Reciprocity towards groups : a laboratory experiment on the causes

Field studies of conflict report cycles of mutual revenge between groups, often linked to perceptions of intergroup injustice. We test the hypothesis that people are predisposed to reciprocate against groups. In a computerized laboratory experiment, subjects who were harmed by a partner’s uncooperative action reacted by harming other members of the partner’s group. This group reciprocity was only observed when one group was seen to be unfairly advantaged. Our results support a behavioral mechanism leading from perceived injustice to intergroup conflict. We discuss the relevance of group reciprocity to economic and political phenomena including conflict, discrimination and team competition

Group Reciprocity

People exhibit group reciprocity when they retaliate, not against the person who harmed them, but against somebody else in that person's group. Group reciprocity may be a key motivation behind intergroup conflict. We investigated group reciprocity in a laboratory experiment. After a group identity manipulation, subjects played a Prisoner's Dilemma with others from different groups. Subjects then allocated money between themselves and others, learning the group of the others. Subjects who knew that their partner in the Prisoner's Dilemma had defected became relatively less generous to people from the partner's group, compared to a third group. We use our experiment to develop hypotheses about group reciprocity and its correlates.reciprocity, groups, conflict

Retaining the Thin Blue Line: What shapes workers' willingness not to quit the current work environment?

The purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants of police officers' willingness to quit their current department. For this purpose, we work with US survey data that covers a large set of police officers for the Baltimore Police Department in Maryland. Our results indicate that more effective cooperation between units, a higher trust in the work partner, a higher level of interactional justice and a higher level of work-life-balance reduces police officers' willingness to quit the department substantially. On the other hand, higher physical and psychological stress and the expereicene of traumatic events are not, ceteris paribus, correlated with the willingness to leave the department. It might be that police officers accept stress as an acceptable factor in their job description.Willingness to Quit the Job; Turnover Rates: Job Satisfaction; Stress; Police Officers; Work-Life Balance; Fairness; Acceptance.

Nitrogen abundances in giant stars of the globular cluster NGC 6752

We present N abundances for 21 bright giants in the globular cluster NGC 6752 based on high-resolution UVES spectra of the 3360A NH lines. We confirm that the Stromgren c1 index traces the N abundance and find that the star-to-star N abundance variation is 1.95 dex, at the sample's luminosity. We find statistically significant correlations, but small amplitude variations, between the abundances of N and alpha-, Fe-peak, and s-process elements. Analyses using model atmospheres with appropriate N, O, Na, and Al abundances would strengthen, rather than mute, these correlations. If the small variations of heavy elements are real, then the synthesis of the N anomalies must take place in stars which also synthesize alpha-, Fe-peak, and s-process elements. These correlations offer support for contributions from both AGB and massive stars to the globular cluster abundance anomalies.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Electroweakino constraints from LHC data

We investigate the sensitivity of existing LHC searches to the charginos and neutralinos of the MSSM when all the other superpartners are decoupled. In this limit, the underlying parameter space reduces to a simple four-dimensional set $\{M_1,\,M_2,\,\mu,\,\tan\beta\}$. We examine the constraints placed on this parameter space by a broad range of LHC searches taking into account the full set of relevant production and decay channels. We find that the exclusions implied by these searches exceed existing limits from LEP only for smaller values of the Bino mass $M_1 \lesssim 150$ GeV. Our results have implications for MSSM dark matter and electroweak baryogenesis.Comment: 30 pages, 15 figure

Reconstructing thawing quintessence with multiple datasets

In this work we model the quintessence potential in a Taylor series expansion, up to second order, around the present-day value of the scalar field. The field is evolved in a thawing regime assuming zero initial velocity. We use the latest data from the Planck satellite, baryonic acoustic oscillations observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and Supernovae luminosity distance information from Union2.1 to constrain our models parameters, and also include perturbation growth data from the WiggleZ, BOSS and the 6dF surveys. The supernova data provide the strongest individual constraint on the potential parameters. We show that the growth data performance is competitive with the other datasets in constraining the dark energy parameters we introduce. We also conclude that the combined constraints we obtain for our model parameters, when compared to previous works of nearly a decade ago, have shown only modest improvement, even with new growth of structure data added to previously-existent types of data.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures and 1 table. Version 2 with minor changes to match Physical Review D accepted versio