Fundamental freedoms and the psychology of threat, bargaining, and inequality
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2013
Van de Vliert&amp... more Van de Vliert's findings may be explained by the psychology of threat and bargaining. Poor people facing extreme threats must cope by surrendering individual freedom in service of shared group needs. Wealthier people are more able to flee from threats and/or resist authoritarianism, so their leaders must concede greater freedom. Incorporating these factors (plus inequality) can sharpen researchers' predictions.
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Papers by Adam M Sparks
available, such as facial and vocal traits. The evolutionary function of impression formation and social judgment
mechanisms have received limited attention in psychology research; we argue that their function is to
accurately forecast the behavior of others. There is some evidence for the predictive accuracy of social judgments,
butmuch of it comes fromsituations where there is little incentive to deceive, which limits applicability to questions
of the function of such mechanisms. A classic experiment that avoids this problem was conducted by R. H.
Frank, T. Gilovich, and D. T. Regan (1993); their participants predicted each other's Prisoner's Dilemma Game decisions
with above-chance accuracy after a short interaction period, knowing the game would follow. We report
three original studies that replicate these aspects of the methods of Frank et al. (1993) and reanalyze data fromall
known replications. Our meta-analysis of these studies confirms the original report: humans can predict each
other's Prisoner's Dilemma decisions after a brief interaction with people who have incentive to deceive.