Norbert L. Kerr - US grants

Social traps are settings in which individual and collective welfare are in conflict. For example, an individual taxpayer might be personally better off by acting (e.g., voting) to retain special tax breaks or entitlements, yet the nation as a whole might be better off if many such preferences were eliminated. One reason individuals may not act in the whole group's welfare is that they believe that such cooperative acts have little impact and/or that the group cannot successfully avoid the trap. This research explores how such beliefs are formed and how they guide cooperative behavior in social traps. One study explores how the necessity for coordinated effort in many social situations may undermine confidence in the effectiveness of personal cooperation. Another study examines whether people feel less overwhelmed by very large social problems when the problems are broken up into smaller parts. Another study explores whether people sometimes excuse their failure to cooperate in a group by saying their contributions just don't matter, and thereby convince themselves that future cooperation is also pointless. Yet another study tries to determine when a sense of helplessness might counteract other factors that would normally increase cooperation (e.g., loyalty to the group). This research will a) contribute to basic knowledge on how people think and act in social traps and b) suggest ways of strengthening peoples' beliefs that they and the groups to which they belong can solve their groups' problems.

Over the past 25 years researchers have identified and explained numerous instances of group motivation loss - lower task motivation when people work in groups rather than as individuals. In contrast, relatively less is known about when and how group contexts can sometimes promote a gain in motivation. This project seeks to build on early work concerned with two types of group motivation gain-the "Koehler effect" and the "social compensation effect." Early research found evidence for a group motivation gain on persistence tasks. Although some contemporary attempts to explore this phenomenon have been unsuccessful, very recent work in our laboratory has succeeded in both replicating and partially explaining it. The current project will further explore the causes and generality of the Koehler effect. The research will examine: (a) the relative validity of concerns with collective success versus self-presentation as an explanation for the Koehler effect; (b) the role that workers' ability to monitor each other's performance plays in generating the motivation gain; (c) how long workers will persist in exceeding their usual individual performance; and (d) some possible group composition moderators of the Koehler effect. Other early research identified a motivation gain that is very different from the Koehler effect: social compensation occurs when a group member has some reason to believe that fellow group members cannot or will not perform well. A series of studies will extend the initial work on social compensation. This work will explore (a) the extent to which the effect depends on believing that greater effort can sufficiently compensate for other group member's low performance; (b) whether it matters if the others' low performance is due to low ability versus low motivation; and (c) how long a group member will continue to compensate for others' low performance. The significance of this project lies both in its potential for contributing to basic knowledge about motivation in groups and its potential for application. The project will contribute to a better understanding of group dynamics in the kind of performance contexts found in the workplace. Finding ways to increase task motivation may offer an effective way of enhancing collective performance in a diverse array of contexts, including small groups, a marriage, a work team, or a business organization.

Juries have the implicit power to acquit defendants despite evidence and judicial instructions to the contrary. The jury's right to decide a criminal case by its own lights without fear of outside coercion and pressure has been a hallmark of Anglo-American jurisprudence. To some observers of criminal cases where juries nullified the evidence or instructions, jury acquittals in the face of ostensibly strong prosecution cases were tantamount to racially-based jury nullification. Others suggest that it is both possible and perhaps even probable that such acquittals were really not jury nullifications of the law, but simply instances of the prosecution failing to meet its burden of proof. This research tests a model of jury nullification and involves four experiments that examine the influence of judicial instructions and various fact and legal situations that may provoke juries to nullify. The mock jury experiments, as guided by the model, involve 1316 juror-participants using videotaped trials presented in a realistic setting. The first experiment is an exploration of the effects of jurors' emotional biases in reaching a nullification verdict. Jurors will view a trial that has elicited nullification verdicts or a trial that has not. Jurors will either be given standard (pattern) or nullification instructions by the trial judge. Emotional biases will be primed by varying the attributes of the victim who will be presented either in a neutral light or will be very unsympathetic. A second battery of experiments will delineate three nullification-relevant legal situations (i.e., unfair laws, unfair application of law to the defendant, and violation of due process). While commentators have argued that these situations tend to evoke the jury's nullification tendencies, there is no extant empirical evidence that this is so. The studies also investigate the impact of providing juries with nullification instructions as compared to standard (pattern) judicial instructions. The researchers examine the impact of these instructions on both the verdicts and dynamics of jury deliberations within the context of the three categories of nullification. The third proposed experiment explores the impact on a nullification decision of a juror who argues that the jury should focus on a just outcome rather than solely on an outcome that complies with the law (a trigger). The researchers experimentally manipulate the presence or absence of a trigger in two trials and analyze the effects on the jury's deliberations and verdicts. The research proposed will provide empirical evidence as to when, why, and how juries nullify and inform the debate as to whether juries should be informed of their power.

Over the past 30 years, there has been considerable research showing that members of work groups often do not work as hard as comparable individual task performers. Such social loafing research has led some to suggest that task motivation is generally lower in groups or teams. However, in the last few years, there has been growing evidence that groups are not inherently or typically demotivating, but on the contrary, can sometimes result in increases in member task motivation. This proposal seeks to extend understanding of such group motivation gains by continuing a program of research on one such phenomenon, the Kohler effect. In seminal research with rowing teams, O. Kohler (1926) found that when the group's performance was defined by the least capable member's performance, that least capable member (the "weak link") would work particularly hard. With prior NSF support (through Grant BCS-9974664), the Kohler effect's robustness has been established, a number of its boundary conditions have been determined, and most importantly, at least two psychological processes which underlie it have been identified [1. a competitive motive to avoid being identified as the "weak link" in the group, and 2. a cooperative motive to fulfill the special responsibility that comes with being the group's weak link]. This project extends this prior work by exploring how the Kohler motivation gain may depend upon a number of distinctive group processes. In particular, it will determine how the Kohler effect specifically [and group motivation gains more generally] depends on the nature of the work group itself. Nine experiments are proposed that focus on several important features of work groups-how group members feel about their fellow group members or the group as a whole, what group members expect of one another, the relationship between the group and the authorities that judge and reward them, whether the group works alone or competes against other groups, the culture from which the group members come, and how the ingroup (and outgroup) is composed. The project's primary significance lies in its potential to illuminate basic processes of motivation in groups, and thereby to provide useful knowledge that can be applied to maximizing workforce productivity in collective work contexts (e.g., work groups and teams).