The rules of gangs
A great book on the political economy of gangs is written by Sudhir Venkatesh in “Gang Leader for a Day”. In this book Sudhir reports on his adventures as a Chicago graduate students studying the activities of a gang. He got access to the innerworkings of the gang by getting the interest of gangleader JT. […]
Language and Institutions
In the edition of January 22 of PNAS Steven Pinker and colleagues discuss the “logic of indirect speech”. “When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition.” This is interesting from an institutional perspective. When people interact in open societies how do they know the intent of […]
The tragedy of the commons in evolutionary biology
In the December issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Daniel Rankin, Katja Bargum and Hanna Kokko from Finland review some fascinating recent research on the study of commons dilemmas in non-human context such as plants competing for light and virus phages overharvesting a host bacteria. After they discuss a number of examples, they discuss […]
Cooperation with ingroup and outgroup persons
In a paper in te October 26 edition of Science by Jung-Kyoo Choi and Sam Bowles, entitled “The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War”, they discuss the interesting dilemma why people cooperate with members of a group, but not with those outside the group. How does this conditional cooperation with non-kin evolve? Assuming conditions likely […]
Genetics and Ultimatum Game
This week two interesting papers appeared who had unusual design to study fairness by using ultimatum games. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA of October 2, Björn Wallace and his colleagues performed large series of ultimatum games with monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins using a Swedish Twin Registry. A significant correlation […]
Why conservation efforts often fail
Modern conservation techniques have brought us the resurgence of American bald eagles, sustainable forest harvests, improved water quality of rivers and the rescue of prized lobster fisheries. So how can modern conservation strategies also have wrought such failures, from the catastrophic loss of Sumatra’s forests, disappearance of the Aral Sea to the economy-crippling Klamath River […]
Real crisis in virtual worlds and the need for institutions
A bank in Second Life Ginko has been dissolved creating a loss of 750,000 actual US dollars of it’s members. The unregulated world of second life leads to an interesting experiment of the evolution of institutions. At least it becomes clear that also in virtual world institutional arrangements need to be crafted to govern the […]
The cover article of Science of July 27 is about the research potential of virtual worlds. It is written by William Sims (!!) Bainbridge, who is a program officer at the National Science Foundation. The argument is that nowadays so many people make use of virtual worlds, especially for entertainment, that it might be a […]
cooperation and big brother
Manfred Milinski and Bettina Rockenbach report in a recent perspective article in Science on the impact of feeling being watched on cooperation in social dilemmas. Even when images of eyes are used in the experimental environment, cooperation increases. This effect is used in various artifacts like he totem poles in North America (see picture left).In […]
Can we trust avatars?
Kristine Nowak and Christian Rauh of the University of Connecticut wrote an interesting paper where they describe an experiment to test how people perceive the trustworthiness of avatars. Volunteers where chatting and they were represented as avatars with different levels of gender specific representation. The androgynous-looking avatars were perceived as being less credible. The authors […]