Perceived warmth and competence predict callback rates in meta-analyzed North American labor market experiments.

Extensive literature probes labor market discrimination through correspondence studies in which researchers send pairs of resumes to employers, which are closely matched except for social signals such as gender or ethnicity. Upon perceiving these signals, individuals quickly activate associated stereotypes. The Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske 2002) categorizes these stereotypes into two dimensions: warmth and competence.

Dynamic neural reconfiguration for distinct strategies during competitive social interactions.

Information exchange between brain regions is key to understanding information processing for social decision-making, but most analyses ignore its dynamic nature. New insights on this dynamic might help us to uncover the neural correlates of social cognition in the healthy population and also to understand the malfunctioning neural computations underlying dysfunctional social behavior in patients with mental disorders. In this work, we used a multi-round bargaining game to detect switches between distinct bargaining strategies in a cohort of 76 healthy participants.

Physiological Responses to a Haunted-House Threat Experience: Distinct Tonic and Phasic Effects.

Threats elicit physiological responses, the frequency and intensity of which have implications for survival. Ethical and practical limitations on human laboratory manipulations present barriers to studying immersive threat. Furthermore, few investigations have examined group effects and concordance with subjective emotional experiences to threat.

Reading between the lines: Listener's vmPFC simulates speaker cooperative choices in communication games.

Humans have a remarkable ability to understand what is and is not being said by conversational partners. It has been hypothesized that listeners decode the intended meaning of a communicative signal by assuming speakers speak cooperatively, rationally simulating the speaker's choice process and inverting it to recover the speaker's most probable meaning. We investigated whether and how rational simulations of speakers are represented in the listener's brain, by combining referential communication games with functional neuroimaging.

The golden age of social science.

Social science is entering a golden age, marked by the confluence of explosive growth in new data and analytic methods, interdisciplinary approaches, and a recognition that these ingredients are necessary to solve the more challenging problems facing our world. We discuss how developing a "lingua franca" can encourage more interdisciplinary research, providing two case studies (social networks and behavioral economics) to illustrate this theme. Several exemplar studies from the past 12 y are also provided.

Evidence of general economic principles of bargaining and trade from 2,000 classroom experiments.

Standardized classroom experiments provide evidence about how well scientific results reproduce when nearly identical methods are used. We use a sample of around 20,000 observations to test reproducibility of behaviour in trading and ultimatum bargaining. Double-auction results are highly reproducible and are close to equilibrium predictions about prices and quantities from economic theory.

Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams.

Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same dataset, testing the same 9 ex-ante hypotheses. The flexibility of analytical approaches is exemplified by the fact that no two teams chose identical workflows to analyse the data.

Does testosterone impair men's cognitive empathy? Evidence from two large-scale randomized controlled trials.

The capacity to infer others' mental states (known as 'mind reading' and 'cognitive empathy') is essential for social interactions across species, and its impairment characterizes psychopathological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. Previous studies reported that testosterone administration impaired cognitive empathy in healthy humans, and that a putative biomarker of prenatal testosterone exposure (finger digit ratios) moderated the effect. However, empirical support for the relationship has relied on small sample studies with mixed evidence.

fMRI data of mixed gambles from the Neuroimaging Analysis Replication and Prediction Study.

There is an ongoing debate about the replicability of neuroimaging research. It was suggested that one of the main reasons for the high rate of false positive results is the many degrees of freedom researchers have during data analysis. In the Neuroimaging Analysis Replication and Prediction Study (NARPS), we aim to provide the first scientific evidence on the variability of results across analysis teams in neuroscience.

Choice overload reduces neural signatures of choice set value in dorsal striatum and anterior cingulate cortex.

Modern societies offer a large variety of choices, which is generally thought to be valuable. But having too much choice can be detrimental if the costs of choice outweigh its benefits due to 'choice overload'. Current explanatory models of choice overload mainly derive from behavioural studies.

It's all about gains: Risk preferences in problem gambling.

Problem gambling is a serious socioeconomic problem involving high individual and social costs. In this article, we study risk preferences of problem gamblers including their risk attitudes in the gain and loss domains, their weighting of probabilities, and their degree of loss aversion. Our findings indicate that problem gamblers are systematically more risk taking and less sensitive toward changes in probabilities in the gain domain only.

A Collaborator's Reputation Can Bias Decisions and Anxiety under Uncertainty.

Informational social influence theory posits that under conditions of uncertainty, we are inclined to look to others for advice. This leaves us remarkably vulnerable to being influenced by others' opinions or advice. Rational agents, however, do not blindly seek and act on arbitrary information, but often consider the quality of its source before committing to a course of action.

Neural mechanisms and personality correlates of the sunk cost effect.

The sunk cost effect, an interesting and well-known maladaptive behavior, is pervasive in real life, and thus has been studied in various disciplines, including economics, psychology, organizational behavior, politics, and biology. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the sunk cost effect have not been clearly established, nor have their association with differences in individual susceptibility to the effect. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated neural responses induced by sunk costs along with measures of core human personality.

The Psychology and Neuroscience of Financial Decision Making.

Financial decisions are among the most important life-shaping decisions that people make. We review facts about financial decisions and what cognitive and neural processes influence them. Because of cognitive constraints and a low average level of financial literacy, many household decisions violate sound financial principles.

Evaluating replicability of laboratory experiments in economics.

The replicability of some scientific findings has recently been called into question. To contribute data about replicability in economics, we replicated 18 studies published in the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics between 2011 and 2014. All of these replications followed predefined analysis plans that were made publicly available beforehand, and they all have a statistical power of at least 90% to detect the original effect size at the 5% significance level.

Vasopressin increases human risky cooperative behavior.

The history of humankind is an epic of cooperation, which is ubiquitous across societies and increasing in scale. Much human cooperation occurs where it is risky to cooperate for mutual benefit because successful cooperation depends on a sufficient level of cooperation by others. Here we show that arginine vasopressin (AVP), a neuropeptide that mediates complex mammalian social behaviors such as pair bonding, social recognition and aggression causally increases humans' willingness to engage in risky, mutually beneficial cooperation.

Determinants of Propranolol's Selective Effect on Loss Aversion.

Research on emotion and decision making has suggested that arousal mediates risky decisions, but several distinct and often confounded processes drive such choices. We used econometric modeling to separate and quantify the unique contributions of loss aversion, risk attitudes, and choice consistency to risky decision making. We administered the beta-blocker propranolol in a double-blind, placebo-controlled within-subjects study, targeting the neurohormonal basis of physiological arousal.

Behavioral economics.

Behavioral economics uses evidence from psychology and other social sciences to create a precise and fruitful alternative to traditional economic theories, which are based on optimization. Behavioral economics may interest some biologists, as it shifts the basis for theories of economic choice away from logical calculation and maximization and toward biologically plausible mechanisms.

Irrational exuberance and neural crash warning signals during endogenous experimental market bubbles.

Groups of humans routinely misassign value to complex future events, especially in settings involving the exchange of resources. If properly structured, experimental markets can act as excellent probes of human group-level valuation mechanisms during pathological overvaluations--price bubbles. The connection between the behavioral and neural underpinnings of such phenomena has been absent, in part due to a lack of enabling technology.

Social equality in the number of choice options is represented in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

A distinct aspect of the sense of fairness in humans is that we care not only about equality in material rewards but also about equality in nonmaterial values. One such value is the opportunity to choose freely among many options, often regarded as a fundamental right to economic freedom. In modern developed societies, equal opportunities in work, living, and lifestyle are enforced by antidiscrimination laws.

How psychological framing affects economic market prices in the lab and field.

A fundamental debate in social sciences concerns how individual judgments and choices, resulting from psychological mechanisms, are manifested in collective economic behavior. Economists emphasize the capacity of markets to aggregate information distributed among traders into rational equilibrium prices. However, psychologists have identified pervasive and systematic biases in individual judgment that they generally assume will affect collective behavior.

fMRI evidence of a hot-cold empathy gap in hypothetical and real aversive choices.

Hypothetical bias is the common finding that hypothetical monetary values for "goods" are higher than real values. We extend this research to the domain of "bads" such as consumer and household choices made to avoid aversive outcomes (e.g.