All Together Now: Genes, Interpersonal Touch, and Self‐Conscious Processes Jointly Guide Cooperative Behavior
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Cooperation and trust are critical parts of many relationships. However, such relationships are often studied in siloed ways, leading to incomplete explanations of behavior (e.g., from the point of view of a buyer or a seller, but not necessarily both). This paper makes three contributions to broadening this perspective. First, the authors develop a model incorporating individual differences (genetics), environmental (interpersonal touch), and psychological (empathy and trust) elements to shed light on when and how cooperation is influenced in dyadic relationships. Empathy was predicted to be elicited by the interaction of human touch and the COMT gene to induce, in turn, felt trust and cooperative behaviors. Second, the centipede game is used as a behaviorally relevant context to study how and under what conditions players cooperate while competing with each other. The results of a conditional serial mediation demonstrate that cooperative responses are guided by the interaction of touch and the COMT gene, where empathy and trust are mediators. Actual actions of players are recorded and real behaviors explained. In an additional registered experiment, the mediator, empathy, was manipulated to show that it had a positive effect on trust.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".