Progress-focused

A new study by Peperkorn et al. (2020) shows that as humans, we prefer social contact in pairs. What does this mean and what are the reasons for this? 

Human nature not only has a competitive side to it, which expresses itself through tendencies such as resource striving and status seeking ; it also has an equally important, if not more important, cooperative side which expresses itself through tendencies such as fairness and reciprocity seeking and group identity seeking (for more about this read The dual human nature: competitive and cooperative forces ). Here, I want to focus on one of those cooperative tendencies, namely  reciprocity seeking . The principle of reciprocity seeking, which has a strong impact how we behave in social interactions, implies that if someone else does us some kind of favor we want to give a favor in return to that person. Negative reciprocity, by the way, means that if we feel that someone treats us badly, we want to treat them badly in return. In other words, we tend to want to give back what we feel we get.

Three basic needs (SDT) As I've written about quite a few   times , self determination theory (SDT) has demonstrated three basic human needs which motivate people to initiate behavior: Need for autonomy, which is the perception of experiencing a sense of choice and psychological freedom in the initiation and continued engagement in one’s actions,  Need for competence, which is the perception of being effective in dealing with the environment, and  Need for relatedness, which is the sense of being cared for and connected to other people.  Four human forces (behavioral economics)