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Biomedical subjects

Margo Wilson

Publications and source records attributed to Margo Wilson.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Are juvenile offenders extreme future discounters?

It has been the prevailing view that young offenders are more present oriented than their peers, but this view has little empirical basis other than the actions that have defined these youth as offenders. In the present study, we used a decision task with actual monetary consequences to assess the tendency of young offenders and a control group of high school students to discount the future. The young offenders were not significantly different from the students in discounting the future, even though the young offenders scored significantly higher on a sensation-seeking personality scale, were less likely to have lived with their fathers, and had changed schools more often. Young offenders and control participants were also similar in the extent to which they manifested a clear vision of the future by anticipating which future milestones would occur sooner, in a task pairing milestones with each other and with year markers.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Carpe diem: adaptation and devaluing the future.

Organisms typically "discount the future" in their decision making, but the extent to which they do so varies across species, sexes, age classes, and circumstances. This variability has been studied by biologists, economists, psychologists, and criminologists. We argue that the conceptual framework required for an interdisciplinary synthesis of knowledge in this area is the evolutionary adaptationist analysis of reproductive effort scheduling pioneered by George Williams.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2004

Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future?

Organisms 'discount the future' when they value imminent goods over future goods. Optimal discounting varies: selection should favour allocations of effort that effectively discount the future relatively steeply in response to cues promising relatively good returns on present efforts. However, research on human discounting has hitherto focused on stable individual differences rather than situational effects. In two experiments, discounting was assessed on the basis of choices between a smaller sum of money tomorrow and a larger sum at a later date, both before and after subjects rated the 'appeal' of 12 photographs. In experiment 1, men and women saw either attractive or unattractive opposite-sex faces; in experiment 2, participants saw more or less appealing cars. As predicted, discounting increased significantly in men who viewed attractive women, but not in men who viewed unattractive women or women who viewed men; viewing cars produced a different pattern of results.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Nominal kinship cues facilitate altruism.

We investigated whether names in common promote altruistic behaviour, predicting that this would be especially so for relatively uncommon names, for surnames (which are better kinship cues than first names), and among women (who, although less willing than men to help strangers, according to prior research, are also the primary "kin keepers"). We solicited help from 2960 email addressees, with the request ostensibly coming from a same-sex person sharing both, either, or neither of the addressee's first and last names. As anticipated, addressees were most likely to respond helpfully when senders shared both their names (12.3%) and least likely when they shared neither (2.0%), and this was especially true for relatively uncommon names. A shared surname was more effective than a shared first name only if it was relatively uncommon. Women were substantially more likely to reply than men. These results indicate that names elicit altruism because they function as salient cues of kinship.

Altruism↗