ofelia
detecting the molecular signature of social conflict: theory and a test with bacterial quorum sensing genes
j. david van dyken and michael j. wade 2012
http://doi.org/10.1086/664609
new scientist news article
Link: newscientist.com/article/mg21328535.800-bacterial-cheaters-do-not-prosper.html
the long way to a small, angry planet
becky chambers 2014
a closed and common orbit
becky chambers
record of a spaceborn few
becky chambers 2018 not yet read
to be taught, if fortunate
becky chambers 2019 not yet read
humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games
poncela-casasnovas, m. et al. 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
Link: dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
the effects of scarcity on cheating and in-group favoritism
billur aksoy, marco a. palma et al. 2019
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2019.06.024
a closer look at cheating during periods of relative economic abundance and scarcity to determine whether cheating for monetary gain is a product of the economic environment.
During the experiment, they found evidence that cheating is more likely caused by an individual's propensity to cheat than external factors.
Famous criminals' propensity for cheating has been attributed to their circumstances and being a product of an impoverished upbringing, Palma explained. So to test this theory, researchers selected a remote community in Guatemala for a field experiment to help determine whether scarcity, or impoverished situations, truly influence a person's propensity to cheat and lie.
THE EXPERIMENT
According to Palma, the experiment gave participants the opportunity to cheat without any repercussions, and they were tested both during times of scarcity and relative abundance. Since the village where the experiment was held relied solely on coffee production for their livelihood, the abundance period would be during the five-month window when coffee is harvested weekly, and scarcity would be tested during the seven months of no harvest, and therefore no income.
The experiment included giving participants a cup and dice and asking them to roll the dice with the cup. Depending on the number rolled, participants received monetary compensation for filling out a survey. If a one was rolled, the participant received five quetzales, which is a little bit less than a dollar. Rolling a two paid 10 quetzales, a three paid 15 quetzales and so on. Rolling a six received nothing. Participants were asked to roll the dice twice by shaking the cup.
"The first time is the one that counts, and then they shake it again so nobody else sees what they rolled," Palma said. "So now people have an opportunity to cheat in order to increase their earnings. We did this in the scarcity period, and again in the abundance period."
By even distribution, each number should be rolled about one-sixth of the time, he said.
CHEATING FOR PERSONAL GAIN
"If you look at the high paying numbers, there are three numbers out of six. So, 50% of the time they should report a high payoff and 50% of the time a low payoff," he said. "We find that they reported about 90% of high numbers during scarcity and about 90% in abundance. So, there was no change in cheating across the two periods."
"This tells us there is no real change for the propensity to cheat during scarcity and abundance. Meaning, this is more like an inner characteristic of an individual."
CHEATING FOR A FRIEND
The second part of the experiment gave people the opportunity to cheat for someone in their village, the in-group, like a family member or friend, and increase their monetary benefit.
"In general, people cheat for the in-groups, but at a lower rate than they would for themselves. And this doesn't really change across the scarcity and abundance conditions," he said.
CHEATING FOR A STRANGER
Next, they were given the opportunity to cheat for a stranger, the out-group, someone outside of the community.
"During the abundance period, people did not cheat for the out-group," Palma said. "In other words, if it is somebody who is outside of the group, the level they reported for the high payoffs was exactly 50%, which is the expectation. But during the scarcity period, the gap between the in-group and the out-group was closed. All of a sudden people started cheating for the out-group at the same rate as they did for the in-group."
RESULTS
Palma explained that the participants' willingness to cheat during scarcity was unexpected. During the scarcity period, the boundaries of the in-group and out-group disappear not only because people are willing to incur a moral cost, but they are also willing to incur monetary costs by giving the same amount of money to both groups.
"This experiment helped bridge the gap between the lab and the real world, and we can inform policy makers and make accurate predictions of how humans will react under different types of environments," Palma said.
According to Aksoy, these findings appear to be universal.
"In our experiment, we did not find any significant impact of scarcity on cheating behavior when the beneficiaries were the subjects themselves," she said. "In a recent unpublished study, titled "Poverty negates the impact of social norms on cheating," other researchers also reach the same conclusion in their experiment with rice farmers in Thailand. This suggests that our findings are not exclusive to Guatemalan coffee farmers, but, of course, there is more research that needs to be done in order to better understand this phenomenon. In fact, a study conducted in 23 countries highlights very little differences in cheating behavior across the countries. "
abstract •Subjects cheat at high levels in scarcity and abundance when they are the beneficiaries.
•Scarcity does not impact the cheating behavior for oneself or an in-group member.
•There is in-group favoritism in cheating in the abundance period.
•Scarcity eliminates in-group bias through increased cheating for the out-group member.
•Scarcity also eliminates in-group favoritism when the cost is monetary rather than moral.
We study the impact of scarcity on cheating and in-group favoritism using a two-period lab-in-the-field experiment with low-income coffee farmers in a small, isolated village in Guatemala. During the coffee harvesting months, farmers in this village experience a significant income boost from selling their coffee beans. However, during the non-harvesting months, they experience a substantial decline in income, inducing a pronounced state of scarcity, while other factors remain similar. Using this distinctive variance in income, we first conduct our experiment before the coffee harvest (Scarcity period). We then repeat the experiment with the same group of subjects during the harvest season (Abundance period). First, using the Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013) die-roll paradigm, we find that subjects cheat at high levels in both periods when they are the beneficiaries of the cheating. Scarcity does not impact this cheating behavior. Secondly, using subjects’ natural village identity, we find significant in-group favoritism for cheating in the Abundance period, which disappears during the Scarcity period. Finally, using a dictator game, we show that this finding holds even when the cost of favoring an in-group member is monetary rather than moral.
mouse tracking reveals structure knowledge in the absence of model-based choice
arkady konovalov, ian krajbich 2020
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15696-w
When faced with a decision, people may know which choice gives them the best chance of success, but still take the other option, a new study suggests.
People may choose based on a "gut feeling," a habit, or what worked for them last time, rather than on what they have learned will work most often, said Ian Krajbich, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology and economics at The Ohio State University.
The results run counter to the belief that people make the less optimal choice because they just don't know any better.
"In our study, people knew what worked most often. They just didn't use that knowledge," Krajbich said.
The research, published today (April 20, 2020) in the journal Nature Communications, was led by Arkady Konovalov, a former graduate student at Ohio State who is now at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
Krajbich gave an example of how the study's findings may work in real life. Say Main Street is usually the fastest way home from work for you. But yesterday there was an event that was going to slow traffic on Main Street, so you took Spruce Street instead and it got you home a few minutes faster than normal.
Today, do you take Main Street -- which you know is usually the better route -- or take Spruce Street because it worked so well yesterday?
Krajbich said the results of this study suggest that many times we will take the route that worked yesterday and ignore the evidence of what normally works best.
"There's this tension between doing what you should do, at least from a statistical perspective, versus doing what worked out well recently," Krajbich said.
In the study, participants played a simple computer game in which noticing and exploiting patterns could make them more money. The researchers tracked their computer mouse movements to detect whether they picked up on those patterns.
For example, participants would choose one of two symbols on the top half of the screen -- one on the top left and one on the top right. They would then move the cursor to the bottom half of the screen and a symbol would appear on the bottom right or bottom left. They would click on that to see their reward.
Participants repeated this game dozens of times. The researchers could determine if the participants learned the pattern between what they chose at the top and what they got at the bottom (for example, choosing the top left symbol usually led to the bottom right symbol with the largest reward) by watching their mouse movements.
"We could tell where they thought the next symbol was going to appear by where they moved the cursor," Krajbich said.
"And we found that nearly everyone -- 56 of the 57 participants -- learned the pattern. That was no problem for our participants."
But the researchers designed part of the study so that the pattern that usually led to the largest reward didn't work 10 to 40 percent of the time.
So the question was: After one of the trials in which the pattern that usually led to the largest reward didn't work, what would participants do? Would they stick to the pattern or choose something else?
Results showed that participants followed the plan that gave them the best chance of success -- which was following the pattern that worked at least 6 out of 10 times -- only about 20 percent of the time.
In other parts of the study, the pattern that produced the biggest reward always worked the same way. Here, where the pattern was consistent, participants followed it about twice as often as in the other cases: about 40 percent of the time.
Why don't people follow the best strategy more often? While the answer to that is beyond the scope of this study, Krajbich said it likely takes a lot of mental energy and planning to always make decisions based on your knowledge of the environment.
And the rewards of following the best strategy aren't always obvious -- especially if following that strategy increases your success by only a small percentage, he said.
This tension between using a statistical-based strategy versus going with your "gut" comes up a lot in sports, Krajbich said. Coaches and managers must decide whether to go for it on fourth down in football or walk a batter in baseball. The decision that has the best chance to succeed statistically is often only a bit more successful than the other choice.
"It can be hard to judge whether you made a good or bad decision based just on the outcome. We can make a good decision and just get unlucky and have a bad outcome. Or we can make a bad decision and get lucky and have a good outcome," Krajbich said.
In those situations, it is easy for people to stop being disciplined and just choose whatever decision got them rewards most recently.
The lesson from this study, Krajbich said, is that people often do learn what works best. "They just have to put that knowledge into practice."
abstract Converging evidence has demonstrated that humans exhibit two distinct strategies when learning in complex environments. One is model-free learning, i.e., simple reinforcement of rewarded actions, and the other is model-based learning, which considers the structure of the environment. Recent work has argued that people exhibit little model-based behavior unless it leads to higher rewards. Here we use mouse tracking to study model-based learning in stochastic and deterministic (pattern-based) environments of varying difficulty. In both tasks participants’ mouse movements reveal that they learned the structures of their environments, despite the fact that standard behavior-based estimates suggested no such learning in the stochastic task. Thus, we argue that mouse tracking can reveal whether subjects have structure knowledge, which is necessary but not sufficient for model-based choice.
zombie
cranberries
another head hangs lowly
child is slowly taken
and the violence caused such silence
who are we mistaken?
but you see, it’s not me, it’s not my family
in your head, in your head they are fighting
with their tanks and their bombs
and their bombs and their guns
in your head, in your head, they are crying
in your head, in your head
zombie, zombie, zombie
hey, hey, hey, what’s in your head, in your head?
zombie, zombie, zombie
hey, hey, hey, hey
oh, oh, dou, dou, dou, dou
dou, dou, dou, dou
dou, dou, dou, dou
dou, dou, dou, dou
another mother’s breakin’
heart is taken over
when the violence causes silence
we must be mistaken
it’s the same damn thing since nineteen–sixteen
in your head, in your head they’re still fighting
with their tanks and their bombs
and their bombs and their guns
in your head, in your head, they are dying
in your head, in your head
zombie, zombie, zombie
hey, hey, hey, what’s in your head, in your head
zombie, zombie, zombie?
hey, hey, hey, hey
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
hey, oh, ya, ya ya