Theory of collective mind.

Theory of mind research has traditionally focused on the ascription of mental states to a single individual. Here, we introduce a theory of collective mind: the ascription of a unified mental state to a group of agents with convergent experiences. Rather than differentiation between one's personal perspective and that of another agent, a theory of collective mind requires perspectival unification across agents.

Does competitive winning increase subsequent cheating?

In this preregistered study, we attempted to replicate and substantially extend a frequently cited experiment by Schurr and Ritov, published in 2016, suggesting that winners of pairwise competitions are more likely than others to steal money in subsequent games of chance against different opponents, possibly because of an enhanced sense of entitlement among competition winners. A replication seemed desirable because of the relevance of the effect to dishonesty in everyday life, the apparent counterintuitivity of the effect, possible problems and anomalies in the original study, and above all the fact that the researchers investigated only one potential explanation for the effect. Our results failed to replicate Schurr and Ritov's basic finding: we found no evidence to support the hypotheses that either winning or losing is associated with subsequent cheating.

Prosociality in the social dilemma of antibiotic prescribing.

Antibiotic prescribing can be conceptualised as a social dilemma in which the overuse of antibiotics, to minimise immediate risks to individual patients, results in a sub-optimal outcome for society (antimicrobial resistance) and increased risks to all patients in the long run. Doctors face the challenge of balancing the interests of individual patients against the collective good when prescribing antibiotics. While evidence suggests that doctors tend to prioritise individual interests over those of the collective, the conventional interpretation of such decisions as selfish may be inappropriate because most doctors are motivated by prosocial concerns about their patients.

Drivers of Broad-Spectrum Antibiotic Overuse across Diverse Hospital Contexts-A Qualitative Study of Prescribers in the UK, Sri Lanka and South Africa.

Antimicrobial stewardship programs focus on reducing overuse of broad-spectrum antibiotics (BSAs), primarily through interventions to change prescribing behavior. This study aims to identify multi-level influences on BSA overuse across diverse high and low income, and public and private, healthcare contexts. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 46 prescribers from hospitals in the UK, Sri Lanka, and South Africa, including public and private providers.

Team Reasoning and the Rational Choice of Payoff-Dominant Outcomes in Games.

Standard game theory cannot explain the selection of payoff-dominant outcomes that are best for all players in common-interest games. Theories of team reasoning can explain why such mutualistic cooperation is rational. They propose that teams can be agents and that individuals in teams can adopt a distinctive mode of reasoning that enables them to do their part in achieving Pareto-dominant outcomes.

Moral and Contextual Dimensions of "Inappropriate" Antibiotic Prescribing in Secondary Care: A Three-Country Interview Study.

Overuse of broad-spectrum antibiotics in secondary care is a key contributor to the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR); efforts are focused on minimizing antibiotic overuse as a crucial step toward containing the global threat of AMR. The concept of overtreatment has, however, been difficult to define. Efforts to address the overuse of medicine need to be informed by an understanding of how prescribers themselves understand the problem.

Medical prescribing and antibiotic resistance: A game-theoretic analysis of a potentially catastrophic social dilemma.

The availability of antibiotics presents medical practitioners with a prescribing dilemma. On the one hand, antibiotics provide a safe and effective treatment option for patients with bacterial infections, but at a population level, over-prescription reduces their effectiveness by facilitating the evolution of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotic medication. A game-theoretic investigation, including analysis of equilibrium strategies, evolutionarily stability, and replicator dynamics, reveals that rational doctors, motivated to attain the best outcomes for their own patients, will prescribe antibiotics irrespective of the level of antibiotic resistance in the population and the behavior of other doctors, although they would achieve better long-term outcomes if their prescribing were more restrained.

The persuasive power of knowledge: Testing the confidence heuristic.

According to the confidence heuristic, people are confident when they know they are right, and their confidence makes them persuasive. Previous experiments have investigated the confidence-persuasiveness aspect of the heuristic but not the integrated knowledge-confidence-persuasiveness hypothesis. We report 3 experiments to test the heuristic using incentivized interactive decisions with financial outcomes in which pairs of participants with common interests attempted to identify target stimuli after conferring, only 1 pair member having strong information about the target.

Persistent cooperation and gender differences in repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games: Some things never change.

In the finite-horizon repeated Prisoner's Dilemma, a compelling backward induction argument shows that rational players will defect in every round, following the uniquely optimal Nash equilibrium path. It is frequently asserted that cooperation gradually declines when a Prisoner's Dilemma is repeated multiple times by the same players, but the evidence for this is unconvincing, and a classic experiment by Rapoport and Chammah in the 1960s reported that cooperation eventually recovers if the game is repeated hundreds of times. They also reported that men paired with men cooperate almost twice as frequently as women paired with women.

Dynamic probability of reinforcement for cooperation: Random game termination in the centipede game.

Experimental games have previously been used to study principles of human interaction. Many such games are characterized by iterated or repeated designs that model dynamic relationships, including reciprocal cooperation. To enable the study of infinite game repetitions and to avoid endgame effects of lower cooperation toward the final game round, investigators have introduced random termination rules.

Altruism, collective rationality, and extreme self-sacrifice.

Puzzlement about extreme self-sacrifice arises from an unarticulated assumption of psychological egoism, according to which people invariably act in their own self-interests. However, altruism and collective rationality are well established experimentally: people sometimes act to benefit others or in the interests of groups to which they belong. When such social motives are sufficiently strong, extreme self-sacrifice presents no special problem of explanation and does not require out-group threats.

Team reasoning: Solving the puzzle of coordination.

In many everyday activities, individuals have a common interest in coordinating their actions. Orthodox game theory cannot explain such intuitively obvious forms of coordination as the selection of an outcome that is best for all in a common-interest game. Theories of team reasoning provide a convincing solution by proposing that people are sometimes motivated to maximize the collective payoff of a group and that they adopt a distinctive mode of reasoning from preferences to decisions.

Correction: Social Value Induction and Cooperation in the Centipede Game.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Social Value Induction and Cooperation in the Centipede Game.

The Centipede game provides a dynamic model of cooperation and competition in repeated dyadic interactions. Two experiments investigated psychological factors driving cooperation in 20 rounds of a Centipede game with significant monetary incentives and anonymous and random re-pairing of players after every round. The main purpose of the research was to determine whether the pattern of strategic choices observed when no specific social value orientation is experimentally induced--the standard condition in all previous investigations of behavior in the Centipede and most other experimental games--is essentially individualistic, the orthodox game-theoretic assumption being that players are individualistically motivated in the absence of any specific motivational induction.

Is Tit-for-Tat the Answer? On the Conclusions Drawn from Axelrod's Tournaments.

Axelrod's celebrated Prisoner's Dilemma computer tournaments, published in the early 1980s, were designed to find effective ways of acting in everyday interactions with the strategic properties of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game. The winner of both tournaments was tit-for-tat, a program that cooperates on the first round and then, on every subsequent round, copies the co-player's choice from the previous round. This has been interpreted as evidence that tit-for-tat is an effective general-purpose strategy.

Strong Stackelberg reasoning in symmetric games: An experimental replication and extension.

In common interest games in which players are motivated to coordinate their strategies to achieve a jointly optimal outcome, orthodox game theory provides no general reason or justification for choosing the required strategies. In the simplest cases, where the optimal strategies are intuitively obvious, human decision makers generally coordinate without difficulty, but how they achieve this is poorly understood. Most theories seeking to explain strategic coordination have limited applicability, or require changes to the game specification, or introduce implausible assumptions or radical departures from fundamental game-theoretic assumptions.

The outlandish, the realistic, and the real: contextual manipulation and agent role effects in trolley problems.

Hypothetical trolley problems are widely used to elicit moral intuitions, which are employed in the development of moral theory and the psychological study of moral judgments. The scenarios used are outlandish, and some philosophers and psychologists have questioned whether the judgments made in such unrealistic and unfamiliar scenarios are a reliable basis for theory-building. We present two experiments that investigate whether differences in moral judgment due to the role of the agent, previously found in a standard trolley scenario, persist when the structure of the problem is transplanted to a more familiar context.

Spontaneous similarity discrimination in the evolution of cooperation.

The similarity discrimination effect occurs when a single gene or gene cluster causes its carriers to display both a variable phenotypic trait and a behavioural predisposition to cooperate preferentially with recognisably similar carriers. We distinguish this from the greenbeard effect, in which cooperation evolves through fixed phenotypic tags and genetically linked cooperative behaviour with others displaying the same tag. Our agent-based simulations show that the evolution of cooperation through similarity discrimination, in contrast to the greenbeard effect, does not depend on population viscosity or other restrictive conditions.

Continuity and trust in primary care: a qualitative study informed by game theory.

Purpose: The relationship between continuity of care and patient trust in primary care is not fully understood. We report an empirical investigation, informed by game theory, of patients' accounts of their trust in general practitioners (GPs).

Methods: We conducted an analysis based on the constant comparative method of 20 semistructured interviews with patients about trust in GPs in the United Kingdom.

Learning to cooperate without awareness in multiplayer minimal social situations.

Experimental and Monte Carlo methods were used to test theoretical predictions about adaptive learning of cooperative responses without awareness in minimal social situations-games in which the payoffs to players depend not on their own actions but exclusively on the actions of other group members. In Experiment 1, learning occurred slowly over 200 rounds in a dyadic minimal social situation but not in multiplayer groups. In Experiments 2-4, learning occurred rarely in multiplayer groups, even when players were informed that they were interacting strategically and were allowed to communicate with one another but were not aware of the game's payoff structure.

The Prostate Care Questionnaire for Carers (PCQ-C): reliability, validity and acceptability.

Background: Patient experience is commonly monitored in evaluating and improving health care, but the experience of carers (partners/relatives/friends) is rarely monitored even though the role of carers can often be substantial. For carers to fulfil their role it is necessary to address their needs. This paper describes an evaluation of the reliability, validity and acceptability of the PCQ-C, a newly developed instrument designed to measure the experiences of carers of men with prostate cancer.

The prostate care questionnaire for patients (PCQ-P): reliability, validity and acceptability.

Background: In England, prostate cancer patients report worse experience of care than patients with other cancers. However, no standard measure of patient experience of prostate cancer care is currently available. This paper describes an evaluation of the reliability, validity and acceptability of the PCQ-P, a newly developed instrument designed to measure patient experience of prostate cancer care.

Men's and carers' experiences of care for prostate cancer: a narrative literature review.

Objective: To review studies of patients' and carers' experience of prostate cancer care.

Design: Narrative literature review.

Methods: Search strategies were developed for the following databases: MEDLINE (1966-2006), EMBASE (1980-2006), CINAHL (1982-2006) and PsycINFO (1987-2006).