Social biases determine spatiotemporal sparseness of ciliate mating heuristics

Social biases determine spatiotemporal sparseness of ciliate mating heuristics

Ciliates become highly social, even displaying animal-like qualities, in the joint presence of aroused conspecifics and nonself mating pheromones. Pheromone detection putatively helps trigger instinctual and learned courtship and dominance displays from which social judgments are made about the availability, compatibility, and fitness representativeness or likelihood of prospective mates and ri...

Sexual overperception: power, mating motives, and biases in social judgment.

Results from 4 experiments suggest that power motivates heightened perceptions and expectations of sexual interest from subordinates. Having power over a member of the opposite sex activated sexual concepts that persisted across a temporal delay, indicating the activation of a mating goal (Study 1). Having power increased participants' expectations of sexual interest from a subordinate (Study 2...

Heuristics and Biases in Charity

We consider utilitarian models of altruism constrained by limited willingness to sacrifice self-interest. By these models donors should strive to maximize the good they do, within the constraint. We describe several departures from predictions of these models and provide new data on some of them, based on studies conducted on the World Wide Web. We find: people focus on minimizing operating cos...

Heuristics: Heuristics and Biases at the Bargaining Table

Heuristics and Biases in Retirement Savings Behavior

A ll around the world, in both the public and private sectors, retirement plans are shifting away from “defined benefit” plans toward “defined contribution” plans. Poterba, Venti, and Wise (2006), for example, followed the cohort of Americans who were 45 years old in 1984 and report a decrease in defined benefit plan coverage from about 40 percent to 20 percent and a corresponding increase in d...