might operationally distinguish whether one alternative is better than another.

"Effectively solving some economic problems requires one to think in terms of differences while others require one to think in terms of ratios," Dr. Mahmoudi said. "Because both types of thinking are necessary, it is reasonable to think people develop and apply both types. However, it is also reasonable to expect that people misapply the two types of thinking, especially when less experienced with the context."

Past studies have shown that when given the opportunity to save, for example, $5 on a $25 item or a $500 item, people in general would put in more effort to save the money on the lower-cost product than the more expensive item. They believe they are getting a better deal because the ratio of cost to savings is higher. In fact, the $5 saved is the same for both items and the perfect, or optimal choice, would be to look at the absolute savings and work equally hard to save each $5. People should use differences to solve this problem, but many seem to make unreasonable decisions because they apply ratio thinking.

"Understanding how the cognitive and motivational characteristics of human beings and the operating procedures of organizations influence the working of economic systems is of critical importance," Dr. Mahmoudi said. "Many economic behaviors such as imitation occur and many economic institutions like inventories exist because people cannot maximize or because markets are not in equilibrium. Our model provides an example of a behavior that occurs because people cannot maximize."

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Smells like ancient society: Scientists find ways to study and reconstruct past scents

In a new call for action paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, discuss the importance of scent in human history and address how and why experts might investigate smells from the past.

In recent years, millions of people worldwide have suffered the loss of smell due to COVID-19. Even those who have avoided infection with the new coronavirus experience the world of scent differently now due to the very masks that provide protection from the virus. This loss of olfaction has highlighted the important role of smell in how we perceive and navigate the world, and underscored the connections between olfaction and mental and physical health.

Scent has always been an integral component of the human experience, but up until now, the past has remained largely odorless. Most scents come from organic substances that decay quickly, leaving little for archaeologists to investigate thousands of years later. Now a team of researchers from the MPI for the Science of Human History is looking for new ways to bring the smellscapes of the past back to life and using smell to study past experience, behaviour, and society.

"Tracking scent in the deep past is not a simple task," says Barbara Huber, the lead author of the paper, "but the fact that history records expeditions of discovery, wars, and long-distance exchange to acquire materials with strong olfactory properties -- like incense and spices -- reveals how significant scent has been for human kind."

Understanding the sensorial dimension of human history and the use of odorous and aromatic substances can contribute knowledge about many aspects of the past -- including ritual, perfumery, hygiene, cuisine, trade and commerce. But because scent is part of how we experience, understand and navigate the world, ancient scents can also provide insight into more general aspects of the past, from social hierarchy and social practices to group identity.

"Scent is a powerful and underappreciated aspect of human experience," notes Professor Nicole Boivin, senior author of the study and Director of the Department of Archaeology at the MPI Science of Human History "Smells reach our brain fairly directly and motivate us in critical ways -- whether to avoid danger, identify something that is good for us, or remember something from our past, for example."

"Using only traces of scented substances preserved in archaeological artefacts and features," adds Huber, "novel methods are revealing the powerful odours that were a cardinal feature of ancient lived realities, and that shaped human action, thoughts, emotions and memories."

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Why people deceive themselves

A philosophy team from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the University of Antwerp analysed the role self-deception plays in everyday life and the strategies people use to deceive themselves. In the journal Philosophical Psychology, Dr. Francesco Marchi and Professor Albert Newen describe four strategies used to stabilise and shield the positive self-image. According to their theory, self-deception helps people to stay motivated in difficult situations. The article was published on 6 January 2022.

Four strategies of self-deception

"All people deceive themselves, and quite frequently at that," says Albert Newen from the RUB Institute of Philosophy II. "For instance, if a father is convinced that his son is a good student and then the son brings home bad grades, he may first say that the subject isn't that important or that the teacher didn't explain the material well." The researchers call this strategy of self-deception the reorganisation of beliefs. In their article, they describe three more frequently used strategies that come into play even earlier in order to prevent unpleasant facts from getting to you in the first place.

This includes selecting facts through purposeful action: people avoid places or persons that might bring problematic facts to their attention, such as the parent-teacher conference. Another strategy is to reject facts by casting doubt on the credibility of the source. As long as the father hears about his son's academic problems only indirectly and does not see the grades, he can ignore the problems. The last strategy is what Newen and Marchi call generating facts from an ambiguous state of affairs: "For instance, if the kind mathematics teacher gently suggests that the son is not coping, and the father would have expected a clear statement in case of difficulties, he may interpret the considerable kindness and the gentle description as a positive assessment of his son's abilities," Francesco Marchi elaborates on the example.

The researchers describe all four strategies as typical psychological thinking tendencies. Self-deception is neither unreasonable nor detrimental to people in the short term, but always in the medium and long term. "These are not malicious ways of doing things, but part of the basic cognitive equipment of humans to preserve their established view of themselves and the world," says Newen. In normal times with few changes, the tendency to stick to proven views is helpful and also deeply rooted in evolution. "However, this cognitive tendency is catastrophic in times of radically new challenges that require rapid changes in behaviour," adds the Bochum researcher.

Read more at Science Daily

Brain study on how to slow down climate change

When it comes to climate-friendly behaviour, there is often a gap between what we want and what we actually do. Although most people want to see climate change slowed down, many do not behave in an appropriately sustainable way. Researchers at the University of Bern have now used brain stimulation to demonstrate that the ability to sympathize with the future victims of climate change encourages sustainable behaviour.

Global climate change may be the biggest challenge faced by humanity today. Despite decades of warnings and political resolutions, however, sustainability remains a long way from being achieved. "The fact that people aren't acting in a more climate friendly way isn't because we know too little about this critical situation, though." explains Daria Knoch, Professor for Social Neuroscience at the University of Bern. To find out more about the reasons that prevent us from acting sustainably, Daria Knoch and her team have conducted a neuroscientific study. The findings have just been published in the international journal Cortex.

While some effects of global warming are already visible today, those affected more strongly will be people in the future who we do not know. "It is precisely our inability to mentalise with these strangers that discourages climate-friendly action," says Daria Knoch, commenting on the findings of the new study that she carried out with her research group in the "Social Neuro Lab" at the University of Bern. During the study, participants received stimulation to a part of their brain which plays an important role for taking the perspective of others. This stimulation led to more sustainable behaviour.

Stimulation of the part of the brain responsible for forming perspectives

During the experiment, participants in groups of four withdrew real money from a shared pool. Each participant decided for themself: the more money they withdrew from the pool, the more they ultimately had in their pocket. However, if the group of four withdrew too much money overall, this had consequences for the next group: the payment they received was much lower. Thus, the experiment mimicked a real situation in which the overuse of a resource has negative consequences for other people in the future.

While deciding on the amount of money to withdraw, some participants received a brain stimulation (experimental group): a non-invasive, harmless, mild electrical current was applied to the skull to increase the function of the stimulated brain area. The researchers in Bern stimulated an area which plays a strong role in taking the perspective of others, and discovered that it had a considerable impact: the stimulated individuals made more sustainable decisions than the participants without the stimulation (control group), by deciding not to withdraw an excessive amount of money from the pool.

Benefits for climate communication

"Applying brain stimulation to the general public is out the question, of course," explains Benedikt Langenbach, lead author of the study and a former PhD student at the Social Neuro Lab. However, according to the researchers, the functioning brain area in question can also be enhanced, for example, through neurofeedback and meditation. According to Benedikt Langenbach, who now works at the University of Duisburg-Essen, additional strategies are also available to improve the forming of perspectives: "We know that people are more likely to empathise with someone -- a victim of climate change, for example -- if they are able to identify with them."

Read more at Science Daily

How people understand other people

To successfully cooperate or compete with other people in everyday life, it is important to know what the other person thinks, feels, or wants. Dr. Julia Wolf, Dr. Sabrina Coninx and Professor Albert Newen from Institute of Philosophy II at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have explored which strategies people use to understand other people. For a long time, it was assumed that people relied exclusively on a single strategy: mindreading. This means that people infer the mental states of others solely based on their behaviour. In more recent accounts, however, this ability has been relegated to the background. The Bochum-based team now argues that although people use a number of different strategies, mindreading also plays an important role. They present their findings in the journal Erkenntnis, published online on 10 November 2021.

Strategies for understanding others

In recent years, researchers have criticised mindreading for being too complicated and demanding to be a common strategy for understanding other people. Julia Wolf provides an example of mindreading: "When I see someone running towards a bus, I infer that this person has the desire to catch the bus," she says. "In doing so, I can either picture myself in their situation, or draw on my knowledge of general principles regarding the behaviour of others."

However, in order to recognise the feelings, desires, and needs of others, people may take a different approach. They can directly perceive that a person is stressed based on physical features and other contextual cues. But they can also predict what a person will do next based on learned behavioural rules, without having to infer and attribute a mental state. "When someone gets on the bus, I can predict that they will show their ticket at the entrance without thinking about what is making them do so," says Sabrina Coninx.

People combine different strategies

Today, researchers assume that people combine several strategies to understand others. "We argue that mindreading is more than an unreliable and rarely used backup strategy in this context -- it plays a major role in social cognition," Albert Newen sums up the findings. The authors identify three criteria that could be used to test the importance of mindreading: how frequently it is used, how central it is, and how reliable it is.

While more empirical research is needed to answer the frequency question, the Bochum-based team thinks that there are good reasons to think that mindreading is central to social understanding. "It enables us to develop an individual understanding of others that goes beyond the here and now," explains Julia Wolf. "This plays a crucial role in building and maintaining long-term relationships."

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Researchers map neurons in the brain involved with social interactions with others in groups

Meaningful social interactions are critical to an individual's well-being, and such interactions rely on people's behaviors towards one another. In research published in Science, investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have mapped the neurons in the brain that allow a monkey to process and remember the interactions and behaviors of another monkey to influence the animal's own actions. The findings might be used to develop treatment strategies for people with neuropsychiatric conditions.

The study had three Rhesus monkeys sit around a rotary table and take turns to offer an apple slice to one of the other two monkeys. At the same time, the researchers recorded the activity of individual neurons in a brain area known to play a role in social cognition, called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC).

During these interactions, the monkeys reciprocated past offers of an apple slice and retaliated when they did not receive a slice from another. The researchers' recordings identified distinct neurons in the dmPFC that responded to the actions of other monkeys in the group. Certain neurons were activated with a particular action and outcome of specific individuals within the group (such as a neighbor monkey offering an apple slice leads to the outcome of receiving the reward). Many of the neurons encoded information not only about the actions and outcomes of specific individuals but also about their past behavior. This information about past interactions with group members influenced an animal's upcoming decisions to reciprocate or retaliate, and investigators could use the neuronal information to predict which monkey would receive an apple slice from a particular monkey even before it was offered.

"This finding suggested that the dmPFC plays a role in strategic decisions. To test this idea, we disrupted the normal activity in this area and found that the animals were less likely to reciprocate," says lead author Raymundo Báez-Mendoza, PhD, an investigator in the Department of Neurosurgery at MGH.

The results suggest that the dmPFC plays an important role in mapping out our actions and outcomes as well as the actions of others. "In neuropsychiatric conditions in which this ability is compromised, treatments aimed at improving the functioning of this brain area, either directly or indirectly, might improve peoples' lives," says senior author Ziv Williams, MD.

Read more at Science Daily

People love the billionaire, but hate the billionaires’ club

Americans may respect and admire how individual billionaires -- think Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates -- made their billions, even as they rage against the "top 1%" as a group, new research finds.

In eight related studies, people tended to have fewer problems with hearing about the extreme wealth of a particular wealthy person, even as they thought it was unfair that billionaires in general controlled so much riches.

"When there's this group of people at the top, we think that's unfair and wonder how luck or the economic system may have played a role in how they made all the money," said Jesse Walker, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.

"But when we look at one person at the top, we tend to think that person is talented and hard-working and they're more deserving of all the money they made."

And this difference may have real-life implications: People are more likely to support wealth taxes on the super-rich when they think about a group like the top 1%, but less likely to support these taxes when they think about a specific rich person.

Walker conducted the study with Thomas Gilovich, professor of psychology, and Stephanie Tepper, a PhD student in psychology, both at Cornell University. Their findings were published today (Oct. 18, 2021) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In one study, 201 survey respondents had very different opinions about how much more a CEO should make relative to the average employee depending on how this fact was presented.

One group of participants read that the salaries of the CEOs of the largest 350 companies in America had grown from 48 times the average worker in 1995 to 372 times today.

The other group of participants read about one specific company in the top 350, called Avnet, and how Avnet's CEO, Robert Eisen, had seen his salary grow from 48 times the average worker in 1995 to 372 times today.

Participants in the study read that observers attributed the growth of all 350 companies, or the growth of Avnet, to their CEOs.

Those who were told about Avnet's CEO thought that the ratio of his salary to the average employee should be significantly higher than did those who were told about the whole group of CEOs.

"We appear to be a bit more tolerant of lavish compensation when it is an individual CEO being compensated, rather than CEOs as a group," Walker said.

The way the wealthy are portrayed and praised in society and the media may play a large role in how accepting people are of economic inequality, he said.

In one study, participants were shown a Forbes magazine cover. Half saw a cover adapted from an issue that highlighted the wealthiest people in the world. The cover was edited to remove five billionaires that most people were familiar with, such as Gates and Winfrey, in order to eliminate any positive or negative biases people might have toward them. It included only the seven billionaires that most people would either know nothing about or not feel strongly about.

The other half were shown a cover with only one of the seven billionaires.

After reading a brief description of the person or persons on the cover, participants were asked to write a few sentences conveying how they felt about the person or persons, and rate how much the person or persons deserved their wealth and how they thought they earned those riches.

The findings were striking, Walker said.

The comments of those who wrote about the individual were less angry than those who wrote about the group, and more likely to reflect the belief that the individual billionaire's success was due to talent and hard work.

"People in our study were clearly more upset by the wealth of the seven individuals pictured on a single cover than they were by any one of them pictured alone," Walker said.

And there was more. People who saw the seven billionaires pictured together were more in favor of an inheritance tax to close the gap between the wealthy and poor than were those who saw only one billionaire.

"How we think of the wealthiest people -- as a group or as individuals -- seems to affect even our policy preferences," he said.

The issue of how we think about policy regarding inequality is important, Walker said. Economic inequality has grown substantially over the past decades, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. One analysis suggests that U.S. billionaires saw their wealth surge $1.8 trillion (62%) during the pandemic.

Research has shown that countries with greater economic inequality tend to have higher homicide rates, greater infant mortality, lower well-being and lower commitment to democratic institutions.

"How we express and communicate information about inequality is important. Talking about "the 1%" is going to get a different reaction than personalizing it by talking about one person in that exclusive club," Walker said.

Read more at Science Daily

Those earrings are so last year – but the reason you're wearing them is ancient

The necklace, nametag, earrings or uniform you chose to put on this morning might say more than you realize about your social status, job or some other aspect of your identity.

Anthropologists say humans have been doing this -- finding ways to communicate about themselves without the fuss of conversation -- for millennia.

But shell beads recovered from a cave in western Morocco, determined to be between 142,000 and 150,000 years old, suggest that this behavior may go back much farther than previously thought. The finding, detailed Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, was made by a team of archaeologists that includes Steven L. Kuhn, a professor of anthropology in the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The beads, Kuhn and his colleagues say, are the earliest known evidence of a widespread form of nonverbal human communication, and they shed new light on how humans' cognitive abilities and social interactions evolved.

"They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing," Kuhn said. "They're the tip of the iceberg for that kind of human trait. They show that it was present even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that humans were interested in communicating to bigger groups of people than their immediate friends and family."

How does this ancient form of communication show up today? It happens often, Kuhn said.

"You think about how society works -- somebody's tailgating you in traffic, honking their horn and flashing their lights, and you think, 'What's your problem?'" Kuhn said. "But if you see they're wearing a blue uniform and a peaked cap, you realize it's a police officer pulling you over."

Kuhn and an international team of archaeologists recovered the 33 beads between 2014 and 2018 near the mouth of Bizmoune Cave, about 10 miles inland from Essaouira, a city on Morocco's Atlantic coast.

Kuhn co-directs archaeological research at Bizmoune Cave with Abdeljalil Bouzouggar, a professor at the National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage in Rabat, Morocco, and Phillipe Fernandez, from the University Aix-Marseille in France, who are also authors on the study. El Mehdi Sehasseh, a graduate student at the National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage, who did the detailed study of the beads, is the study's lead author.

The beads uncovered by Kuhn and his collaborators were made from sea snail shells, and each measures roughly half an inch long. Holes in the center of the beads, as well as other markings from wear and tear, indicate that they were hung on strings or from clothing, Kuhn said.

The beads are like many others found at sites throughout northern and southern Africa, but previous examples date back to no older than 130,000 years. Ancient beads from North Africa are associated with the Aterian, a Middle Stone Age culture known for its distinctive stemmed spear points, whose people hunted gazelles, wildebeest, warthogs and rhinoceros, among other animals.

The beads serve as potential clues for anthropologists studying the evolution of human cognition and communication. Researchers have long been interested in when language appeared. But there was no material record of language until just a few thousand years ago, when humans began writing things down.

The beads, Kuhn said, are essentially a fossilized form of basic communication.

"We don't know what they meant, but they're clearly symbolic objects that were deployed in a way that other people could see them," he said.

The beads are also notable for their lasting form. Rather than painting their bodies or faces with ochre or charcoal, as many people did, the beads' makers made something more permanent, Kuhn said, suggesting the message they intended to convey was a lasting and important one.

In many ways, the beads raise more questions than they answer. Kuhn said he and his colleagues are now interested in learning why the Aterian people felt the need to make the beads when they did. They're exploring several possible explanations. One, Kuhn said, involves a growing population; as more people began occupying North Africa, they may have needed ways to identify themselves.

It is also possible that people in North Africa started using the method of communication at a time when the climate was cold and dry. They may have developed clans or other allegiances to protect limited resources, then perhaps used the beads to express their ethnicity or other identity to show they belonged in a certain area, Kuhn said.

"It's one thing to know that people were capable of making them," Kuhn said, "but then the question becomes, 'OK, what stimulated them to do it?'"

Read more at Science Daily

Using visual information to learn voluntary behavior while blind

The visual cortex makes up one of the largest regions of the brain, which is a testament to how much information we receive from our eyes. The primary visual cortex, or V1, is the first stage of processing visual input in the brain. Without a functional V1, a person is oblivious to an object that their eyes receive the visual input. However, scientists are in disagreement about whether we must be conscious of what we receive a visual input in order to learn from it. A new study in Scientific Reports by researchers at ASHBi and the University of Sheffield suggests that even if monkeys do not realize they have received a visual signal, they still change their behavior using it.

The loss of the V1 does not mean they do not respond to a visual object, as explained by blindsight, a condition first defined about 50 years ago, in which patients do not consciously detect a visual stimulus but nevertheless localize the target by eye movements or hand reaching. In other words, in blindsight, individuals use visual information of the object but are unaware that they do. Then, to what extent is it possible to act independently of consciousness?

To test this question with regards to blindsight, ASHBi Professor Tadashi Isa, Dr. Rikako Kato and colleagues lesioned V1 in one hemisphere of two monkeys and had them conduct a hidden area search task. In this task, the lesioned monkeys were required to identify the hidden area within a blank screen. When their eyes located the hidden area, a visual signal appeared informing them the area had been discovered, and the monkeys were rewarded with a drop of juice after two seconds delay.

The experiment was designed so that in some cases the visual signal would appear to the intact V1 side and in others it would appear to the lesioned side. The study shows that regardless of the side, the monkeys still identified the hidden area and received the reward. Moreover, the findings suggest that oculomotor behavior after visual cue presentation can be an indicator of confidence. When the confirmation feedback signal was shown to the intact V1 side, the monkeys were certain that they had found the hidden area, as demonstrated by the stopping of searching movements. In contrast, these searching saccadic movements continued when the confirmation signal was shown to the lesioned side.

Dr. Rikako Kato believes deeper study of the brain regions and neural pathways will go beyond understanding the human brain.

Read more at Science Daily

Dogs tell the difference between intentional and unintentional action

Over our long shared history, dogs have developed a range of skills for bonding with human beings. Their ability to make sense of human actions, demonstrated by every "sit," "lay down," and "roll over," is just one such skill. But whether dogs understand human intentions, or merely respond to outcomes, remains unclear. The ability to recognize another's intentions -- or at least conceive of them -- is a basic component of Theory of Mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, long regarded as uniquely human. Do dogs have this basic component of Theory of Mind, the ability to tell the difference between something done on purpose and something done by accident?

To answer this question, a team of researchers in Germany conducted an experiment that examined how dogs reacted when food rewards were withheld, both intentionally and unintentionally. They found that dogs respond differently depending on whether the actions of the experimenter were intentional or unintentional. This, the researchers say, shows that dogs can distinguish between actions that were done on purpose or accidentally.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers conducted an experiment using the "unable vs. unwilling" paradigm. This works by examining whether test subjects react differently towards a human experimenter who either intentionally (the unwilling condition) or unintentionally (the unable condition) withholds rewards from them. Despite being an established paradigm in studies of human and animal cognition, the unable vs. unwilling paradigm had never been previously used to investigate dogs.

The experiment was conducted with 51 dogs, each of which was tested under three conditions. In each condition, the dog was separated from the human tester by a transparent barrier. The basic situation was that the experimenter fed the dog pieces of dog food through a gap in the barrier. In the "unwilling" condition, the experimenter suddenly withdrew the reward through the gap in the barrier and placed it in front of herself. In the "unable-clumsy" condition, the experimenter brought the reward to the gap in the barrier and "tried" to pass it through the gap but then "accidentally" dropped it. In the "unable-blocked" condition, the experimenter again tried to give the dog a reward, but was unable to because the gap in the barrier was blocked. In all conditions, the reward remained on the tester's side of the barrier.

"If dogs are indeed able to ascribe intention-in-action to humans," says Dr. Juliane Bräuer, "we would expect them to show different reactions in the unwilling condition compared to the two unable conditions. As it turns out, this is exactly what we observed."

The primary behaviour measured by the researchers was the time dogs waited before approaching the reward they were denied. The researchers predicted that, if dogs are able to identify human intentions, they would wait longer before approaching the reward in the unwilling condition, where they were not supposed to have the reward, than in the two unable conditions in which the reward was, in fact, meant for them.

Not only did the dogs wait longer in the unwilling condition than in the unable conditions, they were also more likely to sit or lie down -- actions often interpreted as appeasing behaviours -- and stop wagging their tails.

"The dogs in our study clearly behaved differently depending on whether the actions of a human experimenter were intentional or unintentional," says Britta Schünemann, the first author of the study. "This suggests that dogs may indeed be able to identify humans' intention-in-action," adds Hannes Rakoczy from the University of Göttingen.

The team acknowledges that their findings may be met with scepticism and that further study is needed to address alternative explanations, such as behavioural cues on the part of experimenters or knowledge transfer from prior dog training.

Read more at Science Daily

Does testosterone influence success? Not much, research suggests

With the Olympics underway, higher testosterone has often been linked to sporting success, and other kinds of success too. But beyond sport, new research has found little evidence that testosterone meaningfully influences life chances for men or women. In fact, the study suggests that despite the social myths surrounding testosterone, it could be much less important than previously thought.

It is already known that in men testosterone is linked with socioeconomic position, such as income or educational qualifications. Researchers from the University of Bristol's Population Health Sciences (PHS) and MRC Integrated Epidemiology Unit (IEU) wanted to find out whether this is because testosterone actually affects socioeconomic position, as opposed to socioeconomic circumstances affecting testosterone, or health affecting both. The findings are published today [28 July] in Science Advances.

To isolate effects of testosterone itself, the research team applied an approach called Mendelian randomization in a sample of 306,248 UK adults from UK Biobank. They explored testosterone's influence on socioeconomic position, including income, employment status, neighbourhood-level deprivation, and educational qualifications; on health, including self-rated health and BMI, and on risk-taking behaviour.

Dr Amanda Hughes, Senior Research Associate in Epidemiology in Bristol Medical School: Population Health Sciences (PHS), said: "There's a widespread belief that a person's testosterone can affect where they end up in life. Our results suggest that, despite a lot of mythology surrounding testosterone, its social implications may have been over-stated."

First, the team identified genetic variants linked to higher testosterone levels and then investigated how these variants were related to the outcomes. A person's genetic code is determined before birth, and generally does not change during their lifetime (there are rare exceptions, such as changes that occur with cancer). This makes it very unlikely that these variants are affected by socioeconomic circumstances, health, or other environmental factors during a person's lifetime. Consequently, any association of an outcome with variants linked to testosterone would strongly suggest an influence of testosterone on the outcome.

Similar to previous studies the research found that men with higher testosterone had higher household income, lived in less deprived areas, and were more likely to have a university degree and a skilled job. In women, higher testosterone was linked to lower socioeconomic position, including lower household income, living in a more deprived area, and lower chance of having a university degree. Consistent with previous evidence, higher testosterone was associated with better health for men and poorer health for women, and greater risk-taking behaviour for men.

In contrast, there was little evidence that the testosterone-linked genetic variants were associated with any outcome for men or women. The research team concluded that there is little evidence that testosterone meaningfully affected socioeconomic position, health, or risk-taking in men or women. The study suggests that -- despite the mythology surrounding testosterone -- it might be much less important than previously claimed.

Results for women were less precise than results for men, so the influence of testosterone in women could be studied in more detail in the future using larger samples.

Dr Hughes added: "Higher testosterone in men has previously been linked to various kinds of social success. A study of male executives found that testosterone was higher for those who had more subordinates. A study of male financial traders found that higher testosterone correlated with greater daily profits. Other studies have reported that testosterone is higher for more highly educated men, and among self-employed men, suggesting a link with entrepreneurship.

"Such research has supported the widespread idea that testosterone can influence success by affecting behaviour. There is evidence from experiments that testosterone can make a person more assertive or more likely to take risks -- traits which can be rewarded in the labour market, for instance during wage negotiations. But there are other explanations. For example, a link between higher testosterone and success might simply reflect an influence of good health on both. Alternatively, socioeconomic circumstances could affect testosterone levels. A person's perception of their own success could influence testosterone: in studies of sports matches, testosterone has been found to rise in the winner compared to the loser."

Read more at Science Daily

We are more forgiving when people close to us misbehave

When people behave badly or unethically, their loved ones may judge them less harshly than they would judge a stranger who committed the same transgressions, but that leniency may come at the cost of the judger's own sense of self-worth, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"How do we react when our romantic partners, friends or family members behave unethically? Past research tells us a lot about how we respond to a stranger's unethical behavior, but very little about how we respond when the perpetrator is someone we care deeply about," said lead author Rachel Forbes, MA, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. "When someone close to us behaves unethically, we face a conflict between upholding our moral values and maintaining our relationship. We conducted this research to better understand this conflict." The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Researchers conducted a series of four experiments involving more than 1,100 participants. In one experiment, participants read about a hypothetical situation in which a romantic partner, a close friend or a stranger committed an unethical or immoral act, such as stealing money from a charity collection jar. In another experiment, participants were asked to recall a moment when they had witnessed a romantic partner, close friend or stranger commit an unethical or immoral act. In a third experiment, participants kept a log of moral transgressions they witnessed each day for 15 days. In each experiment participants answered a series of questions about the person who committed the act, the severity of the act and how harshly the transgressor should be punished. Participants also answered questions about how they felt about themselves, including any negative emotions they experienced and their own sense of morality.

In all three experiments, researchers found participants felt less anger, contempt and disgust toward family and close friends who behaved badly. They rated them as more moral and wanted to punish or criticize them less than strangers. However, participants also felt more shame, guilt and embarrassment and reported somewhat more negative evaluations of their own morality when someone close to them committed a moral or ethical violation.

In the fourth experiment, participants were physically paired with a romantic partner, a close friend or a relative stranger. They were then taken to separate rooms and asked to respond in writing to a series of questions about themselves. The pairs then swapped answers (via a research assistant) and were told to transcribe them into a book. In the first round, the partners received genuine answers, but in the second round, participants were given fake responses indicating their partner had behaved unethically, by lying, plagiarizing or acting selfishly. As in previous experiments, participants then answered a series of questions about their partner, the transgression, how harsh the punishment should be and their feelings about themselves. The results were similar to the first three experiments, but the effect was not as strong.

Forbes believes the less consistent effects observed in the fourth experiment may be because the unethical information presented to participants in this study was unknown to the participants prior to the experiment and was first shared with them in a very brazen way by a stranger. "It's possible that participants were upset with their close others because they did not tell the participant about the unethical acts beforehand and instead chose to tell the researcher. Hearing about an unethical behavior by someone you care about from a stranger is likely to be a bit more jarring than hearing about it directly from your friend or loved one," she said.

"Across a diverse range of methods with both student and online samples, our findings suggest that having a close relationship with the transgressor heavily affects responses to their bad behavior, supporting the call for social-relational factors to be more strongly incorporated into models of moral judgment," said Forbes.

The findings are important because, in everyday life, unethical behaviors are often entwined with social ties, according to co-author Jennifer Stellar, PhD, also from the University of Toronto.

"Identifying that observers are more lenient toward close others who transgress raises deeper concerns about how moral norms are policed by individuals in these situations," she said. "This may allow people to either overlook and/or fail to call out transgressions committed by close others, which poses a danger for maintaining the moral norms in society."

The researchers focused on close relationships, but Stellar believes that the same processes may apply to other relationships, such as shared group membership, and that should be incorporated in future research.

"One important limitation in our work is that we did not examine responses to extremely severe immoral actions," said Forbes. "Highly immoral acts would certainly place a greater strain on the relationship and therefore could show different effects."

One relevant example she often uses when talking about this work is a quote by "TODAY" host Savannah Guthrie in response to the accusations of sexual misconduct against Guthrie's colleague and friend Matt Lauer. Guthrie responded to news of the accusations on air, saying, "We are grappling with a dilemma that so many people have faced these past few weeks: How do you reconcile your love for someone with the revelation that they have behaved badly?"

"In the case of very severe unethical actions, the conflict with one's moral values is likely more apparent. We don't yet know how close others may respond because this is very difficult to study," said Forbes.

Another limitation was that the participants in the first three experiments were approximately 80% white.

Read more at Science Daily

Powerful people are less likely to be understanding when mistakes are made

Those with power, such as the wealthy are more likely to blame others for having shortcomings and they are also less troubled by reports of inequality, according to recent research from the University of California San Diego's Rady School of Management.

The study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science defines power as control over valuable resources. The paper finds that people in positions of power are more likely to adopt a "choice-mindset," which means that although they have more choices (the definition of power in many cases) they still see others with less power as having lots of choice, regardless of their situation. Consequently, high-power individuals are more likely to blame others if they perform poorly and they are also more likely to punish them.

"Being in a choice-mindset changes how individuals think, feel and behave," said Yidan Yin, the first author of the paper and recent PhD graduate from the Rady School. "Compared to low-power people, high-power people are less likely to be aware of others' constraints. As a result they assign more blame when people make mistakes or have shortcomings. Thus, they see the current hierarchy as more justified."

The results from the research were derived from three different studies the authors conducted to replicate the findings in different settings.

Research findings hold up in three robust study settings

The first study was conducted via a survey in which the researchers measured the sense of power of 363 members of the general public recruited through the platform Prolific. They also asked the participants to complete a separate survey, claiming it was unrelated, in which they were crowdsourcing how to resolve a human resources issue at the university. The survey explained that their academic department was weighing whether to give an administrative assistant a bonus though they had missed a deadline on a big project due to conflicting priorities. The survey participants who measured as having a greater sense of power overwhelming responded the administrative assistant did not deserve the bonus and that their excuses were without merit.

The second study was conducted with the platform Amazon Mechanical Turk involving 393 members of the general public who were randomly assigned to roles as supervisors and subordinates in completing various tasks. Though the assigned ranks were random, supervisors were told they earned the role for their proficiencies and subordinates were told they were designated as such because they were outperformed by supervisors.

The two groups had to judge the performance of an anonymous individual, who by design, made mistakes in completing their tasks. Once again, the researchers found that those with a greater sense of power (supervisors) were harsher, less understanding with their judgment and recommended punishment more than subordinates.

The third study was done in a lab with UC San Diego undergraduates and mirrored the second experiment. The main difference was that both supervisors and subordinates knew that the target person they had to judge had the rank of a subordinate and therefore less choices. The results from the first two studies held up with subjects that had more power assigning more blame and recommending more punishment.

"Each study was designed to build on the others," Yidan and co-author Pamela K. Smith, associate professor of economics and strategic management at the Rady School write. "In study one, we were measuring power, in study two, we manipulated power and in study three, we created a world in which the judges knew the target person had less power and less choices. We wanted to see if the perceptions remained consistent in all three settings. It was a combination of replication and adding these additional twists and turns."

Implications for more equitable public policy and workplace environments

The results from the study have significant implications for public policy, according to the authors.

"Policymakers are in a position of power and privilege and may be less sensitive to the disadvantages of their constituents," the authors write. "This is especially important as we come out of the pandemic when there are big discussions in the political domain on pulling back on unemployment benefits, or rent assistance. If you are in a position of power, you may assume people are choosing to stay home and not work and they can make better choices. However, you may need to think much more carefully about how many choices citizens have and if you are missing constraints they face."

In addition, the implications are far-reaching for the workplace.

"Mangers should be aware of how many more choices they have than their subordinates and their tendency to project their own choices onto others, especially when employees make mistakes." Yin said.

Read more at Science Dialy