Kahneman's framework. Daniel Kahneman (Nobel prize in 2002) proposed System 1 and. System 2 framework as a heuristic for conceptualising decision.
Too Exhausted To Consider Giving? Refractory Periods in Ego-Depletion and Giving Behaviour 2015 SNN Conference, Bucharest, Romania
Gabriela Marcu, Eugen Iordănescu “Lucian Blaga” University Sibiu
“To give or not to give“ What’s beneath the decision to donate?
Directions of research: who, why, how? Giving behaviour - as part of the pro-social behaviour has elicited several issues that challenged the social sciences researchers: • • • •
Who gives? (personal traits, values etc.) Why do people give? (motivation) How do people make giving decisions? (cognitive science) How can these decisions be influenced? (economics, marketing).
Directions of research: who, why, how? Giving behaviour - as part of the pro-social behaviour has elicited several issues that challenged the social sciences researchers: • • • •
Who gives? (personal traits, values etc.) Why do people give? (motivation) How do people make giving decisions? (cognitive science and neuroscience) How can these decisions be influenced? (economics, neuromarketing).
Complexity Giving decisions are complex and often biased by people’s affective and cognitive processes (Hysenbelli, D.). • Part of the complexity comes from: • • •
the large amount of information, the way in which it is presented the difficulty in selecting an appropriate response.
• Other part comes from individual’s own internal characteristics (Lynch, Chakravarti and Anuaree, 1991; Tversky and Kahneman, 1981, Hanesson, 2012)
• Other comes from social norms (Hanesson, 2012) and social influence. This provides us with a fragmented reality on what’s really going on in the process of giving decision and giving behaviour.
Reaction to complexity ▪ Heuristics are used as cognitive strategies to help people to make fast and fairly
accurate decisions saving time and effort / to simplify complex decision settings. ▪ Heuristics bring to scene: ▪ Intuitions ▪ Emotions
▪ Contextual information, often irrelevant for a rational decision
Kahneman’s framework Daniel Kahneman (Nobel prize in 2002) proposed System 1 and System 2 framework as a heuristic for conceptualising decision making. • System 1 is described as intuitive, automatic, fast and emotional.
• System 2 is “the mind’s slower, analytical mode, where reason dominates.” •
System 2 is the deliberate type of thinking involved in focus, deliberation, reasoning or analysis – such as calculating a complex math problem, exercising self-control, or performing a demanding physical task.
WHAT ABOUT GIVING BEHAVIOUR? OR GIVING DECISION?
Kahneman’s framework System 2 activities - cognitive, emotional, or physical - draw on a shared pool of mental energy. Studies consistently show that when the brain is occupied with one type of System 2 thinking, it interferes with any other type of System 2 thinking you need to perform at the same time. Furthermore, when the mind is actively focused on a System 2 activity, it results in System 1 having greater influence over behavior.
Ego depletion Baumeister and colleagues designed some suprinsing experiments, finding that an effort of will or self-control is tiring. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. • Previous research found that ego depletion reduces helping (DeWall et al., 2008), and • There are recent findings that offer a causal mechanism to explain this effect - prosocial behaviour being indirectly decreased by reducing feelings of guilt (Xu H. et al.,2012). • Research also shows that ego depletion decreases trust in economic decision making (Ainsworth et al., 2014).
Refractory periods Previous research shows robust effect of ego-depletion on selfcontrol, who’s waning over time, in refractory periods. (“Resource model”, Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996; Hofmann, Vohs, & Baumeister, 2012; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). This finding was a legitimate breakthrough in cognitive neuroscience. Now we started to ask if self-control in the only construct to consider under the influence of ego-depletion, or there are other such “limited” resources, worth to be studied.
Giving behavior • Giving behaviour links to the “Dual system” decisionmaking models, that have been described in terms of multiple dichotomies, like •
• • •
‘‘bottom-up’’ (automatic and emotion-driven) versus ‘‘top-down’’ (deliberative and reason-driven), habitual versus cognitive, fast versus slow, and implicit versus explicit reasoning (Evans, 2003; Sloman, 1996).
“Dual system” was confirmed by Neuroscientists, who came with proposals regarding the brain systems that may support these twin processes— with: • •
frontal areas underlying the deliberative, cognitive system, and limbic reward areas supporting automatic and affective decisions (Sanfey, Loewenstein, McClure, & Cohen, 2006)
Is ego-depletion somehow influencing giving behavior? Assuming that giving is a choice, it requires some deliberative thinking, so we may presume that is about System 2 activity. Ego-depletion tasks (physical, emotional or cognitive) may lower the performance of System 2 on subsequent tasks/choices. Hypothesis: Ego-depletion is impairing our decisions to give, making them more intuitive and automatic.
Method Participants Thirty-three volunteers (25 female, 8 male), with normal or corrected-tonormal vision participated in this study. An informed written consent was obtained from each participant prior to the experiment.
Procedure The experiment was announced as an attention test.
Materials Ego-depletion task. The ego-depletion task was similar to the one used in previous self-regulation research (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998). In the low-depletion condition, participants were instructed to count out every “e” they could locate in a written passage. This task was relatively easy for participants. Participants in the high-depletion condition were instructed to count each “e” in the text, but only when another vowel was next the “e” in the same word (e.g., “read”) or when a vowel was one letter removed from the “e” in either direction (e.g., “vowel”). This latter rule required participants to concentrate more and necessitated the exertion of self-regulatory resources.
Choice reaction time (CRT) Refractory period generated by the previous cognitive task on giving decision were measured with a Choice Reaction Time software. Choice reaction time is a mental chronometry term and it measures psychomotor speed in choosing one option of two. On this task, participants were told they might convert the points earned in previous task into money (about 150 lei). Then they will make some decisions about the way they want to use those money. Five different choice scenarios were listed, with dichotomic choices, like “I’ll keep the money for myself” and “I’ll give the money for poor children”. We measured the CRT for each decision. For the results accuracy, we eliminated the first scenario CRT from results interpretation, as it was mostly used as subject accommodation with the software and device.
Results Descriptive statistics As the graph shows, it look like the ego-depleted participants have a lower reaction time than non-depleted participants, no matter what their choice is.
This result is consistent with our hypothesis.
Results Inferential statistics Normality tests on the both group’s CRT showed not a normal distribution so we measured the difference between groups by non-parametric test.. Results show a significant difference in CRT between low-depleted and highlydepleted sujects. Test Statisticsb Choice2_RT Mann-Whitney U Wilcoxon W
Z
Choice3_RT
Choice4_RT
Choice5_RT
MED_RT_4
39,000
37,000
55,000
44,000
27,000
175,000
173,000
191,000
180,000
163,000
-3,494
-3,566
-2,918
-3,314
-3,926
Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed)
,000
,000
,004
,001
,000
Exact Sig. [2*(1-tailed Sig.)]
,000a
,000a
,003a
,001a
,000a
a. Not corrected for ties. b. Grouping Variable: Ego_depletion
Conclusions The findings of the experiment are consistent with the literature on egodepletion effects on limited resources. Like self-control, the choice of giving seems to be linked to the subject’s resources (emotional, cognitive etc) and not only to the personality structure (as some theories of altruism state) In this particular case, we are assuming that ego-depleted participants would use mostly system 1, actually a shorter reaction time for their decision. Ego-depleted participants invested less effort in decisions regarding giving having shorter psychological refractory periods while making more intuitive decisions that participants that were low ego-depleted.
Discussions One point to consider in enhancing the obtained results is the measurement of the CRT. It will be exciting to use more measures derived from neuroscience, as they are now at a point where they can meaningfully predict real-world outcomes, and thus complement more traditional measures (Berkman & Falk, 2013). Neuroscience of giving behavior may connect brain measures of giving with the real-world situations, so that we can gain a deeper appreciation of what giving behavior actually is, how it works, and potentially, how to make use of it.
Thank you!
