Rick K. Wilson

The Value of a Smile: Game Theory with a Human Face

Many economists and biologists view cooperation as anomalous: animals (including humans) that pursue their own self-interest have superior survival odds to their altruistic or cooperative neighbors. However, in many situations there are substantial gains to the group that can achieve cooperation among its members, and to individuals who are members of those groups. For an individual, the key to successful cooperation is the ability to identify cooperative partners. The ability to signal and detect the intention to cooperate would be a very valuable skill for humans to posses. Smiling is frequently observed in social interactions between humans, and may be used as a signal of the intention to cooperate. However, given that humans have the ability to smile falsely, the ability to detect intentions may go far beyond the ability to recognize a smile. In the present study, we examine the value of a smile in a simple bargaining context. 120 subjects participate in a laboratory experiment consisting of a simple two-person, one-shot “trust” game with monetary payoffs. Each subject is shown a photograph of his partner prior to the game; the photograph is taken from a collection that includes one smiling and one non-smiling image for each of 60 individuals. These photographs are also rated by a separate set of subjects who complete a semantic differential survey on affective and behavioral interpretations of the images. Results lend some support to the prediction that smiles can elicit cooperation among strangers in a one-shot interaction. Other characteristics of faces also appear to elicit cooperation. Factor analysis of the survey data reveals an important factor, termed “cooperation”, which is strongly related to trusting behavior in the game. This factor is correlated with smiling, but is somewhat more strongly predictive of behavior than a smile alone. In addition, males are found to be more cooperative, especially towards female images, whereas females are least cooperative towards female images.

Judging a Book by its Cover: Beauty and Expectations in the Trust Game

This research examines one mechanism by which people decide whether to trust strangers. Using a laboratory setting that provides subjects with controlled information about their counterparts, we test whether attractive subjects gain a “beauty premium” in a game involving trust and reciprocity. Attractive trustees are viewed as more trustworthy; they are trusted at higher rates and as a consequence earn more in the first stage of the game. Attractiveness does not guarantee higher earnings, as we find a “beauty penalty” attached to attractive trusters in the second stage of the game. This penalty arises because attractive trusters do not live up to expectations of them on the part of the trustees. Trustees withhold repayment when their expectations are dashed. `This punishment is larger when the disappointing truster is attractive.

Good Times, Bad Times, and the Diversionary Use of Force

It is commonly asserted that state leaders, when faced with poor domestic political conditions, have an incentive to engage in diversionary foreign policy behavior. The standard view is that an aggressive foreign policy benefits the executive by leading the public to ignore domestic problems and to “rally around the flag” to meet the foreign threat. In this article, the authors formalize the diversionary argument as a principal-agent problem in which the state executive is an agent under contract to a public whose choice to retain or dismiss the executive is based on whether the agent is judged to be competent. The authors assume that the competence of the executive is private information and that the public makes Bayesian updates of the probability of executive competence based on domestic and foreign policy outcomes. Several implications are derived from the model. First, the competence of executives and their attitudes toward risk are central in the decision to engage in diversionary foreign policy. Second, an executive often can improve her or his chances of being retained only by altering the publics perception of the difficulty of the foreign operation. Third, the model points to the need to distinguish between short-term rally-around-the-flag effects of diversion and the publics long-term assessment of executive competence.

Ethnicity and Trust: Evidence from Russia

The willingness to trust strangers has been associated with a variety of public benefits, from greater civic-mindedness and more honest government to higher rates of economic growth, and more. But a growing body of research finds that such generalized trust is far more common in ethnically homogeneous than in more diverse societies. Ethnic difference is believed to breed more particularistic, ingroup ties, thus undermining both generalized and cross-ethnic trust. We argue that this image is too narrow, and we propose a broader model to identify the factors that give rise to cross-ethnic trust. Using data from two minority regions of Russia, we find considerable support for the model. We also find that high ingroup or particularistic trust is no barrier to faith in another ethnic group.

Globalization and human cooperation

Globalization magnifies the problems that affect all people and that require large-scale human cooperation, for example, the overharvesting of natural resources and human-induced global warming. However, what does globalization imply for the cooperation needed to address such global social dilemmas? Two competing hypotheses are offered. One hypothesis is that globalization prompts reactionary movements that reinforce parochial distinctions among people. Large-scale cooperation then focuses on favoring ones own ethnic, racial, or language group. The alternative hypothesis suggests that globalization strengthens cosmopolitan attitudes by weakening the relevance of ethnicity, locality, or nationhood as sources of identification. In essence, globalization, the increasing interconnectedness of people worldwide, broadens the group boundaries within which individuals perceive they belong. We test these hypotheses by measuring globalization at both the country and individual levels and analyzing the relationship between globalization and individual cooperation with distal others in multilevel sequential cooperation experiments in which players can contribute to individual, local, and/or global accounts. Our samples were drawn from the general populations of the United States, Italy, Russia, Argentina, South Africa, and Iran. We find that as country and individual levels of globalization increase, so too does individual cooperation at the global level vis-à-vis the local level. In essence, “globalized” individuals draw broader group boundaries than others, eschewing parochial motivations in favor of cosmopolitan ones. Globalization may thus be fundamental in shaping contemporary large-scale cooperation and may be a positive force toward the provision of global public goods.

“Liar, Liar... ” Cheap Talk and Reputation in Repeated Public Goods Settings

An abstract public goods setting is considered in which individually rational strategies lead to collectively irrational outcomes. Theorists argue that individual reputations can provide an important means for solving repeated versions of that public goods game. Numerous experimental findings also show that preplay communication leads to higher rates of contributions to public goods. The authors investigate whether preplay communication and reputational information aid in solving collective actions problems by using laboratory experimental methods to disentangle the separate effects of both signals and past behavioral information. The results are discouraging. Increased information about the past behavior of subjects, coupled with preplay signaling, decreases levels of contributions to the public good. These results point to how quickly group distrust takes root and the consequences of that distrust.

Global Social Identity and Global Cooperation

This research examined the question of whether the psychology of social identity can motivate cooperation in the context of a global collective. Our data came from a multinational study of choice behavior in a multilevel public-goods dilemma conducted among samples drawn from the general populations of the United States, Italy, Russia, Argentina, South Africa, and Iran. Results demonstrate that an inclusive social identification with the world community is a meaningful psychological construct that plays a role in motivating cooperation that transcends parochial interests. Self-reported identification with the world as a whole predicts behavioral contributions to a global public good beyond what is predicted from expectations about what other people are likely to contribute. Furthermore, global social identification is conceptually distinct from general attitudes about global issues, and has unique effects on cooperative behavior.

Leadership and Credibility in N-Person Coordination Games

It is often assumed that leaders serve as focal points around which followers rally when confronted with a coordination problem. This research begins with one component of leadership—its coordinating role—and disentangles how leadership matters for followers. This analysis proceeds as a simple one-sided signaling game from leaders to followers and investigates when a leaders signals are credible. The empirical analysis is based on a series of laboratory experiments in which groups of four actors were involved in a series of one-stage coordination games. The findings show that although leadership is crucial for coordinating followers, it is not a panacea. The introduction of uncertainty about the type of leader markedly decreases the ameliorating impact of leadership.

Investigating Conflict, Power, and Status Within and Among Groups

This article investigates the concepts and perspectives of conflict, power, and status developed across the disciplines of political science, psychology, and sociology. Although the different disciplines, at times, have different assumptions about actors and interactions, there is a great deal of similarity. This similarity allows one to uncover some general principles that apply to group behavior. This article advocates and illustrates using institutional rules to analyze the research within and across areas.

Overdraft: The Political Cost of Congressional Malfeasance

This research focuses on the aggregate effects of the House Banking Scandal on the 1992 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. While many commentators felt the scandal would transform the House of Representatives through massive displacement of members, we argue that the literature on scandals in Congress should have made us more cautious in our prognostications. We focus on three different stages of reelection for incumbents and conclude that the House Banking Scandal had only a nominal effect on those who wrote bad checks.