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Envy, as a result of upward social comparisons, is an unpleasant emotion that occurs when a consumer sees others as being more advantaged than him- or herself, in terms of achievements and/or possessions. Envy may drive the envious consumer to 'compete' with the envied-target through purchase of similar or better products; for that reason, envy is frequently used in advertising to motivate consumers to buy better products. While envy may be good for businesses as it may promote economic growth through the “keeping up with the Joneses” mechanism, envy tends to bring destructive behavior to consumers, especially in the long run. Departing from the view to maintain consumer welfare, we argue that envy should be reduced or perhaps, temporarily deactivated. Through a series of studies, we attempt to see if envy, as an emotion, can be transformed into an object upon which physical actions can be performed to destroy it, which thus reduces or temporarily deactivates envy. Furthermore, we want to see if any of these actions, assuming that envy is reduced or temporarily deactivated as a result, would lead consumers to adopt more pro-social behavior, as opposed to typical destructive behavior of envy. / Business Administration/Marketing

Animals coordinate their behavior with each other during cooperative and agonistic social interactions. Such coordination often adopts the form of “turn-taking”, in which the interactive partners alternate the performance of a behavior. Apart from acoustic communication, how turn taking is coordinated, is not well known. Furthermore, the neural substrates that regulate persistence in engaging in social interactions are poorly studied. Here, we use Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens), to study visually-driven turn-taking aggressive behavior. Using encounters with real conspecifics and with computer animations, we discover the visual cues from an opponent and the behavioral dynamics that generate turn taking. Through a brain-wide screen of neuronal activity during aggressive behavior, followed by targeted brain lesions, we then discover that the caudal portion of the dorsomedial telencephalon, an amygdala-like region, promotes continuous participation in aggressive interactions. Our work highlights how dynamic visual cues shape the rhythm of social interactions at multiple timescales and points to the pallial amygdala as a region controlling the drive to engage in such interactions.

Dynamics of social processes in populations, such as the spread of emotions, influence, opinions, and mass movements (often referred to individually and collectively as contagions), are increasingly studied because of their economic, social, and political impacts. Moreover, multiple contagions may interact and hence studying their simultaneous evolution is important. Within the context of social media, large datasets involving many tens of millions of people are leading to new insights into human behavior, and these datasets continue to grow in size. Through social media, contagions can readily cross national boundaries, as evidenced by the 2011 Arab Spring. These and other observations guide our work. Our goal is to study contagion processes at scale with an approach that permits intricate descriptions of interactions among members of a population. Our contributions are a modeling environment to perform these computations and a set of approaches to predict contagion spread size and to block the spread of contagions. Since we represent populations as networks, we also provide insights into network structure effects, and present and analyze a new model of contagion dynamics that represents a person\'s behavior in repeatedly joining and withdrawing from collective action. We study variants of problems for different classes of social contagions, including those known as simple and complex contagions. / Ph. D.

Although behavioral science, due to its emphasis on the use of single-subject research design, appears to focus solely on individual behaviors, behavioral scientists have a long history of lamenting the trajectory of humans, societies, and the discipline itself. Some scholars, for instance, called for our attention to expand our focus beyond individual behaviors to generate solutions for societal issues that we face. When we attempt to develop solutions for issues that require multi-level analysis, we must be cognizant of how institutional contingencies operate at the individual level. The current study analyzed triadic interactions using an exchange task in six triads. The result of this study showed that one common pattern of interactions among participants across triads was direct reciprocation between two participants. The implications of such findings, how they inform social behavior and metacontingency experiments, and future directions are discussed.

The major problem of this study is an investigation, by means of a time-sampling technique, the relationship between social behavior and social acceptance as determined by a sociometric technique.

The naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber) is one of the most social mammals on the planet. These animals live in underground colonies consisting of a breeding female (the “queen”), 1 to 3 breeding males and up to 300 nonreproductive “workers” organized in a dominance hierarchy. In addition to their eusociality, naked mole-rats have evolved many extreme biological characteristics including an exquisite sense of touch and insensitivity to certain types of pain. However, the overlap between the social and somatosensory abilities of naked mole-rats remains mysterious. In this work, we show that naked mole-rats exhibit caste-like behavioral signatures linked to eusociality, predominantly utilize snout-to-snout interactions in social behavior and possess a somatosensory profile to mechanical stimuli distinct from mice. In the first chapter of this work, we leveraged machine learning and molecular biology tools to create a behavioral atlas of naked mole-rat behavior. We first utilized a computational pipeline of pose-tracking using SLEAP and behavioral segmentation using keypoint-MoSeq to identify 20+ behavioral syllables. This showed that the queen naked mole-rat has a distinct behavioral phenotype from the workers, consisting of faster movements, less anxiety-like freezing, and less colony maintenance behaviors such as digging. We next showed that behavioral differences exist between the workers and that the dominance rank of a given individual could be predicted by its spontaneous behaviors in an open field. Relative rank differential appeared to have relevance for social behaviors: during a tube test for dominance, pairings of a high-ranked and low-ranked animal occurred more quickly and were won more frequently by the dominant animal. Snout touch played an integral role in these dominance tests (perhaps in the communication of individual ID information). This prompted us to investigate snout-to-snout interactions in the open field. We found that two familiar naked mole-rats from the same colony engaged in hundreds of snout interactions in a 10-minute period, and the number of interactions was nearly twice as high between two foreign animals. Follow-up experiments explored the molecular basis of this snout touch and showed that mechanosensory channels (e.g. Piezo2) are likely involved in social snout-to-snout interactions. Furthermore, trimming the sensory whiskers of naked mole-rats disrupts their ability to recognize conspecifics and alters their relative dominance relationships. These findings uncover face touch as a prominent social behavior in naked mole-rats that is intimately linked to social recognition. In the second chapter of this work, we more deeply investigated naked mole-rat somatosensation by using high-speed videography. We began by determining how naked mole-rats respond to both innocuous stimuli (cotton swab, dynamic brush) and noxious stimuli (light and heavy pinpricks) when given to the hindpaw. Compared to mice, naked mole-rats showed a distinct hindpaw phenotype, never responding to innocuous touch stimuli, responding to light pinprick, but rarely responding to heavy pinprick (normally the most noxious stimulus that elicits the strongest pain response in mice). Interestingly, naked mole-rats do respond to brush stimuli to the back skin with a dorsiflexion posture. These animals also exhibit an idiosyncratic withdrawal response to a brush applied to the snout skin which appears to be highly aversive. Interestingly, the velocity of this aversive snout withdrawal appears to be socially modulated and is decreased in the presence of another naked mole-rat in the testing chamber. This phenotype does not occur in mice and provides additional evidence that the naked mole-rat snout is not only extremely sensitive but plays a role in processing socially relevant information.

Understanding the complexities of social behavior involves exploring both macro-level socio-cultural dynamics and micro-level neurobiological mechanisms. This dissertation presents findings from two experimental studies aimed at shedding light on different facets of social behavior. The first study focuses on the concept of the metacontingency, which involves the recurring interlocking behaviors of multiple individuals resulting in an aggregate outcome. This study examines the possibility of interlocking behavioral classes within social interactions. By employing experimental methodologies analogous to those used at the operant level, the study investigates whether natural units of interlocked behaviors emerge. The second study investigates the neuromodulatory role of oxytocin (OT) in social behavior, focusing on its effects on social reinforcement and punishment sensitivity. Utilizing a rat model and targeting the prefrontal cortex, this study explores how OT modulates the sensitivity of social consequences with both familiar cage mates and unfamiliar stranger rats. Together, these studies contribute to a comprehensive understanding of social behavior by highlighting behavioral processes at different levels of analysis.