The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly everyone around the world, and it has led to a unique opportunity to draw new conclusions regarding social behavior. During the international COVID-19 pandemic, many recommendations have been established as potential mitigations to prevent the spread of the virus, perhaps most controversial, mask wearing. The present study aimed to identify the extent to which the degree of social discounting correlates with lower probabilities of mask wearing in individuals. It was hypothesized that the greater the social discounting, the less likely subjects would be to wear masks and conversely, the lower the social discounting the more likely subjects would be to wear masks.

abstract: Science is a formalized method for acquiring information about the world. In recent years, the ability of science to do so has been scrutinized. Attempts to reproduce findings in diverse fields demonstrate that many results are unreliable and do not generalize across contexts. In response to these concerns, many proposals for reform have emerged. Although promising, such reforms have not addressed all aspects of scientific practice. In the social sciences, two such aspects are the diversity of study participants and incentive structures. Most efforts to improve scientific practice focus on replicability, but sidestep issues of generalizability. And while researchers have speculated about the effects of incentive structures, there is little systematic study of these hypotheses. This dissertation takes one step towards filling these gaps. Chapter 1 presents a cross-cultural study of social discounting – the purportedly fundamental human tendency to sacrifice more for socially-close individuals – conducted among three diverse populations (U.S., rural Indonesia, rural Bangladesh). This study finds no independent effect of social distance on generosity among Indonesian and Bangladeshi participants, providing evidence against the hypothesis that social discounting is universal. It also illustrates the importance of studying diverse human populations for developing generalizable theories of human nature. Chapter 2 presents a laboratory experiment with undergraduates to test the effect of incentive structures on research accuracy, in an instantiation of the scientific process where the key decision is how much data to collect before submitting one’s findings. The results demonstrate that rewarding novel findings causes respondents to make guesses with less information, thereby reducing their accuracy. Chapter 3 presents an evolutionary agent-based model that tests the effect of competition for novel findings on the sample size of studies that researchers conduct. This model demonstrates that competition for novelty causes the cultural evolution of research with smaller sample sizes and lower statistical power. However, increasing the startup costs to conducting single studies can reduce the negative effects of competition, as can rewarding publication of secondary findings. These combined chapters provide evidence that aspects of current scientific practice may be detrimental to the reliability and generalizability of research and point to potential solutions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2018

TITLE: IMPULSIVNENESS AND SELF-REOPRTED VALUES MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Mark R. Dixon Towards developing an applied behavior technology that treats vales as the dependent variable of interest, there is a necessity for understanding the relationship between impulsiveness and self-reported values. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how values affected social and delay discounting. Thirty participants were given two surveys, one was a social discounting survey, and the other was a delay discounting survey. Finally, participants were given a valued-living questionnaire. In the social discounting survey, participants were asked to mentally make a list of people they knew from 1-100, 1 being the closest to them and 100 being a distant acquaintance. They were then asked to pick between two choices involving hypothetical money. Starting with the choice of keeping $85 for themselves, or giving $75 to the 1st person on their list. The second choice was to keep $75 for themselves, or give $75 to the #1 person on their list. The monetary value continued to decrease by 10, while the value to give to another person remained the same, these were continued for person #2, # 5, #10, #20, and #50 on their list. The delay discounting instructed participants to choose between two hypothetical choices. The first was receiving $85 today or $75 in 1 week. The second choice was to receive $75 today, or $75 in 1 week. The hypothetical monetary value was decreased by $10, until it reached $5. The valued living questionnaire used a Likert-scale from 1-10 with 1 being ‘not at all important and ’10 being ‘extremely important’ across 10 areas (family-other than marriage or parenting, i marriage/couples, intimate relations, parenting, friends/social life, work, education/training, recreation/fun, spirituality, citizenship/community life, and physical self-care (diet, exercise, sleep). The second section of the questionnaire evaluated committed action, and asked participants to rate how consistent their actions have been with each of these value areas within the past week. A Likert-scale was also used from 1-10, with 1 being ‘not at all consistent with my value’ and 10 being ‘completely consistent with my value’. A Pearson product-movement correlation coefficient was composed to access the relationship between the switch point of discounting and rating of each area of valued living. There were to valued living areas with significant findings. There was a positive correlation between Social AUC and VLQ: Importance- Social/Friends (r=.503, n=30, p=.005). There was also a positive correlation between Delay AUC and VLQ: Importance- Physical self-care (r=.448, n=30, p=.013). There was no correlation between either social AUC and delay AUC and any of the committed action values. The results have implications for a translational understanding of the influence of discounting on reported values and committed action processes.

The present study examines delay, probability, and social discounting with money in relations to self-reported values. The participants completed a values questionnaire including questions regarding God, sex, and politics, and were divided into a low values and a high values group with the low values group n=10 and high values group = 10 for a total n=20. These groups were compared in the delay, probability, and social discounting tasks. Results indicate little to no difference in discounting between groups with an AUC for the low values group (.47), (.322), (.196), respectively and the AUC for the high values group at (.494), (.411), (.288) respectively. Individual scores for area under the curve (AUC) were tested for degree of correlation to each values question. Results indicate moderate correlations between temporal discounting and 5 sex value questions. Moderate correlations between probability discounting and political and sex value questions were observed. Finally, correlations between social discounting and politics, religious, and sex values were observed. Keywords: delay discounting, probability discounting, social discounting, politics, sex, religion

The purpose of this study was to examine choice-making as it relates to providing a source of clean water to those at varying social distances. A discounting survey was completed by 65 participants asking them to choose between spending a specified about of money on plastic water bottles that have a 100% chance of harming the environment or spending $1000 on a water filtration system that has a 0% chance of harming the environment. Results indicated that as social distance increased, responding became more impulsive as evident by a steeper amount of discounting. For “Person #1”, 27.69% of participants chose to spend money on plastic water bottles while for “Person #100”, 53.8% of participants chose to spend money on plastic water bottles. The R2 calculated was 0.8633. Results also indicated that there was a positive correlation between frequency of behaving in sustainable ways and how much one valued the environment, as well as how concerned one was with the environment. Implications, strengths and limitations, and future research opportunities are discussed.

abstract: Social discounting underlies individual altruistic decision-making, and it is frequently measured as the amount of hypothetical money one is willing to forgo for another person as a function of social distance. In the classic social discounting task, individual participants are asked to imagine their friends along a continuum of social distance, that is then used to estimate participant’s social discounting rate. While an ever-growing proportion of social interactions takes place over social media, no research has yet characterized social discounting in that context. Moreover, no research has estimated social discounting rate using real persons’ social distance, instead of the hypothetical continuum described above. Using existing social media indicators of social distance, it is now possible to estimate social discounting rate based on real people, which may lead to more accurate social discounting measurements and may expand the discounting model to real-life situations. Specifically, using computer algorithms to estimate the social distance from social media data makes it possible to assess the utility of numeric social distance indicators and the most appropriate ways to represent them. The proposed study examined the extent to which a hyperbolic model for social discounting fits social distance information retrieved from Facebook pages; and assessed whether there were differences in discounting rate when real or hypothetical social distance is used; also to further investigate whether discounting rates based on real persons are in fact based on perceived social distance by the participant, or on the imaginary social distance scale (i.e., an experimental artifact.) It was found that the social discounting model can be applied in the social media context, even when real Facebook friends’ profiles were used as substitutes of numeric social distance indicators. Additionally, people showed similar altruistic tendencies in both the numeric and profile social discounting tests on the Facebook environment. These findings were qualified, however, by a high rate of nonsystematic data for the profile group; a rate much higher than traditional numeric paradigm. This discrepancy suggested that the allocation rates between numeric and profile approaches need further investigation to determine the factors affecting individuals’ generosity as a function of social distance indicators. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2018