Essays
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Cooperative Relationships - Hruschka, Daniel J.
Cooperative relationships arise from a history of mutually beneficial interactions between individuals, and they enable cooperation among a range of entities, including biological organisms, business firms, and nation‐states. As one of the simplest of emergent social forms, cooperative relationships can possess higher level properties (e.g., common expectations and rules of interaction, shared communication protocols) that are more than the sum of individual interactions. As such, cooperative relationships can become “things” in their own right, shaping how partners treat each other and how others treat partners within a relationship. Many open questions remain about how the emergent properties of cooperative relationships arise and how they foster future beneficial interactions while mitigating the risk of exploitation. Here, we frame these diverse findings and emerging questions in terms of the inputs and algorithms that partners use in forming models of each other and in guiding behaviors toward each other. We finish by outlining areas ripe for future exploration. -
Empathy Gaps Between Helpers and Help‐Seekers: Implications for Cooperation - Bohns, Vanessa K.
Help‐seekers and potential helpers often experience an “empathy gap”—an inability to understand each other''s unique perspectives. Both parties are concerned about their reputation, self‐esteem, and relationships, but these concerns differ in ways that lead to misinterpretation of the other party's actions, and, in turn, missed opportunities for cooperation. In this essay, we review research that describes the role‐specific concerns of helpers and help‐seekers. We then review studies of emotional perspective‐taking, which can help explain why help‐seekers and helpers often experience empathy gaps. We go on to discuss recent work that illustrates the consequences of empathy gaps between helpers and help‐seekers—social prediction errors that prevent helping and misguided intentions that can lead to unhelpful help. Finally, we discuss some promising directions for future research. -
State of the Art in Competition Research - Fülöp, Márta
Until the 1990s in psychology, competition was conceived as a unidimensional concept which is opposed to cooperation. Since then, the competition–cooperation dichotomy has shifted and competition is conceptualized as a multifaceted concept that is not in mutually exclusive relationship with cooperation. Constructive and destructive forms of competition have been distinguished regarding their motivational, strategic, and behavioral consequences. Personality psychologists identified different competitive attitudes and research on the psychology of winning and losing, and differentiated specific patterns of emotional and behavioral coping with winning and losing. More recently, psychophysiological, genetic, and neuroimaging studies enrich the understanding of competition. The warrior and worrier genes, the psychology and physiology of challenge and threat, and the neurohormonal changes open up new dimensions of interpretation of competitive encounters and winning and losing. The new challenge of the field is the integration of the accumulated knowledge in a new bio‐psycho‐socio‐cultural model of competition.