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This chapter describes how the initial ideas for the book emerged and discusses a number of key issues regarding behavior in social psychology. Psychologists commonly partition the behavioral chain into three parts that can be roughly characterized as the stimulus environment, mediating processes, and behavioral response. In this volume, the editors attempted to ensure that all three of these parts are well represented by scholars studying each. This chapter organizes the issues facing behavior-related theory and research in much the same way. Questions considered in this chapter include (a) What do we know about the stimulus environment (and why don’t we know more)?; (b) Why don’t we study real behaviors (or at least important ones)?; (c) What, exactly, counts as behavior anyway?; (d) What kinds of processes mediate behavior?; and (e) What gets measured, how and why?

This chapter presents findings from studies of defensive behaviors in Rhesus monkeys which are relevant to understanding fear and anxiety-related psychopathology in humans. The physiological component of these fear-related behaviors is examined to reveal the causal factors of individual differences in fearful temperament. These studies complement the basic work on rodents discussed in prior chapters. Rhesus monkeys were chosen as subjects for the experiments since they share key biological and social characteristics with humans and have shorter life spans that enable longitudinal studies. This chapter discusses the laboratory paradigm developed to characterize fearful behavioral responses in the subjects and to identify which animals have fearful and anxious dispositions. The studies presented also yield relevant findings on the development of defensive responses — its neuropharmacological regulation and physiological components. The findings cited deficiencies in the regulation of adaptive emotional and defensive behavioral responses as the causes of anxiety-related psychopathology.

The term ‘behavioural’ is often used in neurology to denote non-cognitive mental symptoms or disorders, thus including many psychiatric symptoms such as mood and psychotic disorders but also abnormal personality traits such as impulsivity and aggression or even social isolation. However, this chapter focuses on a more operational and restricted definition of this term. In psychology, the notion of behaviour includes the responses or reactions of an individual in front of a stimulus or in a given environment. The mechanisms by which brain lesions can affect a patient's behaviour depend on the pathogeny of lesions but also on their localization. In the acute case, altered perceptual and mental states can mimic confusional states and delusional symptoms. In the more chronic states, different deficits can modify behavioural response after stroke, and these causes correspond to the different steps that will lead to the patient's reaction.

This chapter presents the results of studies regarding determining the existence of consciousness and other high-level cognitive processes. No concrete neurophysiological measures can be used to accept or reject the existence of consciousness. Brain imaging of consciousness results lack consistency and have a high degree of variability, which makes it difficult to analyze the brain regions that are activated during the process. The difference between the brain imaging and electroencephalographic studies on consciousness also provides evidence that consciousness is likely to be an inference based on indirect behavioral responses. Lack of known biomarkers to measure intelligence is also discussed along with the use of brain imaging techniques used to search for a marker of intelligence. The chapter presents discussions related to the use of EEGs or ERPs for measuring intelligence.

If the structure and function of the nervous system were rigid and unmodifiable, behavioural alteration would never occur. To describe the enduring modification of the behavioural response, the term plasticity was introduced by James (1890), whose textbook, The principles of psychology, states: ‘An acquired habit is nothing but a new pathway of discharge formed in the brain…. Nervous tissue seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity…. Plasticity means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.' That is, a neuronal pathway can emerge de novo or the existing reflex pathways can be reinforced gradually in association with past experience.

This chapter examines the live-trap data of four small mammal species for evidence of behavioral responses to predator and/or competitor exclusions in a semiarid thorn scrub community in north-central Chile. It notes that the species include an herbivorous hystricognath rodent, Octodon degus, a granivorous/herbivorous sigmodontine rodent, Phyllotis darwini, and two omnivorous/insectivorous sigmodontines, Abrothrix olivaceus and Abrothrix longipilis. The chapter observes that significant numerical effects of predation on O. degus are present during the study; although none are detected on P. darwini, previous analyses showed significant but small magnitude effects of predation. It further observes that both species had significant effects of predation on survival. The chapter also examines effects of biotic interactions on mean distance between successive captures for consecutive six-month seasons over the course of a 36-month period during and following an El Niño event in 1991–1994.

This chapter discusses the general questions that focus on how nutritional factors affect the growth and size of insects. It specifically focuses more on insect herbivores due to the fact that most studies of insect nutrition have concentrated on herbivorous species, paying only minor attention to predators and parasitoids. The chapter addresses several problems that insects encounter when their nutrition is involved, one of which is the problems with limiting and excess nutrients and imbalanced diets. Additionally, behavioural responses to food are also discussed, particularly how insects find and choose their food – do they use olfactory receptors or taste receptors? Also tackled in the chapter are the post-ingestive responses of individual insects to food. How do they respond to plant physical defences, for example? Finally, the chapter discusses environmental effects on growth and development, and concludes with issues related to the causes and consequences of body size.

When it comes to being social, there is no other nonverbal environmental cue that is more important for humans than the facial expression of another person. Here we consider facial expressions as naturally conditioned stimuli that, when presented as images in an experimental paradigm, evoke neural and behavioral responses that serve to decipher the predictive meaning of the expression. We will cover data showing that the expressions of others alter our attention to the environment, our biases in interpreting these facial expressions, and our neural responses within an amygdala-prefrontal circuitry related to normal variations in reported anxiety.

This chapter investigates the impacts of human-induced environmental change on sexually selected behaviours. It describes the dramatic effects of environmental changes on reproductive behaviour, highlighting on a case study done to male beetles, cichlid fishes, and frogs. It provides an overview of the mechanisms of sexual selection and explains how they depend on the environment. It examines the effects of environmental disturbances on sexually selected behaviours, and what consequences these might have for the fate of individuals, populations, and species. It also considers the degree to which animals can adjust their sexually selected behaviour to environmental change, and whether these behavioural responses can help populations to persist under human-altered conditions.

This chapter analyzes household behavior in response to land reform policies. It addresses how efficacious was land reform in engendering private landownership by examining the following: (1) types of land holdings rural households have; (2) behavioral responses according to age, education, income level, and social classification that may affect the enlargement of holdings by households; and (3) patterns of land rental.

Until recently, mirror neuron activity has been mainly discussed within the framework of action understanding. This chapter reviews recent experimental and computational work that suggests that mirror neurons may process observed actions in order to select adequate behavioral responses. While being far from being conclusive, this idea offers a parsimonious explanation for the modulation of observation-related discharges, via three variables: (1) the viewpoint from which an action is observed, (2) the ability of the observer to intervene in the observed action, and (3) the reward the observing monkey associates with an observed action.

In the preceding chapters, the focus was on simulating policies that aim to reduce poverty, generate revenue, or redistribute resources. However, many public policies also try to incentivize behaviour, such as those to improve labour participation or supply, or to change behaviours in relation to savings or pollution. Social- and fiscal-policy instruments face a fundamental trade-off. An instrument that performs well from an income-maintenance perspective may have unintended behavioural consequences. This chapter considers the structure of instruments that have an explicit goal to improve behavioural response, particularly focusing on in-work benefits. The chapter also describes how to use a microsimulation mode to simulate the inputs required for the estimation of a behavioural-econometric model, and then estimates a revealed-preference-choice model. The chapter then describes a method often used in microsimulation models to calibrate choice models for simulation purposes. In terms of measurement issues related to the behavioural analysis, we describe the design and use of replacement rates. The chapter concludes by undertaking a simulation of the introduction of a change in in-work benefits.

Chapter 1 introduces the basic ingredients of the optimal tax problem. The theory of optimal taxation begins by clarifying the objectives of policy and identifying the constraints upon policy. The tax system that best achieves objectives while satisfying constraints is identified as the optimum system. There are four main elements at play in determining the optimal income tax schedule in the Mirrlees model: the social welfare function; the distribution of earning abilities; the individual supply or behavioural response function; and the production structure. Together these four components produce a degree of optimal after-tax/transfer distribution. Hence, the optimal tax literature combines two rather different origins of economics: the ethics-related tradition and the engineering-related tradition. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the topics covered in the book.

This chapter provides unique evidence of substantial behavioral responses of wealthy taxpayers to charitable giving deductions in a very long time perspective, using original historical data collected from tax records. It then investigates the anatomy of this response. Using the tightening of the rules regulating private foundations implemented in 1969 as a natural experiment on tax enforcement in the US, it shows that tax cheating and tax optimization explain a large fraction of the elasticity of charitable giving of the very wealthy. The chapter develops a model of tax cheating and shows that tax cheating is a first-order phenomenon to assess optimal tax policies for charitable contributions.

Indirect taxation refers to taxation that is levied on expenditure rather than on income and is one of the most important sources of revenue for governments, particularly in middle- and low-income countries. As a result, indirect taxation is frequently included in microsimulation models. These models differ from those described thus far in that they involve the use of data that contains expenditures in addition to incomes. This chapter describes the theoretical structure of a number of different types of indirect taxation. A challenge to the simulation of indirect taxation arises in that the base datasets of microsimulation models typically do not include expenditure data. A relatively simple method for combining income and expenditure data is described. As changes in indirect taxation affect the relative prices of goods, there will either be a change in consumption patterns or a change in savings. A method to model behavioural response when modelling indirect taxation is discussed. These methods are then utilized to describe some descriptive measures for the distributional attributes of consumption and some directions for policy reform. The framework developed in this chapter is then used to model the welfare impact of changes to indirect taxation in an example simulation.