Dokument: The effects of acute stress on social decision-making

Titel:	The effects of acute stress on social decision-making
URL für Lesezeichen:	https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=58423
URN (NBN):	urn:nbn:de:hbz:061-20220110-110808-9
Kollektion:	Dissertationen
Sprache:	Deutsch
Dokumententyp:	Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten » Dissertation
Medientyp:	Text
Autor:	Schweda, Adam [Autor]
Dateien:	[Dateien anzeigen] Adobe PDF [Details] 4,93 MB in einer Datei [ZIP-Datei erzeugen] Dateien vom 23.12.2021 / geändert 23.12.2021
Beitragende:	Prof. Kalenscher, Tobias [Gutachter] Prof. Dr. Bellebaum, Christian [Gutachter]
Dewey Dezimal-Klassifikation:	100 Philosophie und Psychologie » 150 Psychologie
Beschreibung:	Although social behavior is widespread in the animal kingdom, humans are equipped with an unprecedentedly large capacity to navigate effectively through their social realities. Our ability to cooperate with and rely on each other, share resources, and forego personal benefits for abstract social purposes has been crucial to our success in building large-scale communities. Yet, we also possess the ability to derogate from cooperative norms and harm other people, which is, it its extreme form, illustrated by a look at wars and altercations throughout human history. Stress can serve as a rapid and powerful driver of behavior. In fact, recent evidence indicates that human social decision making is altered in situations of acute stress. Yet, this evidence is far from being conclusive: on the one side, some portion of studies supports the “fight-or-flight” hypothesis, which presumes that stress increases the propensity to aggress against an attacker or flee, and hence, predicts that stressed decision makers are less concerned with the well-being of others and act more offensively. On the other side, some studies found evidence for the “tend-and- befriend” hypothesis, which postulates that, in times of hardship, individuals act more prosocially and invest into their social networks in order to, then, receive support from others. The aim of this dissertation is to shed light on the experimental circumstances under which stress actually increases or decreases prosocial tendencies. In study 1, my co-authors and I examined whether both, fight-or-flight and tend-and-befriend can occur simultaneously. Here, stressed participants (vs non-stressed controls) played an intergroup cooperation vs. competition game where both, benefitting the ingroup and harming the outgroup were viable choices. Although stress had no measurable direct effect on the allocation patterns, the results suggest that ingroup-friendly and outgroup-hostile investments are differentially modulated by hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal and sympathetic-adrenal-medullary activity, a finding that tentatively supports the idea of bidirectional effects of stress on social behavior. In study 2, we demonstrated that a small change in a decision’s wording could boost prosocial choice towards socially remote individuals by taking advantage of the reluctance to enrich oneself at the expense of others. Specifically, social discounting curves were much shallower when the decision to share was framed as averting loss of the other’s endowment (“take-frame”) compared to generating a gain for the other at the cost of the player’s own endowment (“give-frame”). Further analyses of functional imaging data show that these two types of decisions possess different neural signatures, which points toward distinct underlying processes. In study 3, we showed that stress is able to mitigate these framing effects. Here, a hybrid psychological and physical stressor left prosocial decisions unaffected under the give-frame, but stressed participants exhibited less restraint to benefit by withdrawing money from socially remote others under the take-frame. These results support the notion that stress can reduce the willingness to comply with social norms that prohibit causing harm to others. All in all, we could further illustrate how manifold stress effects on social behavior can be. The manifest behavior of a stressed individual can, indeed, be a function of the predominantly active physiological process, properties within the decision maker, as well as the type of decision itself. Future scientific endeavors should take into account such intricacies when willing to explore when stress makes us nicer or meaner to each other. Our results make important contributions to a growing and exciting field of decision-making research that yields insights for areas wherever social interaction is essential, such as businesses, hospitals and law.
Lizenz:	Urheberrechtsschutz
Fachbereich / Einrichtung:	Mathematisch- Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät » WE Psychologie
Dokument erstellt am:	10.01.2022
Dateien geändert am:	10.01.2022
Promotionsantrag am:	09.09.2021
Datum der Promotion:	13.12.2021