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1. “We Need to Start Thinking Ahead”: The Impact of Social Context on Linguistic Norm Adherence

   Lockshin, Jane; Williams, Tom (January 2020, Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

   null (Ed.)

   Human dialogue is governed by communicative norms that speakers are expected to follow in order to be viewed as cooperative dialogue partners. Accordingly, for language-capable autonomous agents to be effective human teammates they must be able to understand and generate language that complies with those norms. Moreover, these linguistic norms are highly context sensitive, requiring autonomous agents to be able to model the contextual factors that dictate when and how those norms are applied. In this work, we consider three key linguistic norms (directness, brevity, and politeness), and examine the extent to which adherence to these norms varies under changes to three key contextual factors (potential for harm, interlocutor authority, and time pressure). Our results, based on a human-subject study involving 5,642 human utterances, provide strong evidence that speakers do indeed vary their adherence to these norms under changes to these contextual factors. 

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2. How context influences primates' decisions about reciprocity

   https://doi.org/10.1111/eth.13433  

   Brosnan, Sarah F. (January 2024, Ethology)

   Abstract Reciprocally patterned behavior is widespread in animals in the wild, but experimental evidence has been frustratingly inconsistent. Contrary to earlier contentions that this inconsistency is because reciprocity in non‐human species is a rare or fragile effect, recent authors have argued that the evidence suggests that reciprocity is widespread, that it often relies on cognitive mechanisms that are common across species, and is potentially an important factor in animals' daily lives. Another possible explanation for its apparent rarity, then, is that due to experimental studies' (intentionally) structured environment, they can lack the appropriate context to promote and support reciprocity. Focusing on outcomes from experimental reciprocal tasks in non‐human primates, I consider several factors that may be important, including the identity of the interactors and their relationship to one another, whether there is free choice of partners, whether the individuals are interacting directly, the timing of the interaction, the commodity involved, whether individuals have a reason to reciprocate, and the equity of the interaction. Clarifying the role of each of these factors will help improve experimental tasks and the social and ecological contexts that promote reciprocity. 

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3. When and why framing effects are neither errors nor mistakes

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-025-00338-9  

   McKenzie, Craig_R_M; Sher, Shlomi; Liu, Xingyu_Shirley; Kleiman-Lynch, Leo_J (October 2025, Mind & Society)

   Abstract Framing effects play a central role in the debate regarding human rationality. They violate the normative principle ofdescription invariance, which states that merely redescribing options or outcomes in equivalent ways should not affect judgments or decisions. Description invariance is considered by many decision researchers to be “normatively unassailable”, and violations are widely regarded as demonstrations of systematic irrationality. This article develops an alternative perspective on invariance violations, applying Funder’s (1987) distinction between “errors” and “mistakes”. Description invariance implicitly assumes that (1) rational preferences must be complete and (2) frames do not convey choice-relevant information. We argue that both assumptions often do not hold. When they fail, framing effects in the laboratory are not “errors”, and they do not provide evidence for “mistakes” in natural environments. Furthermore, recent findings suggest that participants often do not regard different responses to different frames as unreasonable, and presenting them with arguments for and against description invariance has little effect on their views. Finally, we argue that similar lessons generalize to other coherence norms, such as procedure invariance and independence of irrelevant alternatives. 

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4. Risk interdependency, social norms, and wildfire mitigation: a choice experiment

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04037-1  

   Dickinson, Katherine L.; Brenkert-Smith, Hannah; Madonia, Greg; Flores, Nicholas E. (June 2020, Natural Hazards)

   Wildfire presents a growing threat across the American West. We conducted an online choice experiment in Western Colorado to assess how social interactions affect wildfire mitigation decisions through two distinct pathways: risk interdependency (neighbors’ conditions affect perceived wildfire risk) and social norms (neighbors’ actions affect perceptions of appropriate mitigation choices). In contrast to key observational studies, we find that participants are less likely to choose to mitigate when they have more neighbors with sparse vegetation. This effect operates through the risk interdependency pathway: sparse vegetation on neighboring properties lowers participants’ wildfire risk perceptions and appears to be viewed as a substitute for one’s own mitigation actions. In this context, where neighbors are nameless and faceless, social norms do not counteract this negative effect. To reconcile this experimental result with observational studies, we discuss how both risk interdependency and social norms are influenced by geographical and social contexts and highlight how these insights can inform future research and policy action. 

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5. All contexts are not created equal: Social stimuli win the competition for organizing reinforcement learning in 9‐month‐old infants

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13088  

   Werchan, Denise_M; Amso, Dima (February 2021, Developmental Science)

   Abstract Previous work has shown that infants as young as 8 months of age can use certain features of the environment, such as the shape or color of visual stimuli, as cues to organize simple inputs into hierarchical rule structures, a robust form of reinforcement learning that supports generalization of prior learning to new contexts. However, especially in cluttered naturalistic environments, there are an abundance of potential cues that can be used to structure learning into hierarchical rule structures. It is unclear how infants determine what features constitute a higher‐order context to organize inputs into hierarchical rule structures. Here, we examine whether 9‐month‐old infants are biased to use social stimuli, relative to non‐social stimuli, as a higher‐order context to organize learning of simple visuospatial inputs into hierarchical rule sets. Infants were presented with four face/color‐target location pairings, which could be learned most simply as individual associations. Alternatively, infants could use the faces or colorful backgrounds as a higher‐order context to organize the inputs into simpler color‐location or face‐location rules, respectively. Infants were then given a generalization test designed to probehowthey learned the initial pairings. The results indicated that infants appeared to use the faces as a higher‐order context to organize simpler color‐location rules, which then supported generalization of learning to new face contexts. These findings provide new evidence that infants are biased to organize reinforcement learning around social stimuli. 

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