Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe.

Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one's location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost, social mindfulness typically entails small acts of attention or kindness. Even though fairly common, such low-cost cooperation has received little empirical attention. Measuring social mindfulness across 31 samples from industrialized countries and regions (n = 8,354), we found considerable variation. Among selected country-level variables, greater social mindfulness was most strongly associated with countries' better general performance on environmental protection. Together, our findings contribute to the literature on prosociality by targeting the kind of everyday cooperation that is more focused on communicating benevolence than on providing material benefits.

Collective nostalgia and domestic country bias.

Three experiments tested and supported the hypothesis that collective nostalgia-nostalgia that is experienced when one thinks of oneself in terms of a particular social identity or as a member of a particular group and that concerns events or objects related to this group-increases individuals' ethnocentric preference for ingroup (compared to outgroup) products. Greek participants who recalled collective nostalgic experiences shared with other Greeks (compared to controls) evinced a highly robust preference for Greek (compared to foreign) consumer products. This preference is referred to as domestic country bias. Following a systematic replicate-and-extend strategy, we demonstrated that both idiographic and nomothetic inductions of collective nostalgia increased domestic country bias (Experiment 1), that collective nostalgia increased domestic country bias across different product categories (Experiment 2), and that collective self-esteem mediated the effect of collective nostalgia on domestic country bias and did so independently of positive affect (Experiment 3). We discuss theoretical and practical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The subtle effects of incentives and competition on group performance.

We show that, under some circumstances, identification and differentiation in the form of competition and individual rewards may undermine, rather than improve, group performance. The key factor for successful group performance seems to be whether or not group members share common goals and whether or not they have aligned incentives.

Verbal and numerical consumer recommendations: switching between recommendation formats leads to preference inconsistencies.

Many Web sites provide consumers with product recommendations, which are typically presented by a sequence of verbal reviews and numerical ratings. In three experiments, we demonstrate that when participants switch between formats (e.g., from verbal to numerical), they are more prone to preference inconsistencies than when they aggregate the recommendations within the same format (e.g., verbal). When evaluating recommendations, participants rely primarily on central-location measures (e.g., mean) and less on other distribution characteristics (e.g., variance). We explain our findings within the theoretical framework of stimulus-response compatibility and we make practical recommendations for the design of recommendation systems and Web portals.

Collective induction without cooperation? Learning and knowledge transfer in cooperative groups and competitive auctions.

There is strong evidence that groups perform better than individuals do on intellective tasks with demonstrably correct solutions. Typically, these studies assume that group members share common goals. The authors extend this line of research by replacing standard face-to-face group interactions with competitive auctions, allowing for conflicting individual incentives. In a series of studies involving the well-known Wason selection task, they demonstrate that competitive auctions induce learning effects equally impressive as those of standard group interactions, and they uncover specific and general knowledge transfers from these institutions to new reasoning problems. The authors identify payoff feedback and information pooling as the driving factors underlying these findings, and they explain these factors within the theoretical framework of collective induction.