shaina
social influence and interaction bias can drive emergent behavioural specialization and modular social networks across systems
christopher k. tokita, corina e. tarnita 2020
doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2019.0564
“Our findings suggest that division of labor and political polarization — two social phenomena not typically considered together — may actually be driven by the same process,” said Tokita, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology. “Division of labor is seen as a benefit to societies, while political polarization usually isn’t, but we found that the same dynamics could theoretically give rise to them both.”
In a paper published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Tokita and Tarnita examined two forces known to drive political polarization and added them to an existing model for how division of labor arises in ant communities. They found that a feedback between these two forces simultaneously resulted in division of labor and polarized social networks.
“It suggests that maybe there’s a common process underlying the organization of societies,” Tokita said.
The two forces are “social influence,” the tendency of individuals to become similar to those they interact with, and “interaction bias,” which leads us to interact with others who are already like us. The researchers combined those with a “response threshold” model of ant social dynamics, in which ants choose their activities based on which need meets a critical internal threshold.
In other words, if ants A and B have both checked community food stores recently and checked on their young recently, but A has a lower threshold for hunger while B has a lower threshold for worrying about the health of the larvae, A will head out foraging while B rushes back to the nursery. Over time, this leads A to interact with other hunger-sensitive ants, who become the foraging team, while B spends more time with other care providers, and they become the nurses. Combine that with social influence and interaction bias, and the gulf between the foragers and the nurses grows steadily wider.
When this leads to societies eating well and raising healthy young, it’s called division of labor and heralded as a cornerstone of civilization. When it leads to tribalism, it’s called a breakdown of civil discourse.
But the underlying forces might be the same, say the researchers.
“Social insect colonies thrive on the heterogeneity that leads to division of labor, but sometimes they need to make decisions that have to be embraced by the whole nest,” said Tarnita, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “For example, when honeybees need to move their nest to a new location, it would be problematic if the colony couldn’t reach consensus and it ended up splitting,”
So what the researchers wondered next was how the social forces that polarized the ants into doing different tasks could be tamed to rebuild consensus when that was needed. Their model predicted a clear way back from polarization: fight the tendency to interact only with those who are similar, and be willing to let your internal thresholds shift a little.
“Our model predicts that if you interact with those who are different from you, over time, you’ll become similar to each other,” Tokita said. “It basically erases those differences.”
It even applies to scientists and sociologists, he added. “One of the things I hope comes from this project is that it causes people in different fields, coming at and thinking about social behavior from different perspectives, to talk to each other a little more. In this project, we learned a lot by borrowing theories from sociology and political science, and combining them with our biological model.”
…
abstract In social systems ranging from ant colonies to human society, behavioural specialization—consistent individual differences in behaviour—is commonplace: individuals can specialize in the tasks they perform (division of labour (DOL)), the political behaviour they exhibit (political polarization) or the non-task behaviours they exhibit (personalities). Across these contexts, behavioural specialization often co-occurs with modular and assortative social networks, such that individuals tend to associate with others that have the same behavioural specialization. This raises the question of whether a common mechanism could drive co-emergent behavioural specialization and social network structure across contexts. To investigate this question, here we extend a model of self-organized DOL to account for social influence and interaction bias among individuals—social dynamics that have been shown to drive political polarization. We find that these same social dynamics can also drive emergent DOL by forming a feedback loop that reinforces behavioural differences between individuals, a feedback loop that is impacted by group size. Moreover, this feedback loop also results in modular and assortative social network structure, whereby individuals associate strongly with those performing the same task. Our findings suggest that DOL and political polarization—two social phenomena not typically considered together—may actually share a common social mechanism. This mechanism may result in social organization in many contexts beyond task performance and political behaviour.
“Loneliness is the common ground of terror”: a gateway to extremism
nabeelah jaffer 2018
aeon.co/essays/loneliness-is-the-common-ground-of-terror-and-extremism
goodbye my love
ailee
Link: m.youtube.com/watch
instrumental
Link: soundcloud.com/kpopmusic-1/official-instrumental-ailee-goodbye-my-love-fated-to-love-you-ost
english
romanised
evidence accumulation is biased by motivation: a computational account
filip gesiarz et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007089
Previous studies had already provided some clues that people gather less information before reaching desirable beliefs. For example, people are more likely to seek a second medical opinion when the first diagnosis is grave. However, certain design limitations of those studies prevented a definitive conclusion and the reasons behind this bias was previously unknown. By fitting people's behavior to a mathematical model Gesiarz and colleagues were able to identify the reasons for this bias.
"Our research suggests that people start with an assumption that their favored conclusion is more likely true and weight each piece of evidence supporting it more than evidence opposing it. Because of that, people will find no need to gather additional information that could have revealed their conclusion to be false. They will stop the investigation as soon as the jury tilts in their favor" said Gesiarz.
In this new study 84 volunteers played an online categorization game in which they could gather as much evidence as they wanted to help them make judgements and were paid according to how accurate they were. In addition, if the evidence pointed to a certain category they would get bonus points and if it pointed to another category they would lose points. So while there was reason to wish the evidence pointed to a specific judgement, the only way for volunteers to maximize rewards was to provide accurate responses. Despite this, they found that the volunteers stopped gathering data earlier when it supported the conclusion they wished was true than when it supported the undesirable conclusion.
"Today, a limitless amount of information is available at the click of a mouse," Sharot says. "However, because people are likely to conduct less through searches when the first few hits provide desirable information, this wealth of data will not necessarily translate to more accurate beliefs."
Next, the authors hope to determine what factors make certain individuals more likely to have a bias in how they gather information than others. For instance, they are curious whether children might show the same bias revealed in this study, or whether people with depression, which is associated with motivation problems, have different data-gathering patterns.
abstract To make good judgments people gather information. An important problem an agent needs to solve is when to continue sampling data and when to stop gathering evidence. We examine whether and how the desire to hold a certain belief influences the amount of information participants require to form that belief. Participants completed a sequential sampling task in which they were incentivized to accurately judge whether they were in a desirable state, which was associated with greater rewards than losses, or an undesirable state, which was associated with greater losses than rewards. While one state was better than the other, participants had no control over which they were in, and to maximize rewards they had to maximize accuracy. Results show that participants’ judgments were biased towards believing they were in the desirable state. They required a smaller proportion of supporting evidence to reach that conclusion and ceased gathering samples earlier when reaching the desirable conclusion. The findings were replicated in an additional sample of participants. To examine how this behavior was generated we modeled the data using a drift-diffusion model. This enabled us to assess two potential mechanisms which could be underlying the behavior: (i) a valence-dependent response bias and/or (ii) a valence-dependent process bias. We found that a valence-dependent model, with both a response bias and a process bias, fit the data better than a range of other alternatives, including valence-independent models and models with only a response or process bias. Moreover, the valence-dependent model provided better out-of-sample prediction accuracy than the valence-independent model. Our results provide an account for how the motivation to hold a certain belief decreases the need for supporting evidence. The findings also highlight the advantage of incorporating valence into evidence accumulation models to better explain and predict behavior.
a meta-analysis of procedures to change implicit measures
patrick s. forscher et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000160
Implicit bias, a term for automatically activated associations, is often perceived to be a primary cause of discrimination against social groups such as women and racial minorities. Identifying and understanding implicit bias and modifying behavior that's based on it has long been a goal of those who seek to address such problems.
Patrick Forscher, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas, along with Calvin Lai, assistant professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, and five other co-authors, reviewed 492 studies on changing implicit bias involving 87,418 participants. The researchers' goal was to investigate procedures that attempted to change implicit bias. They found that while implicit bias can be changed, only a small percentage of the studies they looked at examined changes over time, or whether the changes affected behavior. The study was published in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology.
"When you hear people talk about implicit bias in popular media, there is often this assumption that you do this implicit bias training and the effects stick around for a long time," Forscher said. "What we found is that barely any of the studies that we captured in our analysis even attempted to assess changes over time."
Millions of people interested in assessing their own implicit bias have taken self-administered tests such as the Implicit Association Test, available on the internet, and many companies have created programs to address issues that stem from implicit bias, such as gender pay gaps and hiring discrimination.
"The promise is that if I can change what produces the score I am solving this big problem," Forscher said. "It offers an individualistic, easy solution."
But the researchers found little evidence that implicit bias can be changed long term, and even less evidence that such changes lead to changes in behavior.
"I don't think this research is ready for application," he said. "It could even be true that implicit bias doesn't have a strong impact on behavior. Even if this is not true we should not be using this body of research in its current state to inform public policy."
…
abstract Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures’ effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that implicit measures can be changed, but effects are often relatively weak (|ds| < .30). Most studies focused on producing short-term changes with brief, single-session manipulations. Procedures that associate sets of concepts, invoke goals or motivations, or tax mental resources changed implicit measures the most, whereas procedures that induced threat, affirmation, or specific moods/emotions changed implicit measures the least. Bias tests suggested that implicit effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. Procedures changed explicit measures less consistently and to a smaller degree than implicit measures and generally produced trivial changes in behavior. Finally, changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior. Our findings suggest that changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior
political extremism is supported by an illusion of understanding
philip m. fernbach et al 2013
doi.org/10.1177/0956797612464058
benefiting from disagreement: counterarguing reduces prechoice bias in information evaluation authors
ann-sophie chaxel, yegyu han 2017
doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1003
the political economy of ideas: on ideas versus interests in policymaking
sharun mukand, dani rodrik 2018
drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/the_political_economy_of_ideas.pdf
the divided public heart: is politics driven by pragmatic self-interest or by identities and ideals? the self-harming voter offers a clue
sharun mukand, dani rodrik 2018
aeon.co/essays/how-do-elites-manage-to-hijack-voters-ideas-of-themselves
how totalism works
alexandra stein 2017
aeon.co/essays/how-cult-leaders-brainwash-followers-for-total-control
perceived conflict and leader dominance: individual and contextual factors behind preferences for dominant leaders
lasse laustsen, michael bang petersen 2017
doi.org/10.1111/pops.12403
on tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century
timothy snyder 2017 9780804190121
ideas rise from chaos: information structure and creativity
yeun joon kim, chen-bo zhong 2017
doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2016.10.001
this is how institutions always eventually become corrupted, because the less–understanding people will always insist they are correct, while the more–understanding people grow weary of that insistence that obstructs, and move on to other, more rewarding things.
how to use bureaucracies
samo burja 2018
blog.usejournal.com/how-to-use-bureaucracies-97e980550070
the most intolerant wins: the dictatorship of the small minority
nassim nicholas taleb 2016
medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15#.kavkq4kq6
gaslighting
how to survive gaslighting: when manipulation erases your reality
ariel leve 2017
theguardian.com/science/2017/mar/16/gaslighting-manipulation-reality-coping-mechanisms-trump
i’ve counseled hundreds of victims of gaslighting. here’s how to spot if you’re being gaslighted
robin stern 2018
vox.com/first-person/2018/12/19/18140830/gaslighting-relationships-politics-explained
originals: how non–conformists move the world
adam grant 2016 9780698405776
“Instead of assuming that others share our principles, or trying to convince them to adopt ours, we ought to present our values as a means of pursuing theirs. It’s hard to change other people’s ideals. It’s much easier to link our agendas to familiar values that people already hold.”
at bridgewater, “In the language of futurist Paul Saffo, the norm is to have “strong opinions, weakly held.”
By devoting more than an hour to the debate on that matter, employees reached consensus that they needed to push one another to share original ideas. That transparency would shield them against groupthink, enabling them to avoid countless bad decisions over time. By building a culture in which people are constantly encouraging one another to disagree, Dalio has created a powerful way to combat conformity. Yet the kind of disagreement he seeks is the opposite of what most leaders invite.
Hofmann found that a culture that focuses too heavily on solutions becomes a culture of advocacy, dampening inquiry. If you’re always expected to have an answer ready, you’ll arrive at meetings with your diagnosis complete, missing out on the chance to learn from a broad range of perspectives.
Ray Dalio doesn’t want employees to bring him solutions; he expects them to bring him problems. One of his first inventions was the issue log, an open-access database for employees to flag any problem they identify and to rate its severity. Getting problems noted is half the battle against groupthink; the other is listening to the right opinions about how to solve them. The Bridgewater procedure for the latter is to gather a group of credible people to diagnose the problems, share their reasoning, and explore the causes and possible solutions.
Although everyone’s opinions are welcome, they’re not all valued equally. Bridgewater is not a democracy. Voting privileges the majority, when the minority might have a better opinion. “Democratic decision making—one person, one vote—is dumb,” Dalio explains, “because not everybody has the same believability.”*
At Bridgewater, every employee has a believability score on a range of dimensions. In sports, statistics for every player’s performance history are public. In baseball, before you sign a player, you can look up his batting average, home runs, and steals; assess his strengths and weaknesses; and adjust accordingly. Dalio wanted Bridgewater to work the same way, so he created baseball cards that display statistics on every employee’s performance, which can be accessed by anyone at the company. If you’re about to interact with a few Bridgewater colleagues for the first time, you can see their track records on seventy-seven different dimensions of values, skills, and abilities in the areas of higher-level thinking, practical thinking, maintaining high standards, determination, open-mindedness yet assertiveness, and organization and reliability.
During regular review cycles, employees rate one another on different qualities like integrity, courage, living in truth, taking the bull by its horns, not tolerating problems, being willing to touch a nerve, fighting to get in sync, and holding people accountable. Between cycles, employees can give real-time, open feedback to anyone in the company. At any time, employees can submit dots, or observations—they assess peers, leaders, or subordinates on the metrics and give short explanations of what they’ve observed. The baseball cards create a “pointillist picture” of staff members, aggregating across review cycles and dots, and incorporate various assessments that employees take. The cards’ display changes over time, revealing who’s best suited to play each position, and flagging areas to “rely on” and “watch out for” with green and red lights.
When you express an opinion, it’s weighted by whether you’ve established yourself as believable on that dimension. Your believability is a probability of being right in the present, and is based on your judgment, reasoning, and behavior in the past. In presenting your views, you’re expected to consider your own believability by telling your audience how confident you are. If you have doubts, and you’re not known as believable in the domain, you shouldn’t have an opinion in the first place; you’re supposed to ask questions so you can learn. If you’re expressing a fierce conviction, you should be forthright about it—but know that your colleagues will probe the quality of your reasoning. Even then, you’re supposed to be assertive and open-minded at the same time. As management scholar Karl Weick advises, “Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.”-
What happens, though, when believable people don’t agree? In the summer of 2014, Bridgewater conducted an anonymous survey to find out about dissent that hadn’t been voiced. When co-CEO Greg Jensen led an all-hands meeting to discuss the results, an employee, “Ashley,” commented that some people were misinterpreting Bridgewater’s principles. Greg asked if she was correcting them when that occurred, and Ashley mentioned that she had recently called someone out for a misinterpretation.
By speaking up, Ashley was exemplifying one of Bridgewater’s principles. But rather than responding to the substance of her comment, Greg called her out for violating another Bridgewater principle, which emphasizes the importance of understanding the difference between the forest and the trees, and navigating between the two. He wanted a synthesis of how she handled such situations in general, not her account of a specific case.
A senior manager, Trina Soske, felt that Greg made a bad leadership decision. Although he was attempting to adhere to one Bridgewater principle, Trina was concerned that Ashley—and others—might be discouraged from speaking up in the future. In most organizations, since Greg had higher status than her, a manager in Trina’s position would remain silent and go home thinking he was a jerk. But Trina wrote honest feedback for the whole company to read. She praised Ashley for having the courage and integrity to speak up, and cautioned Greg that his response “signaled the exact opposite of what you, as a CEO, should model.”
In a typical organization, as the senior leader Greg’s opinion would prevail over Trina’s, and her career might be in jeopardy for criticizing him. But at Bridgewater, Trina wasn’t punished, and the resolution wasn’t based on authority, seniority, majority, or who spoke the most loudly or forcefully. It started with a debate via email: Greg disagreed with Trina’s views, as he felt he was being open and direct; after all, principle three stated that no one has the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking up. But Trina had heard two different people criticize Greg’s behavior in informal conversations. “The dampening impact is going to be more about what you don’t see and don’t hear,” she wrote to him. She worried that Greg’s behavior would instigate groupthink, causing people to stay silent rather than to challenge leaders. Greg stood his ground: By allowing people to talk behind his back, Trina was failing to hold people accountable for confronting him with their critical opinions. She was allowing them to violate one of Bridgewater’s principles by acting like “slimy weasels.”
It’s extremely rare to see a senior leader open to this kind of thoughtful disagreement, but even more unusual was what Greg did next. “I doubt we’ll be able to resolve this ourselves,” he wrote to Trina, copying the entire management committee—a group of people who had established their believability as leaders. “It’s like agreeing on a judge or a mediator,” Dalio explains. By escalating the disagreement to them, Greg was allowing the idea meritocracy to sort out who was right.
Instead of leaving it to the management committee to resolve, though, Dalio asked Greg and Trina to collaborate on turning their conflict into a case to share with all of Bridgewater. Along with making their debate transtransparent, it forced them to inquire about each other’s perspectives instead of just advocating for their own viewpoints. When the case was finished, to continue the inquiry process Greg and Trina each generated questions to ask the entire company.
Several months after the issue first occurred, it was still being discussed, and the analytics team was preparing to share the data on employees’ reactions. But “resolving the issue itself is in some ways less important than understanding the path to resolving such things in the future, and agreeing on that,” Zack Wieder explains. “No one (including our CEO) has any monopoly on the truth.”
It’s not just Dalio’s openness that makes people comfortable challenging senior leaders. It’s the fact that early in the training, employees are encouraged to question the principles. Rather than waiting for employees to become experienced, Bridgewater reveals that we can start encouraging originality on day one. In most organizations, the socialization period is passive: We’re busy learning the ropes and familiarizing ourselves with the culture. By the time we’re up to speed, we’re already swamped with work and beginning to see the world in the company way. The early period is the perfect time for employees to pay attention to opportunities to improve the culture.
A principle is just some type of event happening over and over again, and how to deal with that event. Life consists of billions of these events, and if you can go from those billions to 250, you can make the connection, ‘Ah, this is one of those ’
he explained that he favored the debate format between believable people, because it was the fastest way to reach the right answer and it enabled them to learn from each other’s reasoning. He had been testing out different cultural practices at Bridgewater for years, and although they’re not controlled experiments, he felt he’d seen enough to have a good sense of what works. He believes that thoughtful disagreement between experts creates an efficient marketplace of ideas, where the best ones emerge over time.
this is my feeling in a nutshell
driven and imaginative, but I was intrigued by three other qualities on Dalio’s list. “Shapers” are independent thinkers: curious, non-conforming, and rebellious. They practice brutal, nonhierarchical honesty. And they act in the face of risk, because their fear of not succeeding exceeds their fear of failing.
Dalio himself fits this description, and the hurdle facing him now is to find another shaper to fill his shoes. If he doesn’t, Bridgewater may vanish like Polaroid’s instant pictures. But Dalio knows that preventing groupthink is about more than the vision of a single leader. The greatest shapers don’t stop at introducing originality into the world. They create cultures that unleash originality in others.
an illustration of why we have and must use diverse capabilities at different times
When we’re not yet committed to a particular action, thinking like a defensive pessimist can be hazardous. Since we don’t have our hearts set on charging ahead, envisioning a dismal failure will only activate anxiety, triggering the stop system and slamming our brakes. By looking on the bright side, we’ll activate enthusiasm and turn on the go system.
But once we’ve settled on a course of action, when anxieties creep in, it’s better to think like a defensive pessimist and confront them directly. In this case instead of attempting to turn worries and doubts into positive emotions, we can shift the go system into higher gear by embracing our fear. Since we’ve set our minds to press forward, envisioning the worst-case scenario enables us to harness anxiety as a source of motivation to prepare and succeed. Neuroscience research suggests that when we’re anxious, the unknown is more terrifying than the negative. As Julie Norem describes it, once people have imagined the worst, “they feel more in control. In some sense, they’ve peaked in anxiety before their actual performance. By the time they get to the event itself they’ve taken care of almost everything.”
fighting pluralistic ignorance
When Popovic trained the Egyptian activists, he shared a story from 1983 of how Chilean miners had mounted a protest against the country’s dictator, Pinochet. Instead of taking the risk of going on strike, they issued a nationwide call for citizens to demonstrate their resistance by turning their lights on and off. People weren’t afraid to do that, and soon they saw that their neighbors weren’t, either. The miners also invited people to start driving slowly. Taxi drivers slowed down; so did bus drivers. Soon, pedestrians were walking in slow motion down the streets and driving their cars and trucks at a glacial pace. In his inspiring book Blueprint for Revolution, Popovic explains that prior to these activities:
People were afraid to talk openly about despising Pinochet, so if you hated the dictator, you might have imagined that you were the only one. Tactics like these, Chileans used to say, made people realize that “we are the many and they are the few.” And the beauty was that there was no risk involved: Not even in North Korea was it illegal for cars to drive slowly
Popovic sees a role for amusement wherever fear runs rampant. Instead of trying to decelerate the stop system, he uses laughter to rev up the go system. When you have no power, it’s a powerful way to convert strong negative emotions into positive ones.
If you want people to modify their behavior, is it better to highlight the benefits of changing or the costs of not changing? According to Peter Salovey, one of the originators of the concept of emotional intelligence and now the president of Yale, it depends on whether they perceive the new behavior as safe or risky. If they think the behavior is safe, we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it—they’ll want to act immediately to obtain those certain gains. But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn’t work. They’re already comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change aren’t attractive, and the stop system kicks in. Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don’t change. Taking a risk is more appealing when they’re faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t. The prospect of a certain loss brings the go system online.
this is the beauty of the plague inc “destroy” model
This “kill the company” exercise is powerful because it reframes a gain-framed activity in terms of losses. When deliberating about innovation opportunities, the leaders weren’t inclined to take risks. When they considered how their competitors could put them out of business, they realized that it was a risk not to innovate. The urgency of innovation was apparent.
To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.”
give and take: a revolutionary approach to success
adam grant 2013
option b: facing adversity, building resilience, and finding joy
sheryl sandberg, adam grant 2017
recollections of childhood bullying and multiple forms of victimization: correlates with psychological functioning among college students
dorothy l. espelage, jun sung hong, sarah mebane 2016
doi.org/10.1007/s11218-016-9352-z
abusive supervision and employee deviance: a multifoci justice perspective
haesang park et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3749-2
the bullied become bullies themselves
phenomenological configurations of workplace bullying: a cluster approach
marinella paciello et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.05.001
New research reveals how frequently being the target of workplace bullying not only leads to health-related problems but can also cause victims to behave badly themselves.
The study, led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) in collaboration with Uninettuno Telematic International University in Italy, found that in some cases this is characterised by a lack of problem solving and high avoidance coping strategies. For example, drinking alcohol when having a problem, experiencing very frequent negative emotions, such as anger, fear and sadness, and high work 'moral disengagement', which refers to the way individuals rationalise their actions and absolve themselves of responsibility for the consequences.
Bullying is one of the major occupational stresses for employees and the effects can compromise their development and health, as well as interfere with the achievement of both personal and professional goals.
It is usually differentiated as work-related and personal-related bullying. The former refers to bullying affecting workload -- for example removing responsibility -- and work processes, such as attacks on someone's professional status. The latter refers to both indirect -- for example exclusion and isolation -- and direct negative behaviour, such as physical abuse.
While previous research has shown a link between being the target of bullying and behavioral problems, for the first time this study identified different configurations of victims by considering not only exposure to and types of bullying, but also health problems and bad behaviour.
The study also examined how these groups differ in terms of negative emotions experienced in relation to work, coping strategies, and moral disengagement.
Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the study was led by Dr Roberta Fida, a senior lecturer in work psychology at UEA's Norwich Business School. She said: "Overall, our results show the need to consider not only exposure to and types of bullying but also their associated consequences. In particular, the findings highlight that victimisation is associated not only with health problems but also with a greater likelihood of not behaving in line with the expected social and organisational norms.
"The greater the intensity of bullying and the more the exposure to different types of bullying, the higher the likelihood of engaging in counterproductive workplace behaviour. Furthermore, the results show that health-related symptoms are not always associated with experiences of bullying. Indeed, while those experiencing limited work-related bullying did not report health problems, those who were not bullied but misbehaved did."
The authors say the importance of emotions needs to be considered in HR and management intervention policies. "Despite the evidence recognising the relevance of emotions when dealing with workplace aggression, this is rarely incorporated into guidelines," said Dr Fida. "In addition, it is essential to also promote behavioural regulation strategies to reduce moral disengagement, as well as negative compensating behaviour, such as drinking more alcohol and taking more risks. Its role in allowing 'otherwise good' people to freely engage in conduct they would generally consider wrong is further confirmed in this study."
The researchers asked 1019 Italian employees about their experiences of workplace bullying, counterproductive behaviour and health symptoms. They were also asked about their coping strategies, negative emotions experienced at work and moral disengagement.
Five groups were identified, one of which includes victims who are the target of work-related bullying and frequently exposed to personal-related bullying, who experience high health problems and misbehaviour (4.4% of the sample).
Another group experience work-related bullying but less frequent personal-related bullying, and show lower health problems and misbehaviour (9.6%). Although they generally use problem-solving strategies, they tend to be overwhelmed by the negative emotions they experience and are not able to control them. They also have a tendency to morally disengage.
A third group have limited exposure to work-related bullying and no exposure to personal-related bullying (22.3%). While not experiencing health-related problems they sometimes engage in counterproductive work behaviour.
A fourth group includes those who are not bullied, but have high health-related symptoms and some misbehaviour (23.9%). The last group identified are not exposed to any bullying, have no health symptoms or behavioral problems (39.9%).
Examination of the groups in relation to individual dimensions highlighted the pivotal role of negative emotions and emotional regulation, independently from exposure to workplace bullying. In more severe cases, moral disengagement and compensatory behaviour play an equally important role, suggesting the weakening of individuals' ability to regulate their behaviour.
abstract The present study represents an innovative contribution combining an articulated description of phenomenological manifestations of bullying with an in-depth picture of individual processes operating within the regulative system. Phenomenological configurations of bullying were identified considering not only exposure to and types of bullying, but also two of its main correlates: health problems and deviant behaviour. Moreover, the study examined how these configurations differ in terms of discrete negative emotions experienced in relation to work, coping strategies, and moral disengagement. Results from a sample of 1019 employee (53.6% women) support a 5-cluster solution: not bullied with no symptoms and no misbehaviour (39.9%); not bullied but with symptoms and some misbehaviour (23.9%); targets exposed to limited work-related negative acts, with no symptoms and some misbehaviour (22.3%); targets of work-related bullying with symptoms and misbehaviour (9.6%); and victims with high symptoms and high misbehaviour (4.4%). Moreover, the examination of clusters in relation to individual dimensions highlights the pivotal role of negative emotions and emotional regulation, independently from exposure to workplace bullying. Further, in more severe cases, moral disengagement and compensatory behaviour play an equally important role suggesting the weakening of individuals' behavioural regulation.
altruistic punishment does not increase with the severity of norm violations in the field
loukas balafoutas, nikos nikiforakis, bettina rockenbach 2016
doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13327
it’s wrongheaded to protect nature with human-style rights
anna grear 2019
aeon.co/ideas/its-wrongheaded-to-protect-nature-with-human-style-rights
i’ll show you
ailee
reasoning from certainty, anti-religious example
venkatesh rao 2017
ribbonfarm.com/2017/12/14/a-glitch-in-the-theocratic-matrix/
not my future? core values and the neural representation of future events
tobias brosch et al. 2018
doi.org/10.3758/s13415-018-0581-9
“We found that with altruistic people, this cerebral zone is activated more forcefully when the subject is confronted with the consequences of a distant future as compared to the near future. By contrast, in an egotistical person, there is no increase in activity between a consequence in the near future and one in the distant future,” says Brosch.
“We could imagine a psychological training that would work on this brain area using projection exercises,” suggests Brosch. “In particular, we could use virtual reality, which would make the tomorrow’s world visible to everyone, bringing human beings closer to the consequences of their actions.”
influence of vmpfc on dmpfc predicts valence-guided belief formation
bojana kuzmanovic et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0266-18.2018
why hate the good guy? antisocial punishment of high cooperators is greater when people compete to be chosen
aleta pleasant, pat barclay 2018
doi.org/10.1177/0956797617752642
“You can imagine within an organization today the attitude, ‘Hey, you’re working too hard and making the rest of us look bad.’ In some organizations people are known for policing how hard others work, to make sure no one is raising the bar from what is expected.”
The same social dynamic may affect actions to protect the environment, which requires acting both individually and cooperatively for the good of all, Barclay added.
People who do nothing for the environment risk damaging their reputation, and may instead choose to attack the motives of environmentalists, he said.
“It is a way of bringing those people back down, and stopping them from looking better than oneself in their attempts to protect the environment or address social inequality,” Barclay said.
“One potential benefit of this research is that by identifying and raising awareness of this competitive social strategy and what it does, maybe it will be less likely to work.”
how evil happens: why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behaviour is triggered?
noga arikha 2018
aeon.co/essays/is-neuroscience-getting-closer-to-explaining-evil-behaviour
why the wealthy back trump and brexit: nationalism has been sold as ‘a war for the little guy’ but it serves the interests of elites
brooke harrington 2019
theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/07/why-the-wealthy-back-trump-and-brexit
antitrust law is the compromise between socialism and capitalism. The idea is that neither the state nor private corporations should amass unchecked power. “I wouldn’t want to live in a socialist country, and I don’t like living in a country where unaccountable capital faces no real check on its power,” says Wu. “The American Revolution was about resistance to centralized power. The Constitution is about resistance. No one entity should have too much power.”
“I’m a believer in the industry of the common man or common woman in charge of their own destiny, a nation of small business, small concerns, people feeling a sense of opportunity, and I think what deadens that is always excessive, concentrated power, whether in government or in private industry.”
“I think we’re in a time where we need to bring back the controls on bigness.”
theverge.com/2018/9/4/17816572/tim-wu-facebook-regulation-interview-curse-of-bigness-antitrust
dignity is delicate: human dignity is a concept with remarkably shallow historical roots. is that why it is so presently endangered?
remy debes 2018
aeon.co/essays/human-dignity-is-an-ideal-with-remarkably-shallow-roots
i bet this one will not replicate
based on “utility maximisation”
the dark core of personality
morten moshagen et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1037/rev0000111
behavioural modification of a social spider by a parasitoid wasp
philippe fernandez-fournier et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1111/een.12698
rivals without a cause? relative performance feedback creates destructive competition despite aligned incentives
jan k. woike, sebastian hafenbrädl 2020
doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2162
Feedback is regarded as a crucial component of a successful business culture. Used correctly, it can enhance performance and teamwork. But how do different types of feedback impact interactions among employees? In a recent study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the IESE Business School in Barcelona investigated which types of feedback tend to lead to cooperative behaviors and which to competitive behaviors. To this end, 112 students of different disciplines and 28 managers, all of whom had at least seven years of professional experience, were invited to participate in a laboratory experiment.
Groups of four participants played variants of a classic public goods game. Each player was given a fixed number of points to invest per round. Over ten rounds, they were asked to decide how many points they wanted to invest in a group project and how many in their own individual project. The rewards for cooperative behavior differed across the two experimental scenarios, impacting participants’ scores and ultimately how much money they were paid. In the first scenario, cooperative behavior on average led to a better score for the group, but to a worse score on the personal level. In the second scenario, cooperation paid off for both the group and the individual. Uncooperative behavior reduced the overall score, but harmed the other players more than it did the participant themself. After each round, the participants received feedback — either just on their own performance (individualistic feedback) or additional feedback on the performance of the group as a whole (joint outcome feedback) or on how they ranked relative to the other players (ranking feedback).
Joint outcome feedback fosters cooperation
The results show that the type of feedback received had a significant impact on participants’ perceptions of the scenario and on whether they behaved cooperatively or competitively. Participants given individual feedback behaved cooperatively in the cooperative scenario and increasingly selfishly in the competitive scenario over the rounds played. Participants who were given feedback on the performance of the group as a whole were generally interested in maintaining cooperation, regardless of the scenario.
Strikingly, participants given ranking feedback perceived even the cooperative scenario as competitive. As a result, they turned down guaranteed financial gains to ensure themselves a higher ranking, even though that ranking was financially irrelevant. They became increasingly competitive over the rounds played, to their own detriment. In contrast, Given ranking feedback, an above-average number of participants developed into competitive players. This group of players was unique in reporting that they wanted to have more than the other players and that they did not trust the others.
Experience does not protect from selfish behaviour
“Ranking feedback drives even experienced managers to act competitively, even in situations where cooperating would unquestionably be in their financial interest. When the focus is on comparison with others, both students and managers are willing to take financial losses for the sole purpose of inflicting even greater losses on others,” says Jan K. Woike, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. “Feedback can distort people’s perceptions of a situation and turn them into competitive situations for no objective reason,” he adds. Managers and students showed similar patterns of behavior in the games. This shows that extensive experience with feedback and with cooperative and competitive situations — as experienced managers can be assumed to have accumulated — does not enable them to deal more constructively with such situations.
The study’s findings can be applied to the question of how companies should provide feedback for their employees. “Publicly comparing employee performance or even, in extreme cases, making bonus payments or contract renewals dependent on employee ranking is counterproductive,” says Sebastian Hafenbrädl from the IESE Business School. Although management practices that sort employees into performance groups along a ranking scale are controversial, they continue to be used, even by well-known international companies in the IT and internet industry. This practice makes internal disputes and uncooperative behavior inevitable. According to the researchers, providing feedback for the whole group — even in heterogeneous teams — may well be a better approach.
abstract Whether people compete or cooperate with each other has consequences for their own performance and that of organizations. To explain why people compete or cooperate, previous research has focused on two main factors: situational outcome structures and personality types. Here, we propose that—above and beyond these two factors—situational cues, such as the format in which people receive feedback, strongly affect whether they act competitively, cooperatively, or individualistically. Results of a laboratory experiment support our theorizing: After receiving ranking feedback, both students and experienced managers treated group situations with cooperative outcome structures as competitive and were in consequence willing to forgo guaranteed financial gains to pursue a—financially irrelevant—better rank. Conversely, in dilemma situations, feedback based on the joint group outcome led to more cooperation than ranking feedback. Our study contributes to research on competition, cooperation, interdependence theory, forced ranking, and the design of information environments.
parental alienating behaviors: an unacknowledged form of family violence
jennifer j. harman et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1037/bul0000175
multisensory logic of infant-directed aggression by males
yoh isogai et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.11.032
The Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences, Dulac is the lead author of a new study that suggests infanticide in mice is triggered by a suite of factors, including the shape of the pup and a specific set of olfactory signals, or pheromones. The study is described in a December 13 paper published in Cell.
In addition to Dulac, the study is co-authored by Yoh Isogai, a former post-doctoral fellow in Dulac's lab who has now launched his own laboratory at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour in London, UK.
"For parents, the cry of a baby is an incredibly powerful stimulus to stop everything they are doing at the moment and care for their infant," Dulac said. "But the fact is that, for some animals, the signal associated with an infant drives this extreme form of aggression. The question we wanted to answer was: What is it that drives infanticide versus parental behavior? And what we found is a complex but fascinating set of features."
Male infanticide was in fact first described in the late 1970s by a Harvard graduate student in the Psychology Department, Sarah Hrdy, who realized that male langurs, a species of primates she was studying in India, often attacked and killed infants from other males.
Hrdy interpreted this aggressive behavior as an instinctive drive to get rid of the progeny of rivals and sire their own offspring. Indeed, although Hrdy's initial description of this shocking behavior in langurs caused some controversy, her observation was quickly expanded to a variety of primates, lions, rodents, and about half of mammalian species, but not humans nor generally monogamous species, in which animals of both sexes participate in the nurturing of infants.
In an effort to understand the triggers for that aggressive behavior, Dulac and colleagues began by targeting the vomeronasal organ, or VNO, a part of the olfactory system used primarily by many mammals to detect pheromones. Earlier studies had shown that blocking VNO signals in mice stopped infanticide, and that animals without a VNO don't engage in the behavior, and instead perform a wide variety of parenting behaviors.
"That suggested that there are two types of signals," Dulac said. "The ones that drive parenting, which do not require pheromones, and those that drive infanticide, which do."
In the process of trying to identify what those infanticidal signals might be, Dulac and colleagues found that male mice would attack even dead pups -- suggesting that movement or even temperature weren't key factors in their aggression.
What did turn out to be significant, Dulac said, was shape.
"We made silicone casts of pups and then put chemicals on them to test whether males would attack it," she said. "The first was a perfect cast of a pup, and if we put salivary gland extract of a pup on it, males would attack."
In subsequent test, involving a plain brick of silicone and a blob shape that somewhat resembled a pup, there were no attacks. Interestingly, however, when researchers attached legs and a tail to the brick shape, male did attack the dummy.
Armed with that information, Dulac and colleagues set to work pinpointing the chemical cues that set off the attacks by first identifying seven pheromone receptors which are expressed by the VNO.
"What we found was that, actually, none of them are specific to pups," Dulac said. "That is both surprising and not surprising. It's surprising because we know that receptors for pheromones are typically extraordinarily specific.
"But it's not surprising because when we thought about it, if there were receptors specific to pups, it would mean there are chemicals that specifically identify pups, for them to be killed" she continued. "Evolutionarily speaking, why would a pup emit a chemical that tells a male, 'I'm a pup, you need to attack me?' The pups actually want to get rid of those cues and become a blank canvas, chemically-speaking."
What Dulac and colleagues found was that, rather than detect chemical cues that are specific to pups, attacking males are actually responding to a mix of shared maternal and infant cues.
"What happens is Mom licks the pup and they share a lot of chemical signals," Dulac said. "We identified two in particular -- one of them is a specific salivary protein. But the other is hemoglobin. There is bleeding that occurs during birth, and it turns out that this signal stays around for several weeks, betraying the presence of newborn infants."
The hemoglobin signal might be particularly important, Dulac added, because when pups bleed during an attack, the signal will get stronger, amplifying the aggression of the male.
On their own, Dulac said, those signals -- both the shape information and the chemical signals -- don't provoke attacks, but taken together, those allow males to form a full picture of their surroundings and identify pups.
Ultimately, she said, the study not only provides a detailed picture of the underpinnings of a controversial natural behavior, but also highlights the complex, push-and-pull relationship between pups and potentially aggressive males.
"The pup has two needs -- it needs to be recognized to be nurtured and it needs to not be recognized so it won't be attacked," Dulac said. "So there are these conflicting needs...the way the system has evolved, it's probably a tug of war where, chemically, the pup is trying to be a blank slate, but males detect chemicals associated with maternity and the physical traits of the pups."
abstract •Reconstituted pup shape and chemosignals trigger aggression by virgin males
•Repertoire of seven VNO receptors activated by pups is also stimulated by adult cues
•Deletion of receptors to salivary protein and hemoglobin shows role in pup attack
•Complex recognition involves pup’s shape and chemosignals from infants and parents
Newborn mice emit signals that promote parenting from mothers and fathers but trigger aggressive responses from virgin males. Although pup-directed attacks by males require vomeronasal function, the specific infant cues that elicit this behavior are unknown. We developed a behavioral paradigm based on reconstituted pup cues and showed that discrete infant morphological features combined with salivary chemosignals elicit robust male aggression. Seven vomeronasal receptors were identified based on infant-mediated activity, and the involvement of two receptors, Vmn2r65 and Vmn2r88, in infant-directed aggression was demonstrated by genetic deletion. Using the activation of these receptors as readouts for biochemical fractionation, we isolated two pheromonal compounds, the submandibular gland protein C and hemoglobins. Unexpectedly, none of the identified vomeronasal receptors and associated cues were specific to pups. Thus, infant-mediated aggression by virgin males relies on the recognition of pup’s physical traits in addition to parental and infant chemical cues.
don’t touch me
ailee
eng sub live
youtube
who goes nazi?
dorothy thompson 1941
harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
geographies of organized hate in america: a regional analysis
richard m. medina et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1411247
violent proletarianisation: social murder, the reserve army of labour and social security ‘austerity’ in britain
chris grover 2018
doi.org/10.1177/0261018318816932
Dr Chris Grover, who heads the University's Sociology Department, says austerity can be understood as a form of structural violence, violence that is built into society and is expressed in unequal power and unequal life chances, as it is deepens inequalities and injustices, and creates even more poverty.
The article, 'Violent proletarianisation: social murder, the reserve army of labour and social security 'austerity' in Britain', suggests that as a result of the violence of austerity working class people face harm to their physical and mental wellbeing and in some instances are 'socially murdered'.
Dr Grover uses the article to call on the Government for change and action.
He refers to the process as 'violent proletarianisation' (the idea that violent austerity is aimed at forcing people to do paid work, rather than being reliant upon benefits).
"To address violent proletarianisation what is required is not the tweaking of existing policies but fundamental change that removes the economic need for people to work for the lowest wages that employers can get away with paying," says Dr Grover.
Published in the journal, Critical Social Policy, Dr Grover gives examples of where social security austerity has led to a range of harms:
an additional six suicides for every 10,000 work capability assessments done;
increasing number of people Britain dying of malnutrition
increasing numbers of homeless people dying on the streets or in hostels
The article argues that austerity, the difficult economic conditions created by Government by cutting back on public spending, has brought cuts and damaging changes to social security policy meaning Britain has fallen victim to a brutal approach to forcing people to do low paid work.
"The violence takes two forms," says Dr Grover. "First it involves further economic hardship of already income-poor people.
"It causes social inequalities and injustices in the short term and, in the longer term.
"Second, the poverty that violent proletarianisation creates is both known and avoidable."
Dr Grover adds that only by fundamentally rethinking current social security policy can change that protects the poorest people be made.
abstract This article examines social security policy for working age people in Britain in the ‘age of austerity’. Drawing upon critical approaches to understanding social policy and violence, the article argues that severe cuts to benefits and the ratcheting up of conditionality for, and the sanctioning of, benefit recipients can be understood as ‘violent proletarianisation’ – using socio-economic inequality and injustice to force the commodification of labour power, and a consequential creation of diswelfares that are known and avoidable. The article suggests that violent proletarianisation is a contradictory process, one that helps constitute the working class, but in a way that socially murders some of its reserve army members.
moral self-licensing may be at the heart of abusive behaviour
a little good is good enough: ethical consumption, cheap excuses, and moral self-licensing
jannis engel, nora szech 2020
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227036
“Persons shopping consciously in one respect often consider this a blank check to ignore other values. A little good appears to be good enough. An example to illustrate this is the consumer who shops at the organic food supermarket and then drives home in his or her SUV. This probably happens entirely without a bad conscience.”
Pure Organic Cotton Wins over Work Conditions
The economist carried out a three-stage experiment with 200 participants: In the first stage, a computer randomly determines whether the participants have to decide between towels made of conventional cotton and towels made of pure organic cotton. In the second stage, the test persons are to make their choice with respect to production: No money is paid when they decide in favor of products produced under certified, ethical work conditions. They are granted a monetary reward, by contrast, when work conditions of tailors are conventional. “The participants could choose among various amounts of money and had to decide whether they preferred money and a conventionally produced towel or whether they receive no additional money, but a towel produced in compliance with minimum ethical standards for tailors,” Szech says. The result: Participants are far less inclined to refuse money for safe work conditions, if their towel is made of pure organic cotton. “We found that test persons deciding in favor of pure organic cotton towels were far less willing to pay for safe work standards,” Szech says. “Their decision in favor of the better material was used as a ‘moral license’ to no longer consider a second ethical aspect. A single, minor improvement of the product is sufficient to develop a high moral self-conception and to consider oneself an ethically acting person.”
”Indulgence Effect” Persists after the Purchase
This behavior is not limited to the concrete purchasing situation or the time of purchase. In the third stage of her experiment, Szech found that participants used their decision in favor of pure organic cotton even thirty minutes later as an excuse for being more selfish. Test persons were given the opportunity to donate part of their participation premium to refugees from a local refugee camp. “We found that test persons with a towel made of pure organic cotton donated less often than persons preferring a towel made of conventional cotton,” Szech says. “The ethically better material, hence, was used to justify smaller donations to people in need.”
However, the acting persons probably are not aware of their behavior. For this reason, a group of uninvolved persons was asked to assess how the towel purchasers would decide. “The study revealed that this control group completely overlooked the impact of moral excuses and indulgence effects,” Szech points out. Third persons potentially follow another moral compass and consider the stages of the experiment different, not related situations. “For this reason, they do not expect the test persons to use pure organic cotton as an excuse for a less moral behavior at another point.”
According to Szech, the results may trigger social and political debates. As consumers unconsciously react to indulgence effects, companies might use the impacts of moral self-licensing to provide customers with excuses and to influence the purchasing decision. This might also help mask own ethical misconduct. “Politics and the society should know these mechanisms in order to respond accordingly,” Szech summarizes.
abstract This paper explores the role of cheap excuses in product choice. If agents feel that they fulfill one ethical aspect, they may care less about other independent ethical facets within product choice. Choosing a product that fulfills one ethical aspect may then suffice for maintaining a high moral self-image in agents and render it easier to ignore other ethically relevant aspects they would otherwise care about more. The use of such cheap excuses could thus lead to a “static moral self-licensing” effect, and this would extend the logic of the well-known dynamic moral self-licensing. Our experimental study provides empirical evidence that the static counterpart of moral self-licensing exists. Furthermore, effects spill over to unrelated, ethically relevant contexts later in time. Thus, static moral self-licensing and dynamic moral self-licensing can exist next to each other. However, it is critical that agents do not feel that they fulfilled an ethical criterion out of sheer luck, that is, agents need some room so that they can attribute the ethical improvement at least partly to themselves. Outsiders, although monetarily incentivized for correct estimates, are completely oblivious to the effects of moral self-licensing, both static and dynamic.
estimated car cost as a predictor of driver yielding behaviors for pedestrians
courtney coughenour et al. 2020
doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2020.100831
Drivers on a whole aren’t all that great at stopping for pedestrians waiting at crosswalks: Of 461 cars that researchers examined, only 28 percent yielded. But the cost of the car was a significant predictor of driver yielding, with the odds that they’ll stop decreasing by 3 percent per $1,000 increase in the car’s value. Researchers estimated the cost of each car using pricing categories from Kelley Blue Book.
“It says that pedestrians are facing some challenges when it comes to safety, and it’s really concerning,” said lead author and UNLV public health professor Courtney Coughenour.
“Drivers need to be made aware that they legally have to yield. It’s hard to say whether they’re not yielding because they don’t know the laws or because they don’t want to yield,” Coughenour said. “Further study is needed to examine that. Until then, the bigger thing is driver education.”
The study, which analyzed video data from an earlier UNLV study, also found that motorists overall yielded less frequently for men and people of color waiting at mid-block crosswalks than for women and whites. It is also consistent with findings from similar studies on the topics of driver yielding behaviors associated with social class, race, and gender.
abstract •We examined driver yielding behavior by pedestrian skin color, gender, and cost of car.
•The overall driver yielding rate for pedestrians in a midblock crosswalk was about 28%.
•Drivers of higher cost cars were less likely to yield to pedestrians at a midblock crosswalk.
•Interventions should educate drivers of their responsibility to yield to pedestrians.
Pedestrian crashes are not equitably distributed; people of color and males are overburdened. The aim of this study was to examine if driver yielding behavior differed based on gender and skin color of the pedestrian, and the estimated car cost at two midblock crosswalks in the Las Vegas metropolitan area.
Methods
One white and one black female and one white and one black male crossed the intersection in a similar, prescribed manner. Crossings were video recorded. Driver yielding behavior was documented. The cost of car was estimated by cross referencing manufacturing websites and averaging the high and low values of estimated private sale. Generalized linear mixed model was applied, nesting within crossing attempt and within streets.
Results
Of 461 cars, 27.98% yielded to pedestrians. Cars yielded more frequently for females (31.33%) and whites (31.17%) compared to males (24.06%) and non-whites (24.78%). Cost of car was a significant predictor of driver yielding (OR = 0.97; p = 0.0307); odds of yielding decreased 3% per $1000 increase.
Discussion
Driver yielding differed by cost of cars. Given previous findings, future research is needed to further examine gender and racial disparities in pedestrian crashes. Findings are significant for public health and pedestrian safety, especially given the upward trend in crash rates.
assholes: a theory
aaron james 2014
dog whistle politics: how coded racial appeals have reinvented racism and wrecked the middle class
ian haney lópez 2015
end of an era: how china’s authoritarian revival is undermining its rise
carl minzner 2018toreadnext
machiavellianism: the psychology of manipulation
tamás bereczkei 2018 to read next
new power: how power works in our hyperconnected world—and how to make it work for you
henry timms 2018
the neuroscientist who lost her mind: my tale of madness and recovery
barbara lipska 2018 to read next
world according to monsanto
marie-monique robin 2018
we were eight years in power: an american tragedy
ta-nehisi coates 2017
how democracies die
steven levitsky, daniel ziblatt 2018
randomistas: how radical researchers changed our world
andrew leigh 2018
the road to unfreedom: russia, europe, america
timothy snyder 2018
trace: memory, history, race and the american land
lauret savoy 2015
manipulation: a guide to mind control techniques, stealth persuasion, and dark psychology secrets
deborah weiss 2020
the art of the lie: how the manipulation of language affects our minds
marcel danesi 2020
the new psychology of leadership: identity, influence and power
alexander haslam, stephen d. reicher, michael j. platow 2010
human hacking: win friends, influence people, and leave them better off for having met you
christopher hadnagy 2021
fiction
waking gods
sylvain neuvel 2016
sleeping giants
sylvain neuvel 2017
only human
sylvain neuvel 2018
exo
fonda lee 2017
cross fire
fonda lee 2018
zed
joanna kavenna 2019
fiction not yet read
famous men who never lived
k chess 2019
the shining wall
melissa ferguson 2019
commons
the tragedy of the commons is a problem with no solution, literally. because garrett hardin defines commons as a place where all can do anything without restriction or responsibility. thus it is not surprising that he finds that what will happen in such a place is exactly as he defines it.
all refuted yet the paper resonates because it has some truth. people are using the earth as a commons not because they rationally justify it to themselves, but because they wish not to understand that they should act differently. the form of why they should act differently is given by hardin as coercion.
extractive relations rather than sharing relations may be what lead to tragedy of commons in the first place. instead of believing good will come back, we create the bad with each extraction and exploitation.
living within limits: ecology, economics, and population taboos
garrett hardin 1993 not yet read
note that hardin is popular with white nationalist movements as he advocated coercive birth control and was against immigration
no tragedy on the commons
susan jane buck cox 1985
doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics1985716
No Tragedy on the Commons
Susan Jane Buck Cox* 1985
The historical antecedents of Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” are generally understood to lie in the common grazing lands of medieval and post–medieval England. The concept of the commons current in medieval England is significantly different from the modern concept: the English common was not available to the general public but rather only to certain individuals who inherited or were granted the right to use it, and use of the common even by these people was not unregulated. The types and in some cases the numbers of animals each tenant could pasture were limited, based at least partly on a recognition of the limited carrying capacity of the land. The decline of the commons system was the result of a variety of factors having little to do with the system’s inherent worth. Among these factors were widespread abuse of the rules governing the commons, land “reforms” chiefly designed to increase the holdings of a few landowners, improved agricultural techniques. and the effects of the industrial revolution. Thus, the traditional commons system is not an example of an inherently flawed land–use policy. as is wrdely supposed. but of a policy which succeeded admirably in its time.
INTRODUCTION
In 1951, Josephine Tey published her classic detective story, Daughter of Time. In this defense of Richard III, she coined the term Tonypandy which is the regrettable situation which occurs when a historical event is reported and memorialized inaccurately but consistently until the resulting fiction is believed to be the truth.1 History is not the only field in which Tonypandy occurs. A prime example of Tonypandy in the field of economics is the “tragedy of the commons.”
Academics are often too facile in labeling an article as “seminal,” but Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” deserves the accolade.2 The article has been reprinted over fifty times,3 and entire books have been devoted to exploring the meaning and implications of Hardin’s memorable title.4 The phrase “tragedy of the commons” has slipped into common parlance at colleges and universities and is rapidly becoming public property.5 Discussion of the inevitability of such a tragedy is the lawful prey of economists, sociologists, philosophers, and theologians. Certainly we cannot deny that the phenomenon exists: the ruination of a limited resource when confronted with unlimited access by an expanding population. Where, then, lies Tonypandy in the tragedy of the commons?
Although the tragedy of the commons may occur, that it regularly occurred on the common lands of medieval and post–medieval England is not true; the historical antecedents of the tragedy of the commons as developed by Hardin and others following the 1968 article, and as commonly understood by students and professors, are inaccurate.6
As a first step toward the development of an accurate understanding of the commons I contrast Hardin’s definition with the traditional legal understanding of the term as it applies to medieval England. I then discuss the management of the English commons, the abuses to which they were subjected. and the factors which led to their inevitable decline. This decline was not the result of unlimited access, but rather was the result of the historical forces of the industrial revolution, agrarian reform, and improved agricultural practices.
[1] Tonypandy was a Welsh mining town where, in 1910. Winston Churchill sent unarmed London policemen to quell rioting strikers. The version popularly believed in Wales is that govemment troops shot Welsh miners who were striking for their workers’ rights. In precise Tey–usage, _Tonypandy_ exists when such a fiction is allowed to persist even by those people who know better. An example of Tonypandy In American history is the Boston Massacre. Josephine Tey. _Daughter of Time_ (New York: Macmillan. l951).
[2] Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” _Science_ 162 (1968): 1243–48.
[3] Gordon Foxall. “A Note on the Management of ‘Commons’,” _Journal of Agricultural Economics_ 30 (1979): 55.
[4] For example, Garrett Hardin and John Baden. eds., _Managing the Commons_ (San Francisco: Freeman, 1977)
[6] This is not to imply that the tragedy of the commons _never_ occurred in those centuries: records are incomplete and to assert positively that something never occurred is to court contradiction and exposure.
“THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS” DEFINED
Hardin credits William Forster Lloyd with providing the impetus to the commons concept. In 1832, in the midst of the Enclosure Acts, Lloyd published Two Lectures on the Checks to Population in which he describes the situation existing when a resource is held in common:
Again, suppose two persons to have a common purse, to which each may freely resort. The ordinary source of motive for economy is a foresight of the diminution in the means of future enjoyment depending on each act of present expenditure. If a man takes a guinea out of his own purse, the remainder, which he can spend afterwards, is diminished by a guinea. But not so, if he takes it from a fund, to which he and another have an equal right of access. The loss falling upon both, he spends a guinea with as little consideration as he would use in spending half a guinea, were the fund divided. Each determines his expenditure as if the whole of the joint stock were his own. Consequently, in a multitude of partners, where the diminution effected by each separate act of expenditure is insensible the motive for economy entirely vanishes.[7]
Applying his description directly to common land. Lloyd asks “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare–worn and cropped so differently from the adjoining enclosures?” He answers as follows:
In an enclosed pasture, there is a point of saturation, if I may so call it. (by which, I mean a barrier depending on considerations of interest), beyond which no prudent man will add to his stock. In a common, also, there is in like manner a point of saturation. But the position of the point in the two cases is obviously different. Were a number of adjoining pastures, already fully stocked, to be at once thrown open, and converted into one vast common, the position of the point of saturation would immediately be changed. The stock would be increased, and would be made to press much more forcibly against the means of subsistence.[8]
Although Lloyd’s language seems to point unmistakably to eighteenth and nineteenth–century British commons and enclosures, Hardin himself is careful in his initial article to avoid such a categorization. His language is relatively free of cultural phenomena:
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long–desired goal of social stability becomes a reality … the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another … But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.[9]
Examples offered by Hardin of the tragedy in operation are the national rangelands in the western United States, American national parks, and environmental pollution; the purpose of his article is to dramatize the dangers of uncontrolled human reproduction.
Later references to Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, however, reflect a more explicit historical perspective. In 1977 Hardin used allusions to the Enclosure Acts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to explain how the tragedy might be cured.10 In 1969, Beryl Crowe wrote:
The commons is a fundamental social institution that has a history going back through our own colonial experience to a body of English common law which antedates the Roman conquest. That law recognized that in societies there are some environmental objects which have never been, and should never be, exclusively appropriated to any individual or group of indivrduals. In England the classic example of the commons is the pasturage set aside for public use, and the “tragedy of the commons” to which Hardin refers was a tragedy of overgrazing and lack of care and fertilization which resulted in erosion and underproduction so destructive that there developed in the late 19th century an enclosure movement.[11]
Hardin included Crowe’s article in his 1977 anthology Managing the Commons; a similiar illustration is used in Robert Bish’s article “Environmental Resource Management: Public or Private,” anthologized in the same volume. Bish illustrates the commons dilemma through the “enclosure movement in medieval England” during which the “stronger lords and nobles undertook to exclude peasant flocks from what had formerly been common land,” thus saving the commons from “overgrazing and destruction of the pasturage.”12
Perhaps the most extensive anglicization of the commons is found in This Endangered Planet by Richard Falk. He writes that Hardin “has evolved an effective metaphor of [the paradox of aggregation] from a historical experience, the destruction of the common pastures of English country towns in the 1700s and 1800s through overgrazing herds.”13
Further examples can be found, almost ad infinitum and certainly ad nauseum. Moreover, questioning of graduate students in economics or planning or public administration elicits the same historical background on the tragedy of the commons as described by Falk. Such evidence suggests that there is a general impression among most people today that the tragedy was a regular occurrence on the common lands of the villages in medieval and post–medieval England—a belief which, despite its wide acceptance as fact, is historically false.
[7] William Forster Lloyd _Two Lectures on the Check to Population, delivered before the University of Oxford, in Michaelmas Term 1832_, condensed, edited, and reprintted as “On the Checks to Population,” in Hardin and Baden, _Managing the Commons_, pp. 8–15. The above quotation is from p. 9.
[8] lbid., p. 11.
[9] Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of The Commons,” in Hardin and Baden,
Managing the Commons, p. 20.
10 Garrett Hardin, “Denial and Disguise,” in Hardin and Baden, Managing the Commons, pp. 45–52. Hardin acknowledges the injustice of the Enclosure Acts but applauds the increase in agricultural productivity that they entailed.
11 Beryl Crowe, “The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited,” in Hardin and Baden, Managing the Commons, pp. 54–55.
12 Robert Bish, “Environmental Resource Management,” in Hardin and Baden, Managing the Commons, p. 221.
THE COMMONS DEFINED
In order to dispel the myth of the tragedy of the commons, we must first discover the definition of commons as it was understood in medieval England. The legal right of common is “a right which one or more persons have to take or use some portion of that which another’s soil produces . . . and is a fight to part of the profits of the soil, and to part only, the right of the soil lying with another and not with the person who claims common.”14 This right is an ancient one: “Recent archaelogical and historical work indicates that in many places nucleated villages did not come into being until the ninth, tenth, or even the eleventh centuries … But whatever their origins, the classic common field system probably developed with them …”15 These rights “were not something specifically granted by a generous landlord, but were the residue of rights that were much more extensive, rights that are in all probability older than the modern conception of private property. They probably antedate the idea of private property in land, and are therefore of vast antiquity.”16 The right of common was a right granted to specific persons because these persons had some prior claim to the land or because the actual owner of the land granted them that right in return for their services.
Our modem–day notions of common as a public right does not accurately describe the medieval commons. Gonner wrote in 1912:
[Common] now is taken as denoting the claims, somewhat vague and precarious, of the public as against those holding the land and engaged in its cultivation. But this finds no sanction in a time when over very many, if not most, cultivated districts common was a result of claim to land, and formed a necessary condition of its proper management … The early rights of common were anything but vague, and were invariably vested in those employed in cultivation or their representatives; they were anything rather than a general claim on the part of the public … [Common rights] were a necessary element in the agricultural system, they were involved in the ownership and cultivation of the land, and they were largely the source of the profits obtained from the land and the means of rendering its cultivation effective.[17]
Clearly our use of common to describe public access to national parks or to deep–sea fishing is at variance with the original use of the term.
Gonner lists four primary types of common: common of pasture, common of estover, common of turbary, and common of piscary. The common of pasture, the type with which this paper is concemed. is divided into two kinds: common appendant, and common appurtenant.18
Common appendant is the right of the villagers who owned their own land within the manor to feed their animals used in agriculture upon the lord’s “waste,” i.e., that land within the borders of the lord’s domain that was not under cultivation.19 This right was a right attached to the land the freehold tenant actually cultivated.20 In strict theory, common appendant was limited to beasts needed for agriculture: oxen and horses to plow, sheep and cows to manure—in practice, beasts Ievant and couchant that the arable land could support in winter. The lord’s waste was used for grazing during the growing season when the tenant’s land was under cultivation. In turn, during the winter the tenant used his own land and the harvests of hay to support his livestock. Thus, he was not permitted to put more animals on the lord’s land in summer than his own land could feed for the winter. To do otherwise would be to abuse the lord‘s pasture.21
Common appurtenant, in contrast, originated either from a grant by the lord to a villager or by “peaceful, uninterrupted and known usage.”22 It could be granted to both tenants of the manor and to outsiders, and it was occasionally extended to include animals such as “swine, goats, and even geese.”[23]
We thus have a picture of the legal status of a common. Either by common–law right as freehold tenant or through usage and grants, a villager was entitled to pasture limited numbers of specific animals on the lord’s waste. It is important to note that even from the beginning, the use of the common was not unrestricted: “Common pasture of stubble and fallow was a feature of open–field husbandry from the start … and with it went communal control.”[24] The English common was not available to the general public but was only available to certain individuals who owned or were granted the right to use it. Use of the common even by these people was not unregulated. The types and in some cases the numbers of animals each tenant could pasture were limited, based at least partly on a recognition of the limited carrying capacity of the land.
[13] Richard A. Falk. _This Endangered Planet_ (New York: Random, 1971). p. 48.
[14] E. C. K. Gonner. _Common Land and lnclosure_, 2nd ed. (London: Cass, 1966). The first portion of this quote is quoted by Gonner without attribution. This is not, however, an outmoded or esoteric definition: basic American college dictionaries provide the same definition.
[15] C. C. Taylor. “Archaeology and the Origins of Open–field Agriculture.” in Trever Rowley, ed., _The Origins of Open–field Agriculture_ (London: Groom Helm. 1981), p. 21. See also Della Hooke. “Open–field Agriculture—Evidence from the Pre–Conquest Charters of the West Midlands,” ibid., p. 58: “land held in common by a community is clearly in evidence by the tenth century …”
[16] W. G. Hoskins and L. Dudley Stamp, _The Common Lands of England and Wales_ (London: Collins, 1965). p. 6.
[17] Gonner, _Common Land_. pp. 3–4.
[18] lbid., pp 8–15 _Piscary_ is the right to fish, _turbary_ to cut peat or turf for fuel. Common of estover is the right to take wood from the forest or waste for the repair of farm equipment (“plough bote”), for the repair of gates, fences, and other barriers (“hedge bote” or “hay bote”), and for the repair of the house or for fuel (“house bote”) Other forms of common of pasture, such as common in grass, developed at a later period and do not concern us here.
[19] lbid., p. 8.
[20] Edward Scrutton, _Commons and Common Fields_ (1887: reprint ed., New York: Lenox Hill, 1970), p. 42.
[21] Gonner, _Common Land_. p. 9.
[22] Ibid., p. 10.
[23] lbid.
THE MANAGEMENT OF THE COMMONS
The earliest records for communal farming regulations are the manor court rolls of the mid–thirteenth century.[25] The earliest record for a village meeting is the fourteenth century. Joan Thirsk writes:
From these dates the evidence points unequivocally to the autonomy of village communities in determing the form of, and the rules governing their field system … ln Villages which possessed no more than one manor, matters were agreed in the manorial court, and the decisions sometimes, but not always, recorded on the court roll. Decisions affecting villages which shared the use of commons were taken at the court of the chief lord, at which all the villages were represented. In villages where more than one manor existed, agreement might be reached at a village meeting at which all tenants and lords were present or represented.[26]
Similarly, the author of a Northumberland survey of 1664, after naming the manorial fields, wrote of the regulatory process:
Which said fields, after the corns and hay are off, are laid open, and eaten, sometimes with, sometimes without, stint. But how many beasts and sheep everie tenement may keep is uncertain and left as ye Neighbors may agree among themselves; and that severall parcels of ye common fields have been enclosed.[27]
Such agreements among the neighbors are recorded in the village bylaws. These bylaws “emphasize the degree to which … agricultural practice was directed and controlled by an assembly of cultivators, the manorial court, who coordinated and regulated the season–by–season activities of the whole community. Arable and meadowland were normally thrown open for common pasturing by the stock of all the commoners after harvest and in fallow times, and this necessitated some rules about cropping, fencing, and grazing beasts. Similarly, all the cultivators of the intermixed strips enjoyed common pasturage in the waste, and in addition, the rights to gather timber, peat and other commodities were essential concomitants of the possession of arable and meadow shares.”[28] There was, however, an extraordinary diversity of bylaws among the various regions of England. In one Lincolnshire fenland village, for example, “strangers coming into the town but having no land could enjoy free common for their cattle for one year. After that they had to abide by the rules governing all other inhabitants. These were generous provisions that reflected the abundance of grazing.”[29] In contrast, in 1440, the village of Launton decreed that “any tenant who has a parcel of meadow in East Brokemede I shall not mow there now or ever until his neighbors are agreed under pain of 3s. 4d.,”[30] a clear reflection of the need to conserve and to regulate. What is important to note here is the detail with which the open fields were regulated. Ault notes that bylaws covered such points as where field workers were paid (at the granary rather than in the field, where payment in kind might lead to accusations of theft) and at what age boys could begin to pasture sheep on the common (sixteen). The commons were carefully and painstakingly regulated, and those instancesl in which the common deteriorated were most often due to lawbreaking and to oppression of the poorer tenant rather than to egoistic abuse of a common resource.
[24] W. O. Ault, _Open–field Farming in Medieval England_ (London: Allen and Unwin. I972), p. 17.
[25] lbid., p. 18. Ault gives 1246 as the earliest manor court rolls: the earliest manorial reeve’s accounts are for 1208–9.
[26] Joan Thirsk, “Field Systems of the East Midlands,” in Alan R. H. Baker and Robin A. Butlin, eds., _Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1973), p. 232.
[27] Northumberland County History. vol. 10, 1914, p. 140: quoted in R A. Butlin, “Field Systems of Northumberland and Durham,” in Baker and Butlin, _Studies_, pp. 122–23. The “stinting” referred to is a formal allocation of the number and type of beast that could be grazed on the waste and is discussed in more detail below.
[28] B. K. Roberts, “Field Systems of the West Midlands,“ in Baker and Butlin, _Studies_, p. 199.
[29] Thirsk, “Field Systems,” p. 251.
[30] Westminster Abbey Muniments, 1550; quoted in Ault, _Open–field Farmmg, p. 26.
ABUSES OF THE COMMONS
The commons were subject to several forms of abuse. Often the regulations governing the commons were broken, as when greedy farmers took in unauthorized animals , or when wealthy landowners or squatters took grazing to which they were not entitled because of lack of agreement among the tenants. The common thread in these abuses is their illegality.
One of the methods of controlling grazing was “stinting,” allocating the number and type of beast that could be grazed on the waste. Stinting developed more from lack of winter feed when stock was pastured on the arable land than from a desire to protect the summer grazing. This summer grazing “was as carefully controlled as the manorial courts could make it.”[31] The quality of the waste and its size, which could vary from fifty to over three hundred acres,[32] dictated in great part the size of the stints, although in some places other solutions to overgrazing were found. For example, in the 1570s, the grass on Holland Fen was overgrazed because “local people had started taking in large numbers of strangers’ cattle, sheep, and horses with their own … A stint was suggested but not adopted.”[33] “Instead the manorial lord who had brovage rights—an acknowledged right appertaining to lords of manors of taking in strangers’ animals–—and who was probably among the worst offenders in overcharging the common, agreed to surrender his rights in return for an enclosure of 480 acres of fenland.”[34] In Westmorland in 1695, “Occasionally these stinting rules were broken, resulting in the ‘Townfield … being sore abused and misorderly eaten.’ The remedy was to employ a pounder who had to make sure the stints were carefully maintained.”[35] Hence, we have one abuse of the common: simple lawbreaking which was remedied by resort to the law.
A similar problem with a less happy solution occurred when the wealthier landholders took advantage of the poorer tenants. In the early sixteenth century, Fitzherbert noted that the rich man benefited from overcharging the common.[36] According to Gonner, it was “pointed out alike in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the poor owning rights may be largely kept out of their rights by the action of large farmers who exceed their rights and thus surcharge the common to the detriment of all, or by the lack of winter feed in the absence of which summer grazing could be of little worth. Again, jobbers would hire cottages in order to obtain, as it were, a right of entry to the common and then proceed to eat up the common; or new cottages would spring up near the common, and though legally without rights, would encroach in practice on those to whom the common really belonged.”[37] There was little redress: “These abuses used formerly to be strictly observed at the Court Baron, but of late years (ca. 1727] have been little regarded, except in some manors where the steward would present them that offended, and the more when he found the substantial tenants had agreed together not to present one another, and to crush their poorer tenants that should offer to do it.”[38] The unfortunate poor tenant was denied his remedy at law for the illegal abuses of the more powerful landowners. The ultimate conclusion was the enclosure of the common land, most effective in the parliamentary enclosure acts from 1720 to 1880.[39] Such change was perhaps inevitable, but it is social change and the perennial exploitation of the poor by the less poor rather than Hardin’s tragedy.[40]
A third problem arose on unstinted land. In the sixteenth century the “unstinted common was almost invariably overburdened … This state of things was largely to the advantage of rich commoners or the lord of the manor, who got together large flocks and herds and pastured them in the common lands to the detriment of the poorer commoners, who, unlike them, could do little in the way of providing winter feed, and now found themselves ousted even from their slender privileges in the commons.”[41] Similarly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Yorkshire, “there were some townships (especially those bordering the moorlands) where at least part of the pasture was not stinted. Here the owners of common rights could legally depasture only those animals that could be supported in winter by the fodder produced on the farm, but this limitation was frequently ignored. Then the pasture became overgrazed and of little value …”[42] By 1800 in the East Riding, “there was a good deal of overstocking. Some of the commons were stinted but others were not, and it was here that overstocking occurred. Many of the commons were frequently waterlogged when a small expenditure would have drained them, but what was everyone’s business was nobody’s business.”[43] Of course, by 1800 parliamentary enclosure was well under way and this report from East Riding was made by an employee of the newly formed board of agriculture, established in response to a “widespread campaign for the more effective use of the land–resources of the country, with particular reference to the large areas of remaining open fields and to the vast areas of common lands and wastes.”[44] Sponsored by wealthy landowners, the land reform was frequently no more than a sophisticated land–grab, justified in part by the admittedly striking increase in productivity of enclosed common land.
[31] G. Elliott, “Field Systems of Northwest England,” in Baker and Butin, _Studies_. p. 67. As an example, in Denwick in 1567 the stint of “each husbandland was 6 old beasts above two years old. 37 sheep above one year old besides lambs and other young cattle, four pigs above one year old, two geese and one horse or mare” (Butlin, “Field Systems,” p. 138).
[32] “Introduction,” Baker and Butlin, _Studies_. p. 42.
[33] Thirsk, “Field Systems,“ p 255. These fens had unique rights of common. Thirsk (p. 251) writes: “The great size of the fens created special difficulties In ensuring that all commoners had their fair share and none attempted to take more than the rest: so a special restriction applied here: everyone had a fixed place in the fen when he exercised his right of common. When he died, his place (or ‘labour’ as it was called) passed to his wife, if she claimed it, or if not, to the first man who ‘manured’ it, i.e. expended his labour upon it. No one could sell his ‘labour’ to another, but exchanges were permitted so long as public notice was given.”
[34] lbid., p. 255.
[35] Elliott, “Field Systems,” p. 83. The internal quote is from the Westmorland Record office. Musgrave D. P., Court Rolls 1695.
[36] Scrutton, _Commons_, p. 122.
[37] Gonner, _Common Land_, p. 306.
[38] Edward Lawrence, _Duty of a Steward_ (1727): quoted by Scrutton. _Commons_. p. 123.
[39] Roberts, “Field Systems.” p. 190.
[40] A classic example of exploitation is the Statute of Merton (1236) which allowed “chief tenants to assart land for their own or their villeins’ exclusive use, provided that ‘sufficient’ common land was left for the needs of the village community.” June A. Sheppard. “Field Systems of Yorkshire,” in Baker and Butlin, _Studies_. pp. 176–77.
[41] Gonner, _Common Land_, p. 103.
[42] Sheppard, “Field Systems,” p. 157.
[43] Hoskins and Stamp, _Common Lands_. p. 55.
THE lNEVITABLE DECLINE OF THE COMMONS
The increased productivity was often touted by land reformers—wealthy or otherwise—as proof of the evils of the commons system. However, the change was the result of many factors, and not just of enclosure. Some of the increase would probably have occurred without enclosure, but enclosure hastened the process. The common land was not the best land. The lord’s waste was often reclaimed land, cultivated from forest and marsh. Morton in 1712 wrote: “Many of the Lordships, and especially the larger ones, have a Common or uninclosed [sic] Pasture for their cattle in the Outskirts of the fields. Most of these have formerly been plowed; but being generally their worst sort of ground, and at so great Distance from the Towns, the Manuring and Culture of them were found so inconvenient that they have been laid down for Greensod.”[45] Enclosure took the better land and subjected it to the new and improved methods of agriculture which had been all but impossible under the common system, for the management of the common could not be changed unless all commoners agreed and, just as important, remained agreed.”[46] Improved roads and transportation facilities made marketing easier, and of course, the land had fewer people to support. Economies of scale made it profitable to use improved stock. In 1760, Robert Bakewell, the founder of modern methods of livestock improvement, began selective breeding of farm animals.”[47] Previously forbidden by ecclesiastical authorities as incest, inbreeding of animals with desirable qualities soon led to dramatic improvements in stock.” Planting the enclosure with nitrogen–fixing crops such as clover improved the soil; drainage improved livestock health. Animals were disturbed less by driving to and from land pasture. All of these factors combined to improve the productivity of the formerly common land.
That enclosure improved productivity is neither a surprise nor a shame to the commons. The commons system “was falling into disuse, a new system was taking its place, and with the change the actual use made of the common or common rights declined. It might indeed have been retorted [to advocates of inclosure] that what was wanted was a stricter enforcement of the whole common right system.”[49] A related view was expressed in 1974 by Van Rensselaer Potter:
When I first read Hardin’s article [on the tragedy of the commons], I wondered if the users of the early English commons weren’t prevented from committing the fatal error of overgrazing by a kind of ‘bioethics’ enforced by the moral pressure of their neighbors. Indeed. the commons system operated successfully in England for several hundred years. Now we read that, before the colonial era in the Sahel, ‘overpasturage was avoided‘ by rules worked out by tribal chiefs. When deep wells were drilled to obtain water ‘the boreholes threw into chaos the traditional system of pasture use based on agreements among tribal chieftains.’ Thus, we see the tragedy of the commons not as a defect in the concept of a ‘commons’ but as a result of the disastemus transition period between the loss of an effective bioethic and its replacement by a new bioethic that could once again bring biological realities and human values into a viable balance.[50]
[44] lbid., p. 54.
[45] David Hall, “The Origins of Open–field Agriculture—The Archaelogical fieldwork Evidence,” in Rowley, _Origins_. p. 27.
[46] Scrutton, _Commons_, pp. 120–21. For example, all the farmers might agree to let one field lie fallow against custom for two years. If, in the second year, one tenant decided to return to the customary management and to graze his cattle in the field, the rest were powerless to stop him, and of course, the result would be the use of the field by all the tenants.
[47] Victor Rice, Frederick Andrews, Everett Warwick, and James Legates. _Breeding and Improvement of Farm Animals_ (New York: McGraw–Hill. 1957). p. 16.
[48] For example, between 1710 and 1790, the weight at Smithfield of cattle changed from 370 pounds to 800 pounds, of calves from 50 to 148, of sheep from 28 to 80, and of lambs from 18 to 50. This weight change is of course due to a multitude of causes. Scrunon, _Commons_, p. 121.
[49] Gonner, _Common Land_, pp. 306–07.
[50] Van Rensselaer Potter. _Science_ 185 (1974): 813.
CONCLUSION
Hardin writes that the “view that whatever is owned by many people should be free for the taking by anyone who feels a need for it … is precisely the idea of the commons.”[51] Why should it matter if this “idea of the commons” is historically inaccurate?
Any academic should feel an aversion to Tonypandy, but the issue is more important than a possible pedantic dislike of inaccuracy. It is beyond dispute that issues such as depletion of limited resources, environmental quality, fisheries economics, and national land management are of great and increasing concern. How those issues are dealt with depends in large part on our perceptions of the disposition of similar issues in the past. If we misunderstand the true nature of the commons, we also misunderstand the implications of the demise of the traditional commons system. Perhaps what existed in fact was not a “tragedy of the commons” but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years—and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era—land was managed successfully by communities. That the system failed to survive the industrial revolution, agrarian reform, and transfigured farming practices is hardly to be wondered at.
Our reexamination of the commons requires a dual focus. The first is to search for the ideas and practices which led to successful commoning for centuries and to try to find lessons and applications for our own times. The second focus is epistomological: are our perceptions of the nature of humankind awry? Since it seems quite likely if “economic man” had been managing the commons that tragedy really would have occurred, perhaps someone else was running the common.
In 1968. Hardin wrote that “‘ruin’ is the destruction toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a common brings ruin to all.”[52] But the common is not free and never was free. Perhaps in the changed perception of the common lies a remedy for ruin.
[51] Ganett Hardin, “Denial and Disguise,” in Hardin and Baden, _Managing the Commons_, p. 47.
[51] Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” in Hardin and Baden, _Managing the Commons_, p. 20.
enrich, detoxify, pollute, deplete
environmentally mediated social dilemmas
sylvie estrela et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2018.10.004
absurdly well linked to moritz paper below, even the part about free movement being crucial!
Whether it’s a pasture open to public grazing or a batch of glucose colonized by microbes, a shared environmental resource is often depicted as a fixed quantity, doomed to depletion if individuals selfishly consume what they can.
This “tragedy of the commons” is a well-known scenario in a broader class of social dilemmas that are used to characterize how individuals choose to cooperate or compete for shared resources.
But these paradigmatic dilemmas may be too simplistic, according to an opinion piece in press at Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The article introduces real-world complexity to social dilemmas by accounting for the way individuals modify and adapt to the environments that surround them.
“What we’ve been doing so far with humans and with microbes and with everything in between is oversimplified,” says evolutionary biologist Michael Hochberg, a Santa Fe Institute External Professor based at the University of Montpelier in France. Hochberg and his co-authors decided to investigate social dilemmas during two Santa Fe Institute working groups in 2016 and 2017.
“What our work suggests is that sometimes simple models may fail to capture important features of the ecology of microbial interactions, potentially leading to inaccurate predictions,” writes Sylvie Estrela, an evolutionary microbiologist at Yale and the study’s lead author.
To account for some of the complexity of real-world social dilemmas, the group created a classification system that goes beyond the basic model of individuals interacting, selfishly or cooperatively, over a fixed resource. Focusing on bacteria as an example, the group studied the dynamics that emerge as bacteria simultaneously help or harm their environment in one of four ways — enriching it with nutrients (helping), detoxifying it (helping), depleting the resources (harming), or polluting it with toxic excretions (harming).
“It’s what the interactions are actually producing or consuming or modifying that becomes key,” Hochberg says. For instance, bacteria often excrete metabolic waste products that may end up being toxic to themselves and to other neighboring bacteria if the waste persists and accumulates in the environment. But in some cases, such metabolic waste can be food for other bacterial species. Thus, the same behavior can simultaneously harm and help because the same molecule can simultaneously be waste or food, respectively, depending on which microbes are present and how they interact with their environment.
“So rather than having social behaviors that just depend upon interactions between two people or two microbes, the interactions might depend upon the state of the environment as well.”
By accounting for the dynamics of the changing environment, the researchers revealed two layers of complexity absent from classic social dilemmas.
The first of these is spatial. Unlike simple social dilemmas that depict what Hochberg calls “perpetual interactions in a given space,” the new taxonomy allows bacteria to move from a hostile environment to a more friendly one. So an enriching bacterium surrounded by polluters could relocate, changing the environment it enters and the one it leaves behind.
Such explicit environmental dimensions can have important consequences for the evolution of migration. Estrela gives the example of two organisms that both help themselves and harm the other. “When we abstract away the environment, they both appear to have the same ‘social’ strategy. Intuitively, one would think that both types should follow the same migration strategy as well — that is move away from each other since they harm each other. But when one takes into account how the two organisms interact with each other and their environment, one finds that the outcome is actually more complex, and the two types may follow different migration strategies.”
The second layer is temporal, dealing with niche construction and evolutionary dynamics that play out over time.
“The idea is that when we modify our environments, those modifications can be longer and more durable than our own lifetimes,” Hochberg explains. “The ecological inheritance of social behaviors will influence future conditions, but because of the complexity of the system, it is difficult to know just how. This is very relevant to humans because the ways we are modifying our environments will go well beyond our lifetimes, with climate change as one example.”
The next challenge, according to Estrela, is “to understand when a simple model is good enough to predict the dynamics and evolution of social interactions, when it is not, and where instead we need more complex and explicit models.”
Though the paper doesn’t explicitly study social animals or humans, the general framework could be used to study analogous human behaviors such as restorative agriculture on the helping end of the spectrum, or overconsumption of fossil fuels as an example of harming.
abstract Organisms modify their environments in ways that can be beneficial or detrimental not only to themselves but also to others sharing the same environment.
Such niche-constructing or niche-destroying activities are often due to the production or consumption of environmental factors, such as resources, wastes, or toxins, which ultimately influence the ecology and evolution of social interactions.
We present a new, four-way classification of social behaviors where individual behaviors are categorized into producing/consuming an environmental factor, as well as into helping/harming others.
Although not immediately obvious, dispersal (the act of moving within a habitat or between habitats) is another mechanism by which organisms modify their environment.
An explicit representation of such environmentally mediated interactions is key to capturing realistic system complexity and can reveal some unexpected outcomes in social dilemmas.
By consuming and producing environmental resources, organisms inevitably change their habitats. The consequences of such environmental modifications can be detrimental or beneficial not only to the focal organism but also to other organisms sharing the same environment. Social evolution theory has been very influential in studying how social interactions mediated by public ‘goods’ or ‘bads’ evolve by emphasizing the role of spatial structure. The environmental dimensions driving these interactions, however, are typically abstracted away. We propose here a new, environment-mediated taxonomy of social behaviors where organisms are categorized by their production or consumption of environmental factors that can help or harm others in the environment. We discuss microbial examples of our classification and highlight the importance of environmental intermediates more generally.
the tragedy of the commons – minus the tragedy: people can sustainably share resources, under some conditions
emergent sustainability in open property regimes
mark moritz et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1812028115
Scientists have long believed that when there is open access to a shared resource, people will inevitably overuse it, leading to ruin for everyone - an idea known as the “tragedy of the commons.”
But in an analysis of eight case studies from around the world - from foragers in Australia to mangrove fishers in Ecuador - researchers found that people can successfully share and sustainably use resources, under certain conditions.
“We’ve been told that if there is open access, then there must be tragedy, but that’s simply not true,” said Mark Moritz, lead author of the paper and associate professor of anthropology at The Ohio State University.
“We’ve been blinded by the theoretical models. Using a new approach has helped us see from a different perspective.”
The paper was published today (11-26-18) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The classic example of the tragedy of the commons is shepherds who share an open pasture. Each shepherd adds to the number of animals he has, because use of the grazing land is free. But the result is that the land is overgrazed, leaving it ruined for everyone.
But Moritz knew from his own research that this tragedy is not inevitable. He studies pastoralists in Cameroon for whom “keeping livestock is a way of life for them, as well as a way to make a living,” he said.
They live nomadically, seasonally moving cattle from place to place, sharing the grazing land but not depleting the resources.
In the PNAS paper, Moritz and his colleagues compared the cases they knew, which have been studied ethnographically for decades and for which they had long-term social and ecological data.
They found that the successful case studies worked as complex adaptive systems, where interactions between social and ecological processes lead to sustainable outcomes.
Successful systems were self-organizing, resulting in efficient, equitable and sustainable resource use.
“There is no central decision making or collective decision making about resource use. Individual users decide when and where to move or harvest resources. The system self-organizes so that the distribution of resources matches the distribution of the users,” Moritz said.
While open access implies no rules, Moritz said there actually are rules. People usually need to ask permission from current users to use a resource, such as grazing land. But permission is almost always granted.
The researchers found that to avoid the tragedy of the commons, people have to use the environmental resources appropriately. In Cameroon, that means pastoralists move their cattle in response to seasonal rains that bring the grasses on which their animals feed.
“The inappropriate way to use the resources would be to put up a fence and keep the animals there throughout the year, even during periods when there is no rain and the grass isn’t growing,” Moritz said.
That’s why freedom of movement is one of the key conditions necessary to successfully share resources. Other necessary conditions include low population densities, low market value of the resources, variability in resource distribution and an ethos of sharing.
The researchers say that where the conditions are right for successful and sustainable use, there is no need to “manage” the resources, Moritz said.
“The standard approach is to protect the resource. But you can’t see the resource in isolation. We have to look at the social-ecological system as a whole,” he said.
“People are part of the ecosystem. They are not managing the ecosystem, they are using it. You can’t separate people from resources they are use.”
abstract Current theoretical models of the commons assert that common-pool resources can only be managed sustainably with clearly defined boundaries around both communities and the resources that they use. In these theoretical models, open access inevitably leads to a tragedy of the commons. However, in many open-access systems, use of common-pool resources seems to be sustainable over the long term (i.e., current resource use does not threaten use of common-pool resources for future generations). Here, we outline the conditions that support sustainable resource use in open property regimes. We use the conceptual framework of complex adaptive systems to explain how processes within and couplings between human and natural systems can lead to the emergence of efficient, equitable, and sustainable resource use. We illustrate these dynamics in eight case studies of different social–ecological systems, including mobile pastoralism, marine and freshwater fisheries, swidden agriculture, and desert foraging. Our theoretical framework identifies eight conditions that are critical for the emergence of sustainable use of common-pool resources in open property regimes. In addition, we explain how changes in boundary conditions may push open property regimes to either common property regimes or a tragedy of the commons. Our theoretical model of emergent sustainability helps us to understand the diversity and dynamics of property regimes across a wide range of social–ecological systems and explains the enigma of open access without a tragedy. We recommend that policy interventions in such self-organizing systems should focus on managing the conditions that are critical for the emergence and persistence of sustainability.
moving climate change beyond the tragedy of the commons
katrina brown et al. 2018
doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.11.009
December marks the 50th anniversary of the paper that popularized the concept of tragedy of the commons: it argued that individuals will always take advantage of a common resource and so degrade it. A new paper argues that the theory limits the way climate change is viewed.
"New findings about how people understand and act suggest that climate change will more likely be solved by appealing to moral arguments rather than purely scientific ones," said Professor Katrina Brown, one of the paper's authors.
Professor Brown and Professor Neil Adger, both from the University of Exeter, and Professor Joshua Cinner from James Cook University, say that in order to make urgently needed progress in addressing climate change, governments need to promote climate change as a moral issue. And policy needs acknowledge that politicians often make their decisions based on reputation.
"Doing the right thing matters to people, but not everyone agrees what the right thing is. Some people emphasize fairness, others duty and patriotism. We need to appeal to the full range of these values," said Professor Cinner, co-author of the new paper in the journal Global Environmental Change.
They argue new ways of speaking about climate change that focus on the wide variety values and priorities of people with conservative and liberal views should be harnessed to encourage more concern and action on climate change.
American ecologist and philosopher Garrett Hardin wrote his paper "The tragedy of the commons" in 1968.
Lead author, Professor Brown, said: "Hardin's theory has been very influential. It has been used to design global co-operation on climate change such as the Paris Agreement. But there is a rapidly closing window to transform the economy and avoid climate catastrophe.
"New social science points the way to political mobilization based on sense of duty, respect for nature and others, and solidarity. These are now more relevant and more likely to win the day.
"Addressing climate change requires building inclusive moral frames, and fundamental changes in governance systems to better manage the associated risks."
paper The Tragedy of the Commons argued that global human population was on a path of unsustainable growth through the use of a parable of over-grazing of livestock on common land (Hardin, 1968). The concept of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ largely assumes that individuals are solely motivated by self-interest, an assumotion increasingly at odds with insights across the social sciences (Van Vugt, 2009). The original article, and idea of the tragedy, has had a profound influence on science and policy across all environmental issues. In the five decades since its publication, a concerted scientific response by multiple disciplines, synthesised in Elinor Ostrom (1990), has depended the of the causes of environmental overexploitation. Such work has documented commons dilemmas and assembled evidence that collective action can be mobilised at various scales to avoid tragedies in population, in overfishing, in resource consumption, and in land degradation. Many argue, however, that global climate change represents the ultimate Hardin-style tragedy: the global commons of the atmosphere cannot realistically be enclosed or effectively managed, and power asymmetries and concentrated benefits from fossil fuel use mean that irreversible thresholds will be crossed before the costs are fully realised (Jamieson, 2014).
Yet this pervasive framing of climate change as a commons tragedy limits how we confront the climate challenge. Insights from two key areas of political and behavioural sciences are expanding the potential solution space by highlighting how climate change is a dilemma of decision-making and moral values rather than simply a global resource – or global commons – tragedy. First, collective decision-making is as much about managing risks to political systems and their legitimacy, so-called second order risks, as it is about managing the physical and material risks of climate change as documented by science. Second, emerging psychology research demonstrates the range of moral underpinnings that can be mobilised for effective collection action on climate change. These insights shift emphasis away from a commons tragedy to more complex set of governance challenges.
Here we reflect on the relevance of Hardin’s thesis fifty years after its publication to today’s global challenges, and particularly in the context of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 °C which highlights a rapidly closing window of little more than a decade to transform the relationship between society and climate (IPCC, 2018).
The influence of second order risks explains apparently maladaptive behaviours and decisions. The response of governments and local authorities to extreme weather events such as floods, for example, shows how decisions on recovery and long run adaptation are distorted by having to manage second order risks. After severe storms battered the southwest of the UK during winter of 2013-14, the wettest winter in 175 year records and attributable to underlying climatic changes (Schaller et al., 2016), there was considerable pressure on local government to re-build coastal defences rather than implement longer term proactive adaptation strategies (Brown et al., 2017). Responses to the perceived emergency prompted new alliances between different authorities, organisations at different scales and different domains of work, and between public and private sector. These new partnerships in turn amplified the significance of second order risks for different governance actors. This all took place in a context of budget cuts and greater demands for accountability in public funding, stimulating short-term fixes rather than long-term adaptation.
As climate governance becomes increasingly focused on multi-stakeholder collaboration, resultant shifts in public and private responsibilities move emphasis from managing first order risks – the traditional domain of biophysical sciences and engineering – to second order risks, which require negotiation with new partners (Kuklicke and Demeritt, 2016). This is highlighted in the IPCC Special Report (IPCC, 2018), which stresses that meeting the challenge of a 1.5 °C temperature increase requires new forms of multi-level governance that includes non-state actors. The report recognises that this in turn needs enhanced capacities and accountability. This requires reframing climate change not as a simply a physical threat but as an issue that threatens the legitimacy and stability of governance systems and actors.
Critically, viewing climate change as a moral, rather than a technical resource scarcity issue can help to provide more impactful climate change framings. Across societies, conservatives tend to consider purity, respect for authority, and loyalty as more important than progressives do (Rossen et al., 2015). Understanding the importance of these moral priorities provides opportunities to frame climate change issues in ways that tap into the diverse moral foundations relevant to conservatives. Additionally, a moral perspective on climate change can also help explain why many prevalent arguments fail to resonate with climate sceptics.
Although protection from harm and fairness tend to be ranked equally highly by both progressives and conservatives, the latter’s perceptions of fairness tend to be viewed through a lens of moral hierarchy that places humans above nature and the rich above the poor (Lakoff, 2010). So, while the impacts of climate change on the Earth’s biodiversity (Hughes et al., 2018) and the world’s poor (Hsiang et al., 2017; Bathiany et al., 2018) regularly make headlines and raise public consciousness, these are unlikely be considered unfair to climate sceptics as these popular framings of distributional impacts are not in line with their moral hierarchy. Morals matter, and appropriately appealing to the diversity of moral values could substantially reduce opposition to climate change science and policies. Reframing climate change for its moral consequences is not just the domain of religious or other leaders.
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once, a long time ago, they too loved, but they lost it.
is it our response to that inevitable loss that determines our individual fates?
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they have reached the limits of their abilities, and that is okay. everyone is different and has different parts to play in life. you must take care of your physical and mental well–being when they are no longer capable of understanding that their behaviour has become abusive.
it is simply harder for us to understand that which we do not experience — that is the nature of it. if we wish to understand we must experience it somehow, whether by accident, intention, imagination. for people who live without experiencing a wide range of things may seem narrower–minded compared to the rest of us, and more prone to abusive behaviour.
is the inability or lack of adequate ability to understand consequences of our behaviour a major factor in why humans act abusively?
as the consequences of our actions become hidden, it becomes easier to do things that have bad consequences
user friendly: how the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work, and play
cliff kuang, robert fabricant 2019 not recommended
“The automation paradox suggests that as machines make things easier for us—as they take more friction from our daily life—they leave us less able to do things we once took for granted.
The automation paradox is almost always referred to in the context of problems that arise when machines are explicitly designed to do more for us—in the case of self-driving cars, for example, which may create a new era of hopelessly bad drivers. I want to get at something different. Call it the user-friendly paradox: As gadgets get easier to use, they become more mysterious; they make us more capable of doing what we want, while also making us more feeble in deciding whether what we seem to want is actually worth doing.”
and the different kinds of abuser acting concurrently that make the situation seem intractable? if so would it be an advantage to identify the major types of abuser?
because reality changes, we must change our inner representations of it to match. the problem comes when we no longer do so. this is why change, and momentum — the flow of change — are such essential ideas and skills.
Pride is a limitation for learning.
An unprepared enemy can still overwhelm you.
Pride and sloth are addictions, excuses not to face reality.
sadly, all fixed belief systems are likely to be, or become abusive. they set people and the world up for failure, because they cannot even nearly represent reality
all people blind to (truly unaware of) our own mistakes — otherwise why would we still be making them? but essential difference is our current awareness of this something–of–which–we–cannot–be–aware, and what we do about it.
we might argue that we know what needs to be done, or that circumstances are beyond our control, but the question simply becomes: why do we not act to change our lives for the better?
[23]: 69–86). or Hardin and Baden, Managing the Commons. See also basic American government texts such as Robert Lineberry, Government in America, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), in which he identifies the tragedy of the commons as “a parable about sheep overgrazing a common meadow” (pp. 579–80)
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