College of DuPage

About: College of DuPage is a education organization based out in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: SOCRATES & Higher education. The organization has 173 authors who have published 226 publications receiving 5129 citations. The organization is also known as: COD & cod.edu.

Costly Punishment Across Human Societies

Abstract: 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 these insights to the species have necessarily been tentative. Here, experimental results from 15 diverse populations show that (i) all populations demonstrate some willingness to administer costly punishment as unequal behavior increases, (ii) the magnitude of this punishment varies substantially across populations, and (iii) costly punishment positively covaries with altruistic behavior across populations. These findings are consistent with models of the gene-culture coevolution of human altruism and further sharpen what any theory of human cooperation needs to explain.

Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment.

Abstract: Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and institutions that sustain fairness in ephemeral exchanges. If that is true, then engagement in larger-scale institutions, such as markets and world religions, should be associated with greater fairness, and larger communities should punish unfairness more. Using three behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations, we show that market integration (measured as the percentage of purchased calories) positively covaries with fairness while community size positively covaries with punishment. Participation in a world religion is associated with fairness, although not across all measures. These results suggest that modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history.

A critical review of the jury simulation paradigm - The case of defendant characteristics

Abstract: While empirical study of the jury has a long history (cf. Marston, 1924), recent years have witnessed a substantial expansion of research interest. Especially noticeable has been the proliferation of studies involving attempted simulation of jury functioning. The recent popularity of the jury simulation paradigm is probably due to researchers' perception that it offers both theoretical and pragmatic potential. The jury's task, that of making a social judgment based on various kinds of information, provides an arena in which social psychologists can test a variety of theoretical conceptions: the just-world model (Jones & Aronson, 1973), the reinforcement model of attraction (Mitchell & Byrne, 1973), information integration theory (Kaplan & Kemmerick, 1974), social decision scheme models (Davis, Kerr, Atkin, Holt, & Meek, 1975), attribution theory (Izzett & Fishman, 1976), and equity theory (DeJong, Morris, & Hastorf, 1976). At the same time, because of the intrinsic difficulties associated with research on actual juries, the jury simulation paradigm offers an apparently reasonable source of pragmatic insights about jury functioning. For example, legal prohibitions enacted to ensure absolute privacy for the jury (Burchard, 1958) bar social scientists at the door when a real jury retires for deliberation. In addition, the behavioral scientist can exercise only limited experimental control over court

Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment.

Abstract: Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.

Carnivore occurrence along an urban-rural gradient : A landscape-level analysis

Abstract: Human development impacts the landscape by altering the size and shape of natural habitat patches, replacing natural vegetation with other types such as lawns and row crops, or introducing environmental stressors such as increased human activity and pollutants. We investigated the effects of human alterations to the landscape on the distribution of 3 mammalian carnivores (coyote [Canis latrans], raccoon [Procyon lotor], and red fox [Vulpes vulpes]) along an urban–rural gradient in northern Illinois. Distribution of each species was assessed from occurrence at scent stations placed within or along the edges of 47 sites ≥ 4 ha, representing 7 different natural or anthropogenically altered habitats. We averaged presence or absence scores across several seasonal samples over a year, and used an outlying mean index analysis to compare them to environmental variables gathered for each site, including habitat and landscape metrics presumed to reflect varying degrees of anthropogenic influence across the...