Incentives are frequently used by governments and employers to encourage cooperation. Here, we investigated the effect of centralized incentives on cooperation, firstly in a behavioral study and then replicated in a subsequent neuroimaging (fMRI) study. In both studies, participants completed a novel version of the Public Goods Game, including experimental conditions in which the administration of centralized incentives was probabilistic and incentives were either of a financial or social nature. Behavioral results showed that the prospect of potentially receiving financial and social incentives significantly increased cooperation, with financial incentives yielding the strongest effect. Neuroimaging results showed that activation in the bilateral lateral orbitofrontal cortex and precuneus increased when participants were informed that incentives would be absent versus when they were present. Furthermore, activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex increased when participants would potentially receive a social versus a financial incentive. These results speak to the efficacy of different types of centralized incentives in increasing cooperative behavior, and they show that incentives directly impact the neural mechanisms underlying cooperation.
Now that collaborative robots are becoming more widespread in industry, the question arises how we can make them better co-workers and team members. Team members cooperate and collaborate to attain common goals. Consequently they provide and receive information, often non-linguistic, necessary to accomplish the work at hand and coordinate their activities. The cooperative behaviour needed to function as a team also entails that team members have to develop a certain level of trust towards each other. In this paper we argue that for cobots to become trusted, successful co-workers in an industrial setting we need to develop design principles for cobot behaviour to provide legible, that is understandable, information and to generate trust. Furthermore, we are of the opinion that modelling such non-verbal cobot behaviour after animal co-workers may provide useful opportunities, even though additional communication may be needed for optimal collaboration. Marijke Bergman, Elsbeth de Joode, +1 author Janienke Sturm Published in CHIRA 2019 Computer Science
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Hospital staff frequently has to cope with complex information, unpredictable circumstances, and prompt decision making. In such an environment, even the “Gods in white” are susceptible to fatigue and error. Noncompliance with hand hygiene guidelines in hospitals is one of these errors and enhances the risk that microorganisms are transmitted between staff and patients. Previous approaches to enhance this compliance aimed at raising awareness on hand hygiene, such as performance feedback or strategic sink placement, and have only appeared to be partially or temporarily successful. Research on human cooperative behaviour has demonstrated that subtle cues of being observed, such as an image of eyes, could enhance compliance with instructions (Bateson et al, 2006). It has been suggested that these cues might activate motivation to follow a local cooperative norm (Ernest-Jones et al, 2010). However, the underlying psychological mechanisms of possible implicit norm activation remain questionable, and it is unclear whether eye-cues could improve hand disinfection behaviour. We conducted two experiments to investigate this
