Cognitive foundations for helping and harming others: Making welfare tradeoffs in industrialized and small-scale societies

Delton, Andrew W.; Jaeggi, Adrian V.; Lim, Julian; Sznycer, Daniel; Gurven, Michael; Robertson, Theresa E.; Sugiyama, Lawrence S.; Cosmides, Leda; Tooby, John

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2023.01.013

Cited by 12 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…For example, sweetness or savoriness is an appropriate cue to estimate the nutritional value of food but is a poor cue to estimate the social value of social partners. Reciprocally, how much someone gives up in order to do you a favor is an appropriate cue to estimate your social value to them, and thus their social value to you, but is a poor cue to estimate the nutritional value of food (Delton et al, 2023;Delton & Robertson, 2016;Lim, 2012;Tooby & Cosmides, 1996).…”

Section: Computational Elements Supporting the Production Of And Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…and integrates these into a summary variable to guide those decisions that impact the welfares of self and other concurrently. This summary variable, termed Welfare Tradeoff Ratio, specifies the weight the actor attaches to the welfare of a specific other relative to the actor's own welfare (Delton et al, 2023;Sell, 2005;. Welfare Tradeoff Ratios underlie the folk notions of liking, respect, indifference, and hatred.…”

Section: Computational Elements Supporting the Production Of And Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A receiver who responds to the tearing of a sender in a way that favors the sender (e.g., by helping the sender) will do so on the assessment that she (the receiver) too would benefit by doing so, directly (e.g., tears alert receiver about a threat to the tearer and the receiver; receiver removes threat) or indirectly, through shared fate (child signals hunger by tearing up; receiver feeds her child). When the receiver stands to gain indirectly from helping the tearful sender, the receiver will discount the benefit to be derived by the sender by psychological proxies of shared fate (e.g., by the Welfare Tradeoff Ratio the receiver holds toward the sender; Delton et al, 2023). Often, this will lead receivers to incur fewer costs to benefit senders than senders would rather receivers incur (Trivers, 1972).…”

Section: Playing Signaling Games With Tears: Decision-making By Sende...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Emotional tears: What they are and how they work

Sznycer

Gračanin²,

Lieberman³

2023

Preprint

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Tears serve ophthalmic functions: They lubricate, nourish, and protect the cornea. Tearers produce tears non-permanently and at relatively low cost. And observers pay attention to the eyes of others and extract from eyes and faces a lot of information about others’ stable and transient characteristics, including their mental states. These background conditions may have led to the evolution in the human lineage of additional signaling functions in tears. Emotional tearing occurs during negative events (e.g., injuries) and positive events (e.g., achievements). Episodes of tearing appear to be united by tearers’ subjective imputation of negative or positive value to certain internal or external events. Knowing the degree to which things enhance or diminish one’s prospects—the value of things—is a pressing matter for humans and other organisms. Value information is produced for internal consumption, to be used by behavior-regulating mechanisms in the focal individual. But some value information is made available, in addition, to other people, through tearing and other forms of verbal and non-verbal communication. Tearing may function as an implicit plea for receivers to minimize the costs imposed on the tearer by nature, by third-parties, or by the receivers themselves—common when the tearer has lower formidability or wherewithal than receivers do. In addition, tearing may exhort receivers to infer and register which things the tearer values, positively or negatively. Here, we characterize tears, describe the game-theoretic logic of bargaining from a position of weakness, outline the computational systems that regulate the production of and responses to emotional tears, and review findings about emotional tearing that are relevant to the signaling hypothesis.

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Section: Computational Elements Supporting the Production Of And Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Computational Elements Supporting the Production Of And Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Playing Signaling Games With Tears: Decision-making By Sende...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Emotional tears: What they are and how they work

Sznycer

Gračanin²,

Lieberman³

2023

Preprint

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“…For instance, you may offer to take a friend to the airport at 6am, but might not make the same offer to an acquaintance. To a good approximation, these decisions can be modeled by assuming that the decision-maker puts some weight on the payoffs of the other individual (Delton et al, 2023; for review of the empirical evidence see Delton and Robertson, 2016).…”

Section: The Psychology Of Welfare-tradeoffsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first component of the ideal observer model is a generative model of behavior in the WTT. This model can be seen as a set of assumptions about how humans typically behave in the game (for empirical evidence in favor of the model see Delton et al, 2023;Delton, 2010; for existing computational models of social cognition making similar assumptions see e.g. Jern and Kemp, 2014;Ullman et al, 2009;Davis et al, 2021).…”

Section: Ideal Observer Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rational inferences about social valuation

Quillien¹,

Tooby²,

Cosmides³

2023

Preprint

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The decisions made by other people can contain information about the value they assign to our welfare---for example how much they are willing to sacrifice to make us better off. An emerging body of research suggests that we extract and use this information, responding more favorably to those who sacrifice more even if they provide us with less. The magnitude of their trade-offs governs our social responses to them—including partner choice, giving, and anger. This implies that people have well-designed cognitive mechanisms for estimating the weight someone else assigns to their welfare, even when the amounts at stake vary and the information is noisy or sparse. We tested this hypothesis in two studies (N=200; US samples) by asking participants to observe a partner make two trade-offs, and predict the partner's decisions in other trials. Their predictions were compared to those of a model that uses statistically optimal procedures, operationalized as a Bayesian ideal observer. As predicted, (i) the estimates people made from sparse evidence matched those of the ideal observer, and (ii) lower welfare trade-offs elicited more anger from participants, even when their total payoffs were held constant. These results support the view that people efficiently update their representations of how much others value them. They also provide the most direct test to date of a key assumption of the re-calibrational theory of anger: that anger is triggered by cues of low valuation, not by the infliction of costs.

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