RESEARCH INTERESTS
My primary research interest
is in the dynamics of cooperation, specifically, why people are not
more cooperative. I focus on both personality- and
cognition-based reasons for this.
Regarding personality, I believe everyone has a stable set of
traits, or patterns of behavior, that help them navigate the world
and exploit their surroundings to best advantage. These traits
result from social learning that occurs primarily during childhood
and adolescence but does continue across the lifespan. The
patterns become fixed early on, and thus very hard to change, even
when the traits do not work well in the current surroundings.
As a major part of social learning is the experience of working with
others to accomplish goals, it seems to me perfectly reasonable that
personality traits would affect one's willingness to
cooperate. My interest here, then, is in knowing which
particular traits relate to cooperative action. I see this
work as vital because the traits represent a potential brake on the
effectiveness of interventions designed to encourage greater
cooperation, in that people with particular levels of a trait may
just not respond to a specific intervention. I have typically
studied the traits of Social Value Orientation and trust, and am
starting work on Person-Thing Orientation, but also have an interest
in the role of the "Big Five" traits.
At the cognitive level, I'd like to know how people think about, and
respond to, what their fellow group members are doing and have
done. Social comparison is a primary influence on much social
behavior. We like to know how we match up with similar others,
and most people are motivated to make sure their behaviors are
within the range of acceptable actions. What, then, do people
do if they are not being very cooperative, but discover that most
other people are? What if they discover after the fact that
someone was far more, or less, cooperative than anyone else?
How does this information affect what they do in the future?
Among our major findings here, we have shown that people are
sensitive to what similar others are doing, and will revise their
behaviors to seem more in line with those people; those who are
objectively doing very well will nonetheless get quite upset if
someone else is doing better than them; and people who feel like
things have been going better than expected will become less
cooperative in the future, and vice versa for those who feel things
have been going more poorly than expected.
In 2010, my former student Asako Stone and I discovered that people
generally do not want very generous people to remain involved in the
group. For some people, this is because they feel such
extraordinary people make normal actors look bad, and may end up
raising the bar on what is considered appropriate behavior.
Other people think the person is violating social rules of
convention, which state that you should give in proportion to what
you will get out of the situation--a highly generous person is
giving more than they get in return. Finally, a few people saw
a sinister motive underlying the person's behaviors, and believed
the person was setting everyone else up for a double-cross.
This research gained us international attention in The Economist, Time, US News and World
Report, Wired, and myriad newspapers around the world, as
well as interviews on the BBC and Armed Forces Radio. We are
currently working on follow-up studies designed to understand why
people can be negative toward generous others, and what lengths they
will go to to force the generous person out, or to get them to
change their ways. As it is counterproductive to drive away
people who want to help the group, why people do it anyway is, we
feel, a major issue.
A new area for us is investigation of how personality traits relate
to simple willingness to engage in group work. Presumably,
some people find group tasks less attractive than others, but study
of who these people are, and the impact of including them in the
group anyway, is minimal. We are focusing on a trait called
"lone wolf tendency" that has been shown in the educational
literature to identify students who function poorly on group
projects. We are currently testing to see if lone-wolf is also
predictive of willingness to be a part of more general group tasks.
Finally, I enjoy applying my quantitative training to a wide variety
of problems, especially the modeling of health-behavior
connections.