Managing our natural resources often involves learning about the dynamics of the resource while society simultaneously harvests from the resource. However, little is known about how society’s actions affect our ability to learn about a vulnerable resource. Here, we investigate how experience managing a shared resource impacts one’s ability to learn about the underlying dynamics of a resource. We hypothesised that participants' capacity to learn from experience would depend on the behaviour of other group members. 320 participants played a four-player resource management game with computer partners who acted sustainably, unsustainably, or conditionally cooperatively. Participants’ ability to learn the underlying resource dynamics was then assessed in a subsequent single-player resource management game, where the social dynamics were removed and the participants’ understanding of the resource could be evaluated in isolation. Compared to controls with no prior experience, performance on the single-player game improved after experience with sustainable and unsustainable partners, but not after experience with conditionally cooperative partners. However, experience with a single-player game (rather than a group game) outperformed all other experimental conditions; thus individual experience improved performance more than experience in any group dynamic tested. These findings suggest that the presence of others generally hinders learning in resource management contexts, though how much this learning is hindered depends on the behaviour of others.
From an early age, children grapple with questions of fairness and generosity, but do boys and girls approach these moral challenges in the same way? This study examines altruistic behavior in 4- and 5-year-old children using a modified version of the dictator game with two framing conditions: give (sharing from one's own endowment) and take (subtracting from another's endowment). These frames elicit distinct moral intuitions, offering a more nuanced perspective on early prosocial behavior. The gender of the recipient (boy vs. girl) was also manipulated to assess whether gender-based solidarity or competitive biases influenced sharing decisions. Results revealed that, on average, boys and girls responded differently to the framing of the task. Boys shared less when giving from their own endowment (37%) and more when taking from another's (61%), resulting in a notably large framing effect (d = 1.21). Girls, instead, shared more similar amounts across both contexts (45% in give scenarios vs. 51% in take scenarios; d = 0.31). While children varied in their individual responses, these differences suggest that boys were more sensitive to who originally "owned" the resource, whereas girls displayed a steadier inclination toward equality. The overall framing effect was substantial (d = 0.77) and appeared stronger among younger children, hinting at developmental variability even within this narrow age range. No effects of recipient gender were found, indicating that gender-based distinctions may not influence prosocial behavior at this age. Taken together, these findings suggest that preschoolers' sharing behavior is shaped by the moral framing of the action, revealing gender-specific sensitivities.
To validate novel measurement instruments of people's decision making, the behavioral sciences often assess how frequently people make specific risky choices in real life. Yet, it remains unclear to what degree the risky choices tapped by such frequency measures reflect those choices people actually (have to) make. To address this issue, we compared 100 risky choices representing laypeople's perspective with 63 risky choices representing researchers' perspective. In study 1, we leveraged natural language processing calibrated on human judgments to gauge the similarity between choices of both perspectives and found that they only had 18% of the choices in common. In study 2, we further examined the implications of this mismatch in terms of the psychological mechanisms that the various choices may tap into by asking 825 participants to rate the perceived relevance of seven classes of psychological mechanisms to their decision making in these choices. Bayesian mixed effects models revealed credible differences between the two perspectives in five out of seven classes of mechanisms: For choices representing laypeople's perspective, choice attributes, time factors, experience and knowledge, and goals and motivation were on average perceived as more relevant, and social factors were perceived as less relevant, relative to the choices representing researchers' perspective. These findings suggest that decision-making paradigms calibrated on frequency measures from the researchers' perspective may have limited generalizability to the broad range of risky choices people face in their lives, underscoring the need to better understand the complexity of real-life decision making
Experimental work reveals that participants who have access to all situational perspectives in moral scenarios (full perspective-taking accessibility) are more prosocial in their moral judgments than those who receive scenarios offering only one situational perspective (partial perspective-taking accessibility; Martin, Kusev, & van Schaik, 2021). Since previous studies have only focused on decisions made directly after scenario presentation, in the present work, we have explored how perspective-taking accessibility influences moral judgments under varying cognitive priming tasks (no prime, task-relevant prime, and task-irrelevant prime). We found that with full perspective-taking accessibility, participants were consistently utilitarian in their moral judgments, regardless of the cognitive priming task employed. However, with partial perspective-taking accessibility, participants were more utilitarian in their moral judgments after undertaking a task-irrelevant prime (an anagram task) compared to a task-relevant prime or no prime. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that placing the anagram task after the moral scenario (late prime) induced participants' utilitarian moral judgments. Moreover, in Experiment 3, we explored whether placing the anagram task before the moral scenario (early prime) would have a similar effect on participants' moral judgments. With partial perspective-taking accessibility, regardless of the anagram task placement (early or late prime), participants were more utilitarian in their moral judgments compared to participants who were not primed with an anagram task. However, crucially, the results revealed no statistically significant difference between receiving an early and late prime; the properties of the anagram task itself (and not a distraction period between the scenario and judgment task) enhance participants' utilitarian behavior.
