IBSS-L: Inequity Aversion, Individual Decision Making, and the Emergence of Collective Behavior

这个跨学科的研究项目将研究如何在不公平的结果对合作产生负面影响的情况下保持大规模合作。该项目将汇集具有行为和实验经济学和心理学、生物人类学、集体动物行为、进化生物学和生态学经验的研究人员，以加强对人类和密切相关社会中大规模合作中不平等与合作之间相互作用的理解。该项目将跨越这些学科的传统界限，使生物人类学家传统上提出的问题更加关注行为机制，并使行为经济学家注意到决策研究中生态和进化背景的重要性。该项目将为一名博士后研究员和一些本科生提供令人兴奋的教育和培训机会。调查人员还将与un驯服科学（un驯服科学是一家由科学家运营的公司，为教师和学生制作在线媒体内容）合作，开发可以与广泛的K-12学生分享项目信息的材料。人类通常会参与一个人比另一个人得到更多的互动，比如当一个人完成同样的工作时，他比另一个人得到更多的报酬。在这种情况下，人们往往会做出消极的反应，这对他们与伴侣的关系产生了有害的影响。考虑到我们对“不公平”结果的厌恶会阻碍联合行动，人类社会如何维持高水平的合作？一方面，对不平等的消极反应可能会给个人带来优势。从长期来看，通过寻找新的合作伙伴来应对这种差异的人比那些不这样做的人做得更好。但是，对这种差异过于敏感可能会阻碍集团层面的大规模合作。鉴于合作在人类社会中的基础作用，理解对不平等的反应如何影响合作背景下的决策尤为重要。先前对这一主题的研究通常集中在脱离其更大社会背景的两个个体之间的互动，因此不可能调查这些成对的互动如何形成群体层面的行为模式。伦理考虑、隐私问题和后勤限制也使得在人类社会群体中进行必要的实验变得难以想象。为了克服这些障碍，本项目将对卷尾猴（Cebus paella）进行实验，将其作为模型系统，研究社会环境如何在圈养和自然发生的社会群体中塑造不公平厌恶的表达和集体目标的实现。卷尾猴提供了宝贵而恰当的见解，因为它们的大脑与身体和新皮层与身体的比例非常大，它们在各种不同的环境中高度合作，它们和人类一样厌恶不公平的结果。作为该项目的一部分进行的实验调查了社会环境如何在社会和生态相关环境中塑造不公平厌恶的表达，他们将测试对“不公平”结果作出消极反应的倾向如何影响集体行为。实验将采用新颖的实验喂食器，消除人类实验者的任何影响，以便在完整的社会群体的复杂环境中研究个体和群体行为。本项目由美国国家科学基金会跨学科行为与社会科学研究（IBSS）竞赛资助。

This interdisciplinary research project will examine how large-scale cooperation is maintained de-spite the negative impacts that inequitable outcomes have on cooperation. This project will bring together researchers with experience in behavioral and experimental economics and psychology, biological anthropology, collective animal behavior, and evolutionary biology and ecology to enhance understanding of the interplay between inequity and cooperation in large-scale cooperation in human and closely related societies. The project will bridge the traditional boundaries of these disciplines by bringing a stronger focus on behavioral mechanisms to questions traditionally asked by biological anthropologists and by calling the attention of behavioral economists to the importance of ecological and evolutionary context in studies of decision making. The project will provide an exciting education and training opportunity for a post-doctoral researcher and for a number of undergraduate students. The investigators also will work with Untamed Science, a scientist-run company that makes online media content for teachers and students, to develop materials that can share information about the project with a broad range of K-12 students.Humans routinely participate in interactions in which one individual receives more than another, such as when one individual is paid more than another for completing the same job. People tend to react negatively in such situations, with detrimental consequences for their relationship with their partner. How are high levels of cooperation maintained in human societies, given that our aversion to "unfair" outcomes can impede joint action? On the one hand, responding negatively to inequity likely provides an individual advantage. Over the long term, people who respond to such disparities by finding new cooperation partners do relatively better than those that do not. But being too sensitive to such disparities may impede large-scale cooperation at the group level. Given the foundational role of cooperation in human society, understanding how responses to inequity shape decision-making in the context of cooperation is particularly important. Prior research on this topic usually has focused on the interactions between two individuals divorced from their larger social context, so it has not been possible to investigate how these pair-wise interactions shape patterns of group-level behavior. Ethical considerations, privacy concerns, and logistical limitations also have made it difficult to envision conducting the necessary experiments in human social groups. To overcome these obstacles, this project will consist of experiments that study capuchin monkeys (Cebus paella) as a model system for investigating how social context shapes the expression of inequity aversion and the achievement of collective goals in both captive and naturally occurring social groups. Capuchin monkeys provide valuable and appropriate insights because they have extraordinarily large brain-to-body and neocortex-to-body ratios, they are highly cooperative in a variety of different contexts, and they share humans' aversion to inequitable outcomes. The experiments conducted as part of this project investigate how social context shapes the expression of inequity aversion in both socially and ecologically relevant contexts, and they will test how a predisposition to respond negatively to "unfair" outcomes impacts collective behavior. The experiments will employ novel experimental feeders that remove any influence from human experimenters in order to study individual and group behavior in the complex environment of intact social groups. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.