Do you share your personally useless information if others may benefit from it?

Information is personally useless if its beholder cannot individually benefit from it further unless she shares it with those who can exploit that information to increase their mutual outcome. We study sharing such information anonymously in a non-strategic and non-competitive setting, where selfish and cooperative motives align. Although sharing information was cost-free and resulted in expected mutual payoff, almost all subjects showed some levels of hesitancy toward sharing information, and it was more severe in the introverts. According to our mechanistic model, this irrationality could arise because of the excessive subjective value of personally useless information and low other-regarding motives, that necessitated over-attainable personal benefit to drive sharing. Interestingly, other-regarding element correlated with the subjects' belief about how others are cooperative in general. In addition, sensitivity to the value of information correlated with their extraversion level. The results open a new window towards understanding inefficient motives that deprive people of collective benefit.

Iranian and American Moral Judgments for Everyday Dilemmas Are Mostly Similar.

Moral judgment is a complex cognitive process that partly depends upon social and individual cultural values. There have been various efforts to categorize different aspects of moral judgment, but most studies depend upon rare dilemmas. We recruited 25 subjects from Tehran, Iran, to rate 150 everyday moral scenarios developed by Knutson et al. Using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), we observed that the same moral dimensions (except socialness dimension) were driven by the same moral cognitive factors (norm violation, intention, and social affect) in Iranian vs. American studies. However, there were minor differences in the factor loadings between the two cultures. Furthermore, based on the EFA results, we developed a short form of the questionnaire by removing eleven of the fifteen scenarios from each of the ten categories. These results could be used in further studies to better understand the similarities and differences in moral judgment in everyday interactions across different cultures.