Publications by authors named "Branas-Garza P"

This dataset originates from TeensLab, a consortium of Spanish Universities dedicated to behavioral research involving Spanish teenagers. The dataset contains data from 33 distinct educational institutions across Spain, accounting for a total of 5,890 students aged 10 to 23 (M = 14.10, SD = 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to both exacerbate and ameliorate existing socioeconomic inequalities. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary overview of the potential impacts of generative AI on (mis)information and three information-intensive domains: work, education, and healthcare. Our goal is to highlight how generative AI could worsen existing inequalities while illuminating how AI may help mitigate pervasive social problems.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Humans often 'altruistically' punish non-cooperators in one-shot interactions among genetically unrelated individuals. This poses an evolutionary puzzle because altruistic punishment enforces cooperation norms that benefit the whole group but is costly for the punisher. One key explanation is that punishment follows a social-benefits logic: it is eminently normative and group-functional (drawing on cultural group selection theories).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Networks of social interactions are the substrate upon which civilizations are built. Often, we create new bonds with people that we like or feel that our relationships are damaged through the intervention of third parties. Despite their importance and the huge impact that these processes have in our lives, quantitative scientific understanding of them is still in its infancy, mainly due to the difficulty of collecting large datasets of social networks including individual attributes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Access to accurate, timely and age-appropriate information about menarche is an essential part of menstrual health. Reliable evidence shows that girls primarily obtain information from their mothers and/or other female family members, therefore, it is important to determine parents' knowledge and their predictions about other parents' knowledge of the age of menarche.

Methods: To this end, we performed a pre-registered study with data collected from 360 households in Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper conducts a pre-registered study aimed to compare binary and continuous set of responses in survey questionnaires. Binary responses consist of two possible opposing response options (Yes/No). Continuous responses are numerical, where respondents can indicate an option on a 0-10 horizontal blind line.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We report data from an online experiment which allows us to study how generosity changed over a 6-day period during the initial explosive growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in Andalusia, Spain, while the country was under a strict lockdown. Participants ( = 969) could donate a fraction of a €100 prize to an unknown charity. Our data are particularly rich in the age distribution and we complement them with daily public information about COVID-19-related deaths, infections and hospital admissions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Using an incentivized experiment with statistical power, this paper explores the role of stakes in charitable giving of lottery prizes, where subjects commit to donate a fraction of the prize before they learn the outcome of the lottery. We study three stake levels: 5€ (n = 177), 100€ (n = 168), and 1,000€ (n = 171). Although the donations increase in absolute terms as the stakes increase, subjects decrease the donated fraction of the pie.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Prenatal exposure to sex hormones exerts organizational effects on the brain which have observable behavioural correlates in adult life. There are reasons to expect that social behaviours-fundamental for the evolutionary success of humans-might be related to biological factors such as prenatal sex hormone exposure. Nevertheless, the existing literature is inconclusive as to whether and how prenatal exposure to testosterone and oestrogen, proxied by the second-to-fourth digit ratio (2D : 4D), may predict non-selfish behaviour.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Expectations, exerting influence through social norms, are a very strong candidate to explain how complex societies function. In the Dictator game (DG), people expect generous behavior from others even if they cannot enforce any sharing of the pie. Here we assume that people donate following their expectations, and that they update their expectations after playing a DG by reinforcement learning to construct a model that explains the main experimental results in the DG.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In an anonymous 4-person economic game, participants contributed more money to a common project (i.e., cooperated) when required to decide quickly than when forced to delay their decision (Rand, Greene & Nowak, 2012), a pattern consistent with the social heuristics hypothesis proposed by Rand and colleagues.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mechanisms supporting human ultra-cooperativeness are very much subject to debate. One psychological feature likely to be relevant is the formation of expectations, particularly about receiving cooperative or generous behavior from others. Without such expectations, social life will be seriously impeded and, in turn, expectations leading to satisfactory interactions can become norms and institutionalize cooperation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Empirical evidence suggests that obese people are discriminated in different social environments, such as the work place. Yet, the degree to which obese people are internalizing and adjusting their own behavior as a result of this discriminatory behavior has not been thoroughly studied. We develop a proxy for measuring experimentally the "self-weight bias" by giving to both self-identified obese ( = 90) and non-obese ( = 180) individuals the opportunity to request a positive amount of money after having performed an identical task.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Over the past few decades obesity has become one of the largest public policy concerns among the adult population in the developed world. Obesity and overweight are hypothesized to affect individuals' sociability through a number of channels, including discrimination and low self-esteem. However, whether these effects translate into differential behavioural patterns in social interactions remains unknown.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The ultimatum game (UG) is widely used to study human bargaining behavior and fairness norms. In this game, two players have to agree on how to split a sum of money. The proposer makes an offer, which the responder can accept or reject.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study explores the relationship between several personal religion-related variables and social behaviour, using three paradigmatic economic games: the dictator (DG), ultimatum (UG), and trust (TG) games. A large carefully designed sample of the urban adult population in Granada (Spain) is employed (N = 766). From participants' decisions in these games we obtain measures of altruism, bargaining behaviour and sense of fairness/equality, trust, and positive reciprocity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In the Ultimatum Game, a proposer suggests how to split a sum of money with a responder. If the responder rejects the proposal, both players get nothing. Rejection of unfair offers is regarded as a form of punishment implemented by fair-minded individuals, who are willing to impose the cooperation norm at a personal cost.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is a test introduced by Frederick (2005). The task is designed to measure the tendency to override an intuitive response that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. The consistent sex differences in CRT performance may suggest a role for prenatal sex hormones.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Gene-culture co-evolution emphasizes the joint role of culture and genes for the emergence of altruistic and cooperative behaviors and behavioral genetics provides estimates of their relative importance. However, these approaches cannot assess which biological traits determine altruism or how. We analyze the association between altruism in adults and the exposure to prenatal sex hormones, using the second-to-fourth digit ratio.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Experiments using economic games are becoming a major source for the study of human social behavior. These experiments are usually conducted with university students who voluntarily choose to participate. Across the natural and social sciences, there is some concern about how this "particular" subject pool may systematically produce biased results.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Costly punishment of cheaters who contribute little or nothing to a cooperating group has been extensively studied, as an effective means to enforce cooperation. The prevailing view is that individuals use punishment to retaliate against transgressions of moral standards such as fairness or equity. However, there is much debate regarding the psychological underpinnings of costly punishment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Recent literature emphasizes the role that testosterone, as well as markers indicating early exposure to T and its organizing effect on the brain (such as the ratio of second to fourth finger, [Formula: see text]), have on performance in financial markets. These results may suggest that the main effect of T, either circulating or in fetal exposure, on economic behavior occurs through the increased willingness to take risks. However, these findings indicate that traders with a low digit ratio are not only more profitable, but more able to survive in the long run, thus the effect might consist of more than just lower risk aversion.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF