Collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees

Humans actively share resources with one another to a much greater degree than do other great apes, and much human sharing is governed by social norms of fairness and equity. When in receipt of a windfall of resources, human children begin showing tendencies towards equitable distribution with others at five to seven years of age. Arguably, however, the primordial situation for human sharing of resources is that which follows cooperative activities such as collaborative foraging, when several individuals must share the spoils of their joint efforts. Here we show that children of around three years of age share with others much more equitably in collaborative activities than they do in either windfall or parallel-work situations. By contrast, one of humans' two nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), 'share' (make food available to another individual) just as often whether they have collaborated with them or not. This species difference raises the possibility that humans' tendency to distribute resources equitably may have its evolutionary roots in the sharing of spoils after collaborative efforts.     

Audience drives male songbird response to partner's voice

According to the social intelligence hypothesis, social context represents an important force driving the selection of animal cognitive abilities such as the capacity to estimate the nature of the social relationships between other individuals. Despite this importance, the influence of this force has been assessed only in primates and never in other animals showing social interactions. In this way, avian communication generally takes place in a network of signallers and receivers, which represents an audience altering individual signalling behaviours. Indeed, vocal amplitude and repertoire are known to be socially regulated and the attitude towards the opposite sex may change depending on the audience. This 'audience effect' provides support for the reality of social awareness in some bird species. However no evidence has yet been found to suggest that birds are able to estimate the characteristics of the social relationships between group-mates. Here we show that the male of a gregarious songbird species--the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata)--pays attention to the mating status of conspecific pairs, and uses this information to control its behaviour towards its female partner.     

Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members

Humans are an unusually prosocial species-we vote, give blood, recycle, give tithes and punish violators of social norms. Experimental evidence indicates that people willingly incur costs to help strangers in anonymous one-shot interactions, and that altruistic behaviour is motivated, at least in part, by empathy and concern for the welfare of others (hereafter referred to as other-regarding preferences). In contrast, cooperative behaviour in non-human primates is mainly limited to kin and reciprocating partners, and is virtually never extended to unfamiliar individuals. Here we present experimental tests of the existence of other-regarding preferences in non-human primates, and show that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) do not take advantage of opportunities to deliver benefits to familiar individuals at no material cost to themselves, suggesting that chimpanzee behaviour is not motivated by other-regarding preferences. Chimpanzees are among the primates most likely to demonstrate prosocial behaviours. They participate in a variety of collective activities, including territorial patrols, coalitionary aggression, cooperative hunting, food sharing and joint mate guarding. Consolation of victims of aggression and anecdotal accounts of solicitous treatment of injured individuals suggest that chimpanzees may feel empathy. Chimpanzees sometimes reject exchanges in which they receive less valuable rewards than others, which may be one element of a 'sense of fairness', but there is no evidence that they are averse to interactions in which they benefit more than others.     

Individual differences in non-verbal number acuity correlate with maths achievement

Human mathematical competence emerges from two representational systems. Competence in some domains of mathematics, such as calculus, relies on symbolic representations that are unique to humans who have undergone explicit teaching. More basic numerical intuitions are supported by an evolutionarily ancient approximate number system that is shared by adults, infants and non-human animals-these groups can all represent the approximate number of items in visual or auditory arrays without verbally counting, and use this capacity to guide everyday behaviour such as foraging. Despite the widespread nature of the approximate number system both across species and across development, it is not known whether some individuals have a more precise non-verbal 'number sense' than others. Furthermore, the extent to which this system interfaces with the formal, symbolic maths abilities that humans acquire by explicit instruction remains unknown. Here we show that there are large individual differences in the non-verbal approximation abilities of 14-year-old children, and that these individual differences in the present correlate with children's past scores on standardized maths achievement tests, extending all the way back to kindergarten. Moreover, this correlation remains significant when controlling for individual differences in other cognitive and performance factors. Our results show that individual differences in achievement in school mathematics are related to individual differences in the acuity of an evolutionarily ancient, unlearned approximate number sense. Further research will determine whether early differences in number sense acuity affect later maths learning, whether maths education enhances number sense acuity, and the extent to which tertiary factors can affect both.     

Winners don't punish

A key aspect of human behaviour is cooperation. We tend to help others even if costs are involved. We are more likely to help when the costs are small and the benefits for the other person significant. Cooperation leads to a tension between what is best for the individual and what is best for the group. A group does better if everyone cooperates, but each individual is tempted to defect. Recently there has been much interest in exploring the effect of costly punishment on human cooperation. Costly punishment means paying a cost for another individual to incur a cost. It has been suggested that costly punishment promotes cooperation even in non-repeated games and without any possibility of reputation effects. But most of our interactions are repeated and reputation is always at stake. Thus, if costly punishment is important in promoting cooperation, it must do so in a repeated setting. We have performed experiments in which, in each round of a repeated game, people choose between cooperation, defection and costly punishment. In control experiments, people could only cooperate or defect. Here we show that the option of costly punishment increases the amount of cooperation but not the average payoff of the group. Furthermore, there is a strong negative correlation between total payoff and use of costly punishment. Those people who gain the highest total payoff tend not to use costly punishment: winners don't punish. This suggests that costly punishment behaviour is maladaptive in cooperation games and might have evolved for other reasons.     

Spontaneous emergence of leaders and followers in foraging pairs

Animals that forage socially often stand to gain from coordination of their behaviour. Yet it is not known how group members reach a consensus on the timing of foraging bouts. Here we demonstrate a simple process by which this may occur. We develop a state-dependent, dynamic game model of foraging by a pair of animals, in which each individual chooses between resting or foraging during a series of consecutive periods, so as to maximize its own individual chances of survival. We find that, if there is an advantage to foraging together, the equilibrium behaviour of both individuals becomes highly synchronized. As a result of this synchronization, differences in the energetic reserves of the two players spontaneously develop, leading them to adopt different behavioural roles. The individual with lower reserves emerges as the 'pace-maker' who determines when the pair should forage, providing a straightforward resolution to the problem of group coordination. Moreover, the strategy that gives rise to this behaviour can be implemented by a simple 'rule of thumb' that requires no detailed knowledge of the state of other individuals.     

Social evolution: kin preference in a social microbe

Kin recognition helps cooperation to evolve in many animals, but it is uncertain whether microorganisms can also use it to focus altruistic behaviour on relatives. Here we show that the social amoeba Dictyostelium purpureum prefers to form groups with its own kin in situations where some individuals die to assist others. By directing altruism towards kin, D. purpureum should generally avoid the costs of chimaerism experienced by the related D. discoideum.     

社会价值取向与个体的内隐态度

社会价值取向反映了人们在评价自己和他人结果方面的内在动机上的个体差异。亲社会型个体偏好共同利益最大化，而亲自我型个体偏好自我利益最大化。研究发现，亲自我型个体和亲社会型个体在“个人／积极＋社会／消极”的联结程度上有显著差异，亲自我型个体比亲社会型个体具有更强的“个人／积极”联结，前者对“个人／积极”联结的反应时明显快于亲社会型个体。这些结果表明亲自我型个体和亲社会型个体都持有对社会的积极态度，但与亲社会型个体相比，亲自我型个体对个人持有更积极的内隐态度；社会价值取向本身无法有效地预测经济博弈中的决策行为。     

A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization

Human behaviour is thought to spread through face-to-face social networks, but it is difficult to identify social influence effects in observational studies, and it is unknown whether online social networks operate in the same way. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people. Furthermore, the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users' friends, and friends of friends. The effect of social transmission on real-world voting was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves, and nearly all the transmission occurred between 'close friends' who were more likely to have a face-to-face relationship. These results suggest that strong ties are instrumental for spreading both online and real-world behaviour in human social networks.     

Human behaviour: Egalitarian motive and altruistic punishment

Altruistic punishment is a behaviour in which individuals punish others at a cost to themselves in order to provide a public good. Fehr and G?chter present experimental evidence in humans indicating that negative emotions towards non-cooperators motivate punishment, which, in turn, provokes a high degree of cooperation. Using Fehr and G?chter's original data, we provide an alternative analysis of their experiment that suggests that egalitarian motives are more important than motives for punishing non-cooperative behaviour. This finding is consistent with evidence that humans may have an evolutionary incentive to punish the highest earners in order to promote equality, rather than cooperation.     

The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics

The dynamics of many social, technological and economic phenomena are driven by individual human actions, turning the quantitative understanding of human behaviour into a central question of modern science. Current models of human dynamics, used from risk assessment to communications, assume that human actions are randomly distributed in time and thus well approximated by Poisson processes. In contrast, there is increasing evidence that the timing of many human activities, ranging from communication to entertainment and work patterns, follow non-Poisson statistics, characterized by bursts of rapidly occurring events separated by long periods of inactivity. Here I show that the bursty nature of human behaviour is a consequence of a decision-based queuing process: when individuals execute tasks based on some perceived priority, the timing of the tasks will be heavy tailed, with most tasks being rapidly executed, whereas a few experience very long waiting times. In contrast, random or priority blind execution is well approximated by uniform inter-event statistics. These finding have important implications, ranging from resource management to service allocation, in both communications and retail.     

Developmental cheating in the social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus

Cheating is a potential problem in any social system that depends on cooperation and in which actions that benefit a group are costly to individuals that perform them. Genetic mutants that fail to perform a group-beneficial function but that reap the benefits of belonging to the group should have a within-group selective advantage, provided that the mutants are not too common. Here we show that social cheating exists even among prokaryotes. The bacterium Myxococcus xanthus exhibits several social behaviours, including aggregation of cells into spore-producing fruiting bodies during starvation. We examined a number of M. xanthus genotypes that were defective for fruiting-body development, including several lines that evolved for 1,000 generations under asocial conditions and others carrying defined mutations in developmental pathways, to determine whether they behaved as cheaters when mixed with their developmentally proficient progenitor. Clones from several evolved lines and two defined mutants exhibited cheating during development, being overrepresented among resulting spores relative to their initial frequency in the mixture. The ease of finding anti-social behaviours suggests that cheaters may be common in natural populations of M. xanthus.     

直播电商模式下青年群体冲动购买研究

直播电商不仅能带动商品买卖,也能促进冲动购买,此现象在青年群体中尤为明显.本文通过网页电商和直播电商对比发现,直播电商具有社会临场感高的特点,本文基于这一特点,运用相关理论构建了社会临场感和冲动购买之间的概念模型,并对其进行实证分析.通过分析712位有直播间购物经历的青年消费者的数据发现:直播电商模式下,在社会临场感对冲动购买的作用中,情感唤醒、模仿他人和社会规范起到中介作用,其中情感唤醒会影响模仿他人和社会规范,中庸思维会负向调节冲动购买.     

场域:现代社会研究的另一种视角

在对勒温和布迪厄的"场域"理论进行分析研究的基础上,认为"场域"作为一个个体和社会的关系研究的综合平台,协调传统社会中个体与社会、行动与结构之间的紧张关系。"场域"是现代社会研究的另一种视角,也为社会人类学的研究提供了启示。     

双语能力:劣势还是优势?

尽管在传统上人们对双语能力心存偏见,认为讲两种语言会造成一定的表达障碍,但近年来比较权威和科学的研究却得出相反的结论,即特定的社会因素是引发双语者表达障碍的根本原因。在认知领域,双语者具有处理语言和非语言符号的更大灵活性;而人们普遍担心的双语能力将导致非正常个性发展的问题与双语学生所处的社会、政治和经济环境密切相关。     

Pinyon jays use transitive inference to predict social dominance

Living in large, stable social groups is often considered to favour the evolution of enhanced cognitive abilities, such as recognizing group members, tracking their social status and inferring relationships among them. An individual's place in the social order can be learned through direct interactions with others, but conflicts can be time-consuming and even injurious. Because the number of possible pairwise interactions increases rapidly with group size, members of large social groups will benefit if they can make judgments about relationships on the basis of indirect evidence. Transitive reasoning should therefore be particularly important for social individuals, allowing assessment of relationships from observations of interactions among others. Although a variety of studies have suggested that transitive inference may be used in social settings, the phenomenon has not been demonstrated under controlled conditions in animals. Here we show that highly social pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) draw sophisticated inferences about their own dominance status relative to that of strangers that they have observed interacting with known individuals. These results directly demonstrate that animals use transitive inference in social settings and imply that such cognitive capabilities are widespread among social species.     

论社会结构理论下和谐社会关系的构建——以警察对公众态度的差别为视角

社会结构是由个人的社会行动及其相互作用的模式构成。探讨警察等公职人员在执法过程中面对不同的社会阶层所采取的手段以及实施执法活动的内容、结果的区别．可以为如今日趋紧张的警民关系找到一个解释的出口，也可为警察及其他行为人的行为提供指引。     

语言与社会：全球化的视野（下）

(上接 2 0 0 4年第 6期 )语言 ,族群和国家语言是识别自我认同感的一种重要手段 ,我们的认同意识与我们所说的语言有着密切的联系。正如我们所注意到的 ,语言是民族特征的主要标记之一 ,是创造族群意识的一种重要方法。1 8世纪末和 1 9世纪初 ,中欧的几个古老的国家逐渐发展成为工业化社会 ,学校教育也使越来越多的人具备了读写能力 ,当时使用曾一度被视作地方语言的人因此获得了经济和政治权力 ,他们开始使用自己的语言 ,以此作为民族特征的焦点。像匈牙利语、芬兰语、拉脱维亚语和波兰语等这样的语言的出现是和这些地区的民族意识的增强相…     

个体社会情绪的发展、调适与社会适应

情绪情感是影响人的认知的内在因素,个体社会情绪的发展会影响人与人之间的关系、人与社会的关系,从而影响人的社会适应。应用“顺应社会性”、“注重文化作用”、“自主发展”、“积极引导”等策略来培养良好的社会情绪,通过“培养积极社会心态”、“加强自我情绪理解”、“缓解矛盾心理”、“理顺社会情绪表达”等方法来调适社会情绪。对社会情绪的调适有助于个体理解他人、理解社会,从而能够更好地适应社会,减少反社会行为,促进社会的和谐发展。     

短尾猴对顺位关系的认知

对营群体生活的灵长类来说 ,个体的顺位是影响该个体其它行为表现的一个重要因素。本研究通过对安徽黄山风景区鱼鳞坑群短尾猴的野外观察和有关行为的分析 ,表明短尾猴可以认知 :( 1 )自己顺位的变化 ,( 2 )自己与其它个体顺位的高低 ,( 3)其它个体之间顺位的高低。本研究的结果有助于了解动物认知能力的进化。