A systematic evaluation of text mining methods for short texts: Mapping individuals' internal states from online posts.

Short texts generated by individuals in online environments can provide social and behavioral scientists with rich insights into these individuals' internal states. Trained manual coders can reliably interpret expressions of such internal states in text. However, manual coding imposes restrictions on the number of texts that can be analyzed, limiting our ability to extract insights from large-scale textual data. We evaluate the performance of several automatic text analysis methods in approximating trained human coders' evaluations across four coding tasks encompassing expressions of motives, norms, emotions, and stances. Our findings suggest that commonly used dictionaries, although performing well in identifying infrequent categories, generate false positives too frequently compared to other methods. We show that large language models trained on manually coded data yield the highest performance across all case studies. However, there are also instances where simpler methods show almost equal performance. Additionally, we evaluate the effectiveness of cutting-edge generative language models like GPT-4 in coding texts for internal states with the help of short instructions (so-called zero-shot classification). While promising, these models fall short of the performance of models trained on manually analyzed data. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various models and explore the trade-offs between model complexity and performance in different applications. Our work informs social and behavioral scientists of the challenges associated with text mining of large textual datasets, while providing best-practice recommendations.

Signals of belonging: emergence of signalling norms as facilitators of trust and parochial cooperation.

Mechanisms of social control reinforce norms that appear harmful or wasteful, such as mutilation practises or extensive body tattoos. We suggest such norms arise to serve as signals that distinguish between ingroup 'friends' and outgroup 'foes', facilitating parochial cooperation. Combining insights from research on signalling and parochial cooperation, we incorporate a trust game with signalling in an agent-based model to study the dynamics of signalling norm emergence in groups with conflicting interests. Our results show that costly signalling norms emerge from random acts of signalling in minority groups that benefit most from parochial cooperation. Majority groups are less likely to develop costly signalling norms. Yet, norms that prescribe sending costless group identity signals can easily emerge in groups of all sizes-albeit, at times, at the expense of minority group members. Further, the dynamics of signalling norm emergence differ across signal costs, relative group sizes, and levels of ingroup assortment. Our findings provide theoretical insights into norm evolution in contexts where groups develop identity markers in response to environmental challenges that put their interests at odds with the interests of other groups. Such contexts arise in zones of ethnic conflict or during contestations of existing power relations. This article is part of the theme issue 'Social norm change: drivers and consequences'.

Does Living in a Protected Area Reduce Resource Use and Promote Life Satisfaction? Survey Results from and Around Three Regional Nature Parks in Switzerland.

Regional nature parks in Switzerland are, for the most part, protected areas that aim to promote sustainable development and residents' well-being. In recent years, research on regional nature parks and comparable protected areas has focused on questions regarding local populations' acceptance of such areas, their governance, and their economic effects. However, we know surprisingly little about the impact of protected areas on environmental resource use and life satisfaction, two essential ingredients of sustainable regional development. In this study, we survey people living in and around three regional nature parks in Switzerland on their resource use and life satisfaction (gross sample n = 3358). We propose a novel measurement of resource use based on vignettes describing different lifestyles, which we validate against the carbon footprint obtained for a subsample of our respondents. With these indicators, using multiple regression analyses, we test several hypotheses derived from the literature on the relationship between resource use and life satisfaction in and around protected areas. Contrary to our expectations, we do not find differences in resource use or life satisfaction, or the relationship between resource use and life satisfaction, across park and non-park regions. We discuss potential explanations for our findings and their implications for nature park authorities and future study designs. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11205-023-03164-z.

The competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions revisited: A multilab replication.

Is peer sanctioning a sustainable solution to the problem of human cooperation? We conducted an exact multilab replication (N = 1,008; 7 labs × 12 groups × 12 participants) of an experiment by Gürerk, Irlenbusch, and Rockenbach published in Science in 2006 (Gürerk Ö, Irlenbusch B, Rockenbach B. The competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions. 2006. Science. 312(5770):108-111). In GIR2006 (N = 84; 1 lab × 7 groups × 12 participants), groups that allowed members to reward cooperators and punish defectors were found to outgrow and outperform groups without a peer-sanctioning institution. We find GIR2006 replicated in accordance with all preregistered replication criteria in five of the seven labs we sampled. There, the majority of participants joined groups with a sanctioning institution, and participants cooperated and profited more on average than in groups without a sanctioning institution. In the two other labs, results were weaker but still favored sanctioning institutions. These findings establish the competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions as a robust phenomenon within the European context.

Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game.

How people cooperate to provide public goods is an important scientific question and relates to many societal problems. Previous research studied how people cooperate in stable groups in repeated or one-time-only encounters. However, most real-world public good problems occur in groups with a gradually changing composition due to old members leaving and new members arriving. How group changes are related to cooperation in public good provision is not well understood. To address this issue, we analyze a dataset from an online public goods game comprising approximately 1.5 million contribution decisions made by about 135 thousand players in about 11.3 thousand groups with about 234 thousand changes in group composition. We find that changes in group composition negatively relate to cooperation. Our results suggest that this is related to individuals contributing less in the role of newcomers than in the role of incumbents. During the process of moving from newcomer status to incumbent status, individuals cooperate more and more in line with incumbents.

Honesty and dishonesty in gossip strategies: a fitness interdependence analysis.

Gossip, or sharing information about absent others, has been identified as an effective solution to free rider problems in situations with conflicting interests. Yet, the information transmitted via gossip can be biased, because gossipers may send dishonest information about others for personal gains. Such dishonest gossip makes reputation-based cooperation more difficult to evolve. But when are people likely to share honest or dishonest gossip? We build formal models to provide the theoretical foundation for individuals' gossip strategies, taking into account the gossiper's fitness interdependence with the receiver and the target. Our models across four different games suggest a very simple rule: when there is a perfect match (mismatch) between fitness interdependence and the effect of honest gossip, the gossiper should always be honest (dishonest); however, in the case of a partial match, the gossiper should make a choice based on their fitness interdependence with the receiver and the target and the marginal cost/benefit in terms of pay-off differences caused by possible choices of the receiver and the target in the game. Moreover, gossipers can use this simple rule to make optimal decisions even under noise. We discuss empirical examples that support the predictions of our model and potential extensions. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.

Parochial cooperation and the emergence of signalling norms.

Why do people adorn themselves with elaborate body piercings or tattoos, wear obstructing garbs, engage in life-threatening competitions and other wasteful and harmful but socially stipulated practices? Norms of cooperation and coordination, which promote the efficient attainment of collective benefits, can be explained by theories of collective action. However, social norms prescribing wasteful and harmful behaviours have eluded such explanations. We argue that signalling theory constitutes the basis for the understanding of the emergence of such norms, which we call signalling norms. Signalling norms emerge as a result of the uncertainty about who is a friend and who is a foe. The need to overcome this uncertainty arises when different groups compete for scarce resources and individuals must be able to identify, trust and cooperate with their fellow group members. After reviewing the mechanisms that explain the emergence of cooperation and coordination norms, we introduce the notion of signalling norms as markers of group distinction. We argue that adherence to signalling norms constitutes a commitment promoting parochial cooperation rather than a quality-revealing signal facilitating partner choice. We formalize our argument in a game-theoretic model that allows us to specify the boundary conditions for the emergence of signalling norms. Our paper concludes with a discussion of potential applications of our model and a comparison of signalling norms with related concepts. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.

COVID-19 vulnerability and perceived norm violations predict loss of social trust: A pre-post study.

While pandemic containment measures benefit public health, they may jeopardize the social structure of society. We hypothesize that lockdowns and prolonged social distancing measures hinder social support and invite norm violations, eroding social trust. We conducted a pre-registered pre-post study on a representative sample of the Dutch population (n = 2377; participation rate = 88.8%), measuring social trust reported by the same individuals before and after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that social trust in the Netherlands suddenly dropped from its historically stable level, reaching one of its lowest points on record. The decline was stronger among residents belonging to official high-risk categories, especially if they perceived themselves as likely to become infected. Individuals who more strongly agreed with self-isolation norms or did not perceive a widespread compliance or agreement with such norms also reported a greater loss of trust.

Reputation effects in peer-to-peer online markets: A meta-analysis∗.

Most online market exchanges are governed by reputation systems, which allow traders to comment on one another's behavior and attributes with ratings and text messages. These ratings then constitute sellers' reputations that serve as signals of their trustworthiness and competence. The large body of research investigating the effect of reputation on selling performance has produced mixed results, and there is a lack of consensus on whether the reputation effect exists and what it means. After showing how the reputation effect can be derived from a game-theoretic model, we use meta-analysis to synthesize evidence from 107 studies investigating the reputation effect in peer-to-peer online markets. Our results corroborate the existence of the reputation effect across different operationalizations of seller reputation and selling performance. Our results also show the extent to which the reputation effect varies. We discuss potential explanations for the variation in reputation effects that cannot be attributed to sampling error and thereby point out promising avenues for future research.

The emergence of conventions in the repeated volunteer's dilemma: The role of social value orientation, payoff asymmetries and focal points.

Conventions are arbitrary rules of behavior that coordinate social interactions. Here we study the effects of individuals' social value orientations (SVO) and situational conditions on the emergence of conventions in the three-person volunteer's dilemma (VOD). The VOD is a step-level collective good game in which only one actor's action is required to produce a benefit for the group. It has been shown that if actors interact in the payoff-symmetric VOD repeatedly, a turn-taking convention emerges, resulting in an equal distribution of payoffs. If the VOD is asymmetric, with one "strong" actor having lower costs of volunteering, a solitary-volunteering convention emerges by which the strong actor volunteers earning less than others. In study 1 we test whether SVO promotes turn-taking and hampers solitary-volunteering. We find that groups with more prosocials engage less in turn-taking and no effect of SVO on the emergence of solitary-volunteering. In study 2 we test whether making one actor focal is sufficient for solitary-volunteering to emerge. We find instead that payoff asymmetry with one strong actor is a necessary precondition. We discuss explanations for our findings and propose directions for future research.

Heterogeneous groups cooperate in public good problems despite normative disagreements about individual contribution levels.

Norms can promote human cooperation to provide public goods. Yet, the potential of norms to promote cooperation may be limited to homogeneous groups in which all members benefit equally from the public good. Individual heterogeneity in the benefits of public good provision is commonly conjectured to bring about normative disagreements that harm cooperation. However, the role of these normative disagreements remains unclear because they are rarely directly measured or manipulated. In a laboratory experiment, we first measure participants' views on the appropriate way to contribute to a public good with heterogeneous returns. We then use this information to sort people into groups that either agree or disagree on these views, thereby manipulating group-level disagreement on normative views. Participants subsequently make several incentivized contribution decisions in a public goods game with peer punishment. We find that although there are considerable disagreements about individual contribution levels in heterogeneous groups, these disagreements do not impede cooperation. While cooperation is maintained because low contributors are punished, participants do not use punishment to impose their normative views on others. The contribution levels at which groups cooperate strongly relate to the average normative views of these groups.

How dominance hierarchies emerge from conflict: A game theoretic model and experimental evidence.

We develop a game theoretic model of conflict and empirically test its predictions to study the emergence of social hierarchies in small groups. Previous research shows uncertainty about actors' ability may lead to more conflict; conflict demonstrates actors' ability and establishes relationships of dominance and submissiveness. Since we assume uncertainty regarding ability to be a crucial cause of conflict, we focus on the effects of different information conditions. We posit that actors know the distribution of abilities in their group and vary whether or not they know (1) their own ability and (2) their interaction partners' interaction histories. Our results from a laboratory experiment closely match qualitative model predictions. Most importantly, conflict produces information about actors' ability, which reduces subsequent conflict. In an exploratory analysis we investigate to what extent gender, social value orientation, risk preferences and a competitive personality account for the quantitative discrepancies between model predictions and subject behavior.

Heterogeneous groups overcome the diffusion of responsibility problem in social norm enforcement.

Social norms promote cooperation in everyday life because many people are willing to negatively sanction norm breakers at a cost to themselves. However, a norm violation may persist if only one person is required to sanction the norm breaker and everyone expects someone else to do it. Here we employ the volunteer's dilemma game (VOD) to model this diffusion of responsibility in social norm enforcement. The symmetric VOD is a binary choice game in which all actors have the same costs of and benefits from cooperation and only one actor's cooperation is required to provide the collective good for the group. The asymmetric VOD differs from the symmetric VOD in one (strong) actor having lower costs of cooperation. In a laboratory experiment, we find that, in line with the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis, subjects' propensities to sanction the norm breaker decrease with group size in the symmetric VOD. In the asymmetric VOD, groups tacitly coordinate on the strong subject to sanction the norm breaker alone. Although at first lower in larger groups, strong subjects' sanctioning rates increase over time and reach equally high levels across different group sizes. Our results show that heterogeneous groups can be more effective in achieving norm compliance than groups of all equals because they naturally evade diffusion of responsibility in social norm enforcement.

Consensual punishment does not promote cooperation in the six-person prisoner's dilemma game with noisy public monitoring.

We study the effects of different punishment institutions on cooperation in a six-person prisoner's dilemma game in which actors observe others' cooperation with some noise (i.e. imperfect public monitoring). Previous research has shown that peer punishment can sustain cooperation, if a certain proportion of group members punish defectors at a cost to themselves. However, in the presence of noise, co-operators will sometimes be mistaken for defectors and punished, and defectors will sometimes be mistaken for co-operators and escape punishment. Both types of mistakes are detrimental for cooperation because cooperation is discouraged and defection is encouraged. By means of a laboratory experiment, we study whether this adverse effect of noise can be mitigated by consensual punishment. The more other group members have to agree on punishing a defector, the less likely will a co-operator be punished by mistake. We compare a punishment institution in which each subject decides individually whether to punish another, with institutions in which punishments are only implemented if subjects reach sufficient consensus that a particular group member should be punished. In conditions without noise, we find that cooperation and subjects' payoffs are higher if more consensus is required before a punishment is implemented. In conditions with noise, cooperation is lower if more consensus is required. Moreover, with noise, subjects' payoffs are lower under all punishment institutions than in the control condition without punishment opportunities. Our results narrow down the conditions under which punishment institutions can promote cooperation if such cooperation is noisy.

Punitive preferences, monetary incentives and tacit coordination in the punishment of defectors promote cooperation in humans.

Peer-punishment is effective in promoting cooperation, but the costs associated with punishing defectors often exceed the benefits for the group. It has been argued that centralized punishment institutions can overcome the detrimental effects of peer-punishment. However, this argument presupposes the existence of a legitimate authority and leaves an unresolved gap in the transition from peer-punishment to centralized punishment. Here we show that the origins of centralized punishment could lie in individuals' distinct ability to punish defectors. In our laboratory experiment, we vary the structure of the punishment situation to disentangle the effects of punitive preferences, monetary incentives, and individual punishment costs on the punishment of defectors. We find that actors tacitly coordinate on the strongest group member to punish defectors, even if the strongest individual incurs a net loss from punishment. Such coordination leads to a more effective and more efficient provision of a cooperative environment than we observe in groups of all equals. Our results show that even an arbitrary assignment of an individual to a focal position in the social hierarchy can trigger the endogenous emergence of more centralized forms of punishment.

Natural and strategic generosity as signals of trustworthiness.

We exploit the fact that generosity and trustworthiness are highly correlated and the former can thus be a sign of the latter. Subjects decide between a generous and a mean split in a dictator game. Some of them are informed from the start that afterwards they will participate in a trust game and that their choice in the dictator game may matter; others are not informed in advance. In the trust game, before trusters decide whether or not to trust, some trustees can reveal (or conceal) only their true choice in the dictator game, while others can say to trusters, truthfully or otherwise, what they chose. We find that a generous choice made naturally by uninformed trustees and reliably revealed is more effective in persuading trusters to trust than a generous choice that could be strategic or a lie. Moreover, we find that, when they can, mean subjects lie and go on to be untrustworthy.

Individual heterogeneity and costly punishment: a volunteer's dilemma.

Social control and the enforcement of social norms glue a society together. It has been shown theoretically and empirically that informal punishment of wrongdoers fosters cooperation in human groups. Most of this research has focused on voluntary and uncoordinated punishment carried out by individual group members. However, as punishment is costly, it is an open question as to why humans engage in the punishment of wrongdoers even in one-time-only encounters. While evolved punitive preferences have been advocated as proximate explanations for such behaviour, the strategic nature of the punishment situation has remained underexplored. It has been suggested to conceive of the punishment situation as a volunteer's dilemma (VOD), where only one individual's action is necessary and sufficient to punish the wrongdoer. Here, we show experimentally that implementing the punishment situation as a VOD sustains cooperation in an environment where punishers and non-punishers coexist. Moreover, we show that punishment-cost heterogeneity allows individuals to tacitly agree on only the strongest group member carrying out the punishment, thereby increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of social norm enforcement. Our results corroborate that costly peer punishment can be explained without assuming punitive preferences and show that centralized sanctioning institutions can emerge from arbitrary individual differences.