Uncovering and Overcoming Ambivalence: The Role of Chronic and Contextually Activated Attachment in Two‐Person Social Dilemmas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Humans face an enduring conflict between desires to affiliate with others but to protect the self; effective social functioning often requires reconciling the resulting ambivalence between these motives. Attachment anxiety is characterized by chronically heightened concerns about affiliation and self-protection; we investigated how anxious individuals' chronic relational ambivalence affects interpersonal behavior. METHOD: We used the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Assurance Game to examine how the ambivalence associated with attachment anxiety affects pro-social behavior, comparing chronic attachment anxiety with both chronic (Study 1; N = 94) and contextually activated (Study 2; N = 56) security. RESULTS: Chronic attachment anxiety was associated with ambivalent behavior in the social dilemma games. Specifically, the chronically anxious were mistrustfully inconsistent in their strategic choices and took more time to make these choices. However, priming the chronically anxious with attachment security decreased ambivalence by promoting more fluent cooperative behavior. CONCLUSIONS: To our knowledge, these are the first studies to examine the effect of the anxiously attached's chronic relational ambivalence on pro-social behavior. These findings illustrate that the simultaneous activation of affiliation and self-protection can have interpersonal consequences, increasing mistrust and hesitance. Importantly, however, we were able to attenuate these effects by priming felt security.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".