“Families” in International Context: Comparing Institutional Effects Across Western Societies

Speech Acts with Institutional Effects in Agent Societies

A general logical framework is presented to represent speech acts that have institutional effects. It is based on the concepts of the Speech Act Theory and takes the form of the FIPA Agent Communication Language. The most important feature is that the illocutionary force of all of these speech acts is declarative. The formal language that is proposed to represent the propositional content has a...

Antisocial punishment across societies.

We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whe...

Costly punishment across human societies.

Recent behavioral experiments aimed at understanding the evolutionary foundations of human cooperation have suggested that a willingness to engage in costly punishment, even in one-shot situations, may be part of human psychology and a key element in understanding our sociality. However, because most experiments have been confined to students in industrialized societies, generalizations of thes...

Detecting affiliation in colaughter across 24 societies.

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners' judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either established friends or recently acquainted strange...

International League of Dermatological Societies