Marcell Székely

Previous research involving American and Western European participants provides evidence that, in the context of joint action, individuals’ sense of commitment sustains their motivation to persist in performing actions which their joint action partners are expecting and relying on them to perform. In the current study, we extend this research by implementing two web-based experiments comparing participants in two separate cultures: India and the UK, the former being characterized by a higher degree of collectivism and interpersonal interdependence. Participants viewed video clips of two agents making contributions to a joint action, and responded to a battery of questions about how they perceived the scenarios in the video clips, as well as the 30-item self-construal questionnaire. Across the two experiments, we found evidence that the sense of commitment to persisting in a joint action is boosted by the degree of intertemporal coordination and by the perception of a joint action partner’s reliance. We do not find consistent evidence of any difference in how long participants in the two cultures indicate that they would persist. Strikingly, however, participants in India were far more likely to judge there to be an obligation to persist in helping.

In the current paper, we articulate a theory to explain the phenomenology of mental effort. The theory provides a working definition of mental effort, explains in what sense mental effort is a limited resource, and specifies the factors that determine whether or not mental effort is experienced as aversive. The core of our theory is the conjecture that the sense of effort is the output of a cost-benefit analysis. This cost-benefit analysis employs heuristics to weigh the current and anticipated costs of mental effort for a particular activity against the anticipated benefits. This provides a basis for spelling out testable predictions to structure future research on the phenomenology of mental effort.

In discussing Mahr & Csibra's (M&C's) observations about the role of episodic memory in grounding social commitments, we propose that episodic memory is especially useful for gauging cases of implicit commitment and cases in which the content of a commitment is indeterminate. We conclude with some thoughts about how commitment may relate to the evolution of episodic memory.

The present study investigates how group-cooperation heuristics boost voluntary contributions in a repeated public goods game. We manipulate two separate factors in a two-person public goods game: i) group composition (Selfish Subjects vs. Conditional Cooperators) and ii) common knowledge about group composition (Information vs. No Information). In addition, we let the subjects signal expectations of the other’s contributions in the experiment’s second phase. Common knowledge of Selfish type alone slightly dampens contributions but dramatically increases contributions when signaling of expectations is allowed. The results suggest that group-cooperation heuristics are triggered when two factors are jointly salient to the agent: (i) that there is no one to free-ride on; and (ii) that the other wants to cooperate because of (i). We highlight the potential effectiveness of group-cooperation heuristics and proposesolution thinkingas the schema of reasoning underlying the heuristics. The high correlation between expectations and actual contributions is compatible with the existence of default preference to satisfy others’ expectations (or to avoid disappointing them), but the stark end-game effect suggests that group-cooperation heuristics, at least among selfish players, function ultimately to benefit material self-interest rather than to just please others.