A naturalistic field study investigated behavior toward pregnant (vs. nonpregnant) women in nontraditional (job applicant) and traditional (store customer) roles. Female confederates, who sometimes wore a pregnancy prosthesis, posed as job applicants or customers at retail stores. Store employees exhibited more hostile behavior (e.g., rudeness) toward pregnant (vs. nonpregnant) applicants and m...

A central tenet of economics is that individuals respond to incentives. For psychologists and sociologists, in contrast, rewards and punishments are often counterproductive, because they undermine “intrinsic motivation”. We reconcile these two views, showing how performance incentives offered by an informed principal (manager, teacher, parent) can adversely impact an agent’s (worker, child) per...

The following article examines the role of parents in the development of children's self-regulation of energy intake. Various paths of parental influence are offered based on the literature on parental influences on children's emotion self-regulation. The parental paths include modeling, responses to children's behavior, assistance in helping children self-regulate, and motivating children thro...

A central tenet of economics is that individuals respond to incentives. For psychologists and sociologists, by contrast, rewards and punishments are often counterproductive, because they undermine “intrinsic motivation”. We reconcile these two views, showing how performance incentives offered by an informed principal (manager, teacher, parent) can adversely impact an agent’s (worker, child) per...

The capacity to predict future events permits a creature to detect, model, and manipulate the causal structure of its interactions with its environment. Behavioral experiments suggest that learning is driven by changes in the expectations about future salient events such as rewards and punishments. Physiological work has recently complemented these studies by identifying dopaminergic neurons in...

In this paper we present a Risk Management System. The goal of the RMS is to decrease risks related to information access. The goal is met by taking the context of operations into account; providing motivation to users through incentives (e.g., punishments or rewards); providing support to track changes and ability to reason about risk-related attributes; providing support to reason about tasks...

We introduce a multi-class generalization of AdaBoost with binary weaklearners. We use a vectorial codification to represent class labels and a multiclass exponential loss function to evaluate classifier responses. This representation produces a set of margin values that provide a range of punishments for failures and rewards for successes. Moreover, the stage-wise optimization of this model in...

Conditioning experiments probe the ways that animals make predictions about rewards and punishments and use those predictions to control their behavior. One standard model of conditioning paradigms which involve many conditioned stimuli suggests that individual predictions should be added together. Various key results show that this model fails in some circumstances, and motivate an alternative...

This paper develops a positive model of informal justice in which rewards and punishments are not determined by an ex ante optimal contract but instead express the ex post moral sentiments of the arbitrating party. In our model, a third party arbitrator mediates a one-shot relationship between two players, one of whom can exert an externality on the other. Importantly, formal contracts are not ...

The ability to adapt face-to-face social behavior in response to an interaction's changing contingencies is an important aspect of social skill. Individual differences in social ability may depend on how well people learn from social rewards and punishments. Here we relate people's social aptitude to their ability to learn from differences in the reward values of two common social reinforcers, ...