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This study investigated the motivational and social-cognitive foundations (i.e., inequality aversion, in-group bias, and theory of mind) that underlie the development of sharing behavior among 3-to 9-year-old Chinese children (N = 122). Each child played two mini-dictator games against an in-group member (friend) and an outgroup member (stranger) to divide four stickers. Results indicated that there was a small to moderate agerelated increase in children's egalitarian sharing with strangers, whereas the age effect was moderate to large in interactions with friends. Moreover, 3-to 4-year-olds did not treat strangers and friends differently, but 5-to 6-year-old and older children showed strong in-group favoritism. Finally, theory of mind was an essential prerequisite for children's sharing behavior toward strangers, but not a unique predictor of their sharing with friends.

Participants in dictator games frequently avoid learning whether their choice to maximize their own earnings will help or hurt the recipient and then choose selfishly, exploiting the “moral wiggle room” provided by their ignorance. However, this is found in an environment in which the dictator must actively learn the true payoffs, so inaction means ignorance. Does this effect persist when one must actively choose either to be ignorant or to be informed or when one must actively choose to remain ignorant? In fact, whereas 45% of dictators remain ignorant when one must click to become informed, this drops to 25% when one must click in either case and to 3% when one must click to remain ignorant. Although the exploitation of moral wiggle room is not merely an artifact, it is, much like social behavior itself, subject to environmental and psychological factors that may reinforce or undermine its impact. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1989 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics .

Darkness can conceal identity and encourage moral transgressions; it may also induce a psychological feeling of illusory anonymity that disinhibits dishonest and self-interested behavior regardless of actual anonymity. Three experiments provided empirical evidence supporting this prediction. In Experiment I, participants in a room with slightly dimmed lighting cheated more and thus earned more undeserved money than those in a well-lit room. In Experiment 2, participants wearing sunglasses behaved more selfishly than those wearing clear glasses. Finally, in Experiment 3, an illusory sense of anonymity mediated the relationship between darkness and self-interested behaviors. Across all three experiments, darkness had no bearing on actual anonymity, yet it still increased morally questionable behaviors. We suggest that the experience of darkness, even when subtle, may induce a sense of anonymity that is not proportionate to actual anonymity in a given situation.

When defined in terms of social identity and affect toward copartisans and opposing partisans, the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased. We document the scope and consequences of affective polarization of partisans using implicit, explicit, and behavioral indicators. Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters' minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on nonpolitical judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, doing so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race. We note that the willingness of partisans to display open animus for opposing partisans can be attributed to the absence of norms governing the expression of negative sentiment and that increased partisan affect provides an incentive for elites to engage in confrontation rather than cooperation.

The very idea that authoritarian regimes (“autocracies”) may enjoy popular support is hard to fathom for democrats. Models of authoritarian regimes often entail tacit ideological assumptions, and many are driven by methodological fashions. They ignore the efforts of rulers to provide what people value. The psychology they assume is inadequate to predict actions. They are often too abstract to generate testable predictions. “Support” for any regime is difficult to assess.

What explains the strategically costly and ill-planned American invasion and occupation of Iraq? What accounts for Saddam Hussein's failure to take actions that might have deflected it? These decisions can be explored with rationalist tools, including the existence of credible commitment problems and asymmetries in information. But explanations of this sort beg a number of important questions. The Clinton and Bush administrations did not differ substantially in their information about Iraq. But Bush administration officials--and the president himself--did hold beliefs that differed substantially from those of their predecessors, and those beliefs had profound effects. Decision making by both Iraqi and US leaders displayed strong biases. Saddam Hussein failed to recognize that the United States was committed to war unless he was willing to reveal credibly that he had, in fact, dismantled his weapons of mass destruction. The United States signaled its intentions repeatedly, but the Iraqi leader remained impervious to new information. Bush administration officials believed that the Americans would be greeted as liberators and democracy would flourish of its own accord. Such motivated reasoning both precipitated war and contributed to the failure to plan adequately for rebuilding the Iraqi state in war's wake. The causes of the Iraq War and the disastrous consequences of its aftermath appear to lie as much in the realm of beliefs and decision making as in standard theories of bargaining. Similar anomalies can be found in the study of international political economy. The theory of open-economy politics offers clear predictions about individual preferences with respect to trade policy. When factors of production are specific to an industry, individuals employed or invested in the comparatively advantaged sector should favor free trade. When factors of production are mobile, individuals who possess assets that are relatively scarce should favor protectionism. Yet, after more than a decade of careful empirical research, there is little evidence that voters actually define their interests in these rational, materialist ways. Instead, citizens' preferences appear to be in part sociotropic--rooted in concerns about the economy's performance as a whole and averse to policies that harm the least advantaged in society. Individuals also have predispositions with respect to trade that are rooted in nationalism, ethnocentrism, and even racism. Women are more protectionist than men, perhaps because they are more averse to social inequalities. Trade policy preferences depend heavily on how the issues are framed, for example, whether questions engage respondents' status as a producer or consumer. Rather than holding attitudes determined by their position in the international market, individuals appear to be guided by dispositions rooted in emotion, social psychology, and even genetic differences.Armed with these sorts of insights, a new behavioral revolution has swept across the social sciences in the last few decades. With origins in psychology, of course, psychological models have fueled the dramatic growth of behavioral economics and are now gaining traction in political science as well. The defining characteristic of this revolution has been the use of empirical research on preferences, beliefs, and decision making to modify choice- and game-theoretic models. This is hardly the first time that international relations scholars have looked at how decision making might affect political outcomes. Earlier literatures drawing on psychology took advantage of prospect theory and research on decision-making heuristics. What is new in today's behavioral revolution is the explosion of experimental research in both laboratory and field settings. This empirical work has spawned important theoretical advances, such as a growing consensus around a \"two-level\" model of cognition in which some choices are intuitive and immediate--what Kahneman calls \"System 1\" or \"fast\" cognition--while others are slow, deliberative, and more \"rational\"--referred to as \"System 2\" or \"slow\" thinking. Also new are the efforts to anchor behavioral observations in a stronger neurological foundation through advances in brain science. The result has been a wealth of research presenting both complements and alternatives to rational choice models.This special issue aims to chart a strategy for incorporating the new behavioral revolution more fully into the study of international relations. In principle, standard rationalist approaches to the study of international relations have allowed individual preferences, beliefs, and decision making to vary. In practice, however, the focus on structure and interstate games mitigated the need to explore these variations in any great detail.

Fairness considerations fundamentally affect human behavior, but our understanding of the nature and development of people's fairness preferences is limited. The dictator game has been the standard experimental design for studying fairness preferences, but it only captures a situation where there is broad agreement that fairness requires equality. In real life, people often disagree on what is fair because they disagree on whether individual achievements, luck, and efficiency considerations of what maximizes total benefits can justify inequalities. We modified the dictator game to capture these features and studied how inequality acceptance develops in adolescence. We found that as children enter adolescence, they increasingly view inequalities reflecting differences in individual achievements, but not luck, as fair, whereas efficiency considerations mainly play a role in late adolescence.

Grounded cognition assumes that language and concepts are understood using simulations in different modalities. Evidence for this assumption mainly stems from studies using concrete concepts. Less evidence for grounding exists for abstract concepts, which are assumed to be grounded via metaphors associated with them or via experiences with them in specific situations. In the present study, we developed a new paradigm and investigated grounding of abstract concepts related to power or the exercise of power. As stimulus material, we chose pairs of concepts, for example, democracy and dictatorship. Participants were presented each concept separately and were asked to create a visual image in their mind. Then they were asked to rate images on several aspects. Afterwards they were asked to draw a sketch of the image. Results showed that drawings of high-power concepts had a larger vertical extension than low-power concepts. Results of the questions depended on the specific concepts. For instance, wealth (high-power) was rated as more colorful than poverty (low-power), but democracy (low-power) was rated as more colorful than dictatorship (high-power). These results may partly be explained by the valence of the concepts. Drawings often contained persons, objects, and situations, but were rarely abstract. Sometimes drawings contained metaphorical content and sometimes the content of drawings related to specific experiences. In conclusion, abstract concepts related to power can be depicted visually via grounding in different ways, such as using metaphors, experiences, and actions.

A norm of 50-50 division appears to have considerable force in a wide range of economic environments, both in the real world and in the laboratory. Even in settings where one party unilaterally determines the allocation of a prize (the dictator game), many subjects voluntarily cede exactly half to another individual. The hypothesis that people care about fairness does not by itself account for key experimental patterns. We consider an alternative explanation, which adds the hypothesis that people like to be perceived as fair. The properties of equilibria for the resulting signaling game correspond closely to laboratory observations. The theory has additional testable implications, the validity of which we confirm through new experiments.