Social inferences from group size

Social Group Size

Nuanced Social Inferences about Trustworthiness from Observation of Mimicry

Mimicry and imitation are crucial mechanisms of social learning and rapport. Further, mimicry informs essential social judgments formed not only by the interacting party but also by third-party observers. How sophisticated are observer’s inferences from mimicry? We examined this in the context of observers’ use of mimicry to judge trustworthiness. Participants observed a dyadic interaction in w...

Group size effect on cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas

Social dilemmas are central to human society. Depletion of natural resources, climate protection, security of energy supply, and workplace collaborations are all examples of social dilemmas. Since cooperative behaviour in a social dilemma is individually costly, Nash equilibrium predicts that humans should not cooperate. Yet experimental studies show that people do cooperate even in anonymous o...

Infants use relative numerical group size to infer social dominance.

Detecting dominance relationships, within and across species, provides a clear fitness advantage because this ability helps individuals assess their potential risk of injury before engaging in a competition. Previous research has demonstrated that 10- to 13-mo-old infants can represent the dominance relationship between two agents in terms of their physical size (larger agent = more dominant), ...

Group Size and Social Ties in Microfinance Institutions

Microfinance programmes provide poor people with small loans given to jointly liable self-selected groups. Follow-up loans provide incentives to repay. In an experiment we investigate the influence of those features on strategic default. Each group member invests in an individual risky project, whose outcome is known only to the individual investor. Subjects decide, whether to contribute to gro...