22 research outputs found

    Social Functions of Emotions in Social Dilemmas

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    Social dilemmas, or situations in which individual and collective interests collide, elicit strong emotions. But are these emotions socially functional in that they help establish cooperation? Generally, they are, as four empirical chapters showed. In dyadic relations, refusal to return a favour is best reciprocated while expressing disappointment instead of anger or no emotion. This does not even lead to a negative impression. When not recipients but observers can reciprocate cooperative acts, non-cooperation out of anger or disappointment is perceived by observers as a just action to retaliate against defectors and is therefore met cooperatively. In situations where group members have to coordinate their contributions to obtain a public good, anger signals bleaker prospects than guilt does, especially when communicated by an influential fellow group member. This makes that group members are more likely to exit the group or install a democratic leader. Guilt actually promotes successful coordination by signalling that both the person that experiences guilt and the person towards guilt is experienced will contribute, which encourages people to cooperate even when coordination is difficult. Thus, emotions are indispensable, socially informative cues that typically help to establish cooperation, facilitate coordination and implement structural solutions in social dilemmas

    A Mutualistic Approach to Morality: The Evolution of Fairness by Partner Choice

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    What makes humans moral beings? This question can be understood either as a proximate “how” question or as an ultimate “why” question. The “how” question is about the mental and social mechanisms that produce moral judgments and interactions, and has been investigated by psychologists and social scientists. The “why” question is about the fitness consequences that explain why humans have morality, and has been discussed by evolutionary biologists in the context of the evolution of cooperation. Our goal here is to contribute to a fruitful articulation of such proximate and ultimate explanations of human morality. We develop an approach to morality as an adaptation to an environment in which individuals were in competition to be chosen and recruited in mutually advantageous cooperative interactions. In this environment, the best strategy is to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation equally. Those who offer less than others will be left out of cooperation; conversely, those who offer more will be exploited by their partners. In line with this mutualistic approach, the study of a range of economic games involving property rights, collective actions, mutual help and punishment shows that participants\u27 distributions aim at sharing the costs and benefits of interactions in an impartial way. In particular, the distribution of resources is influenced by effort and talent, and the perception of each participant\u27s rights on the resources to be distributed

    2015 Conference Abstracts: Annual Undergraduate Research Conference at the Interface of Biology and Mathematics

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    Schedule and abstract book for the Seventh Annual Undergraduate Research Conference at the Interface of Biology and Mathematics Date: November 21-22, 2015Plenary speaker: Robert Smith, University of OttawaFeatured speaker: Rachel Lenhart, University of Wisconsin, Madiso

    The emotional shape of our moral life: Anger-related emotions and mutualistic anthropology

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    The evolutionary hypothesis advanced by Baumard et al. makes precise predictions on which emotions should play the main role in our moral lives: morality should be more closely linked to "avoidance” emotions (like contempt and disgust) than to "punitive” emotions (like anger). Here, we argue that these predictions run contrary to most psychological evidenc

    "Fair” outcomes without morality in cleaner wrasse mutualism

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    Baumard et al. propose a functional explanation for the evolution of a sense of fairness in humans: Fairness preferences are advantageous in an environment where individuals are in strong competition to be chosen for social interactions. Such conditions also exist in nonhuman animals. Therefore, it remains unclear why fairness (equated with morality) appears to be properly present only in human

    Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

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    Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp

    The Liberal Commons

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    The Liberal Commons

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    Following the Civil War, black Americans began acquiring land in earnest; by 1920 almost one million black families owned farms. Since then, black rural landownership has dropped by more than 98% and continues in rapid decline – there are now fewer than 19,000 black-operated farms left in America. By contrast, white-operated farms dropped only by half, from about 5.5 million to 2.4 million. Commentators have offered as partial explanations the consolidation of inefficient small farms and intense racial discrimination in farm lending. However, even absent these factors, the unintended effects of old-fashioned American property law might have led to the same outcome. Because black farmers often did not make wills, their heirs took the land as co-owners. Over generations, co-owners multiplied, the farms became unmanageable, and the land was partitioned and sold, a seemingly inevitable tragedy of the commons in which too many owners waste a common resource. Black rural landownership may seem a dusty topic, peopled with hardscrabble tales of property past. Consider, though, the daunting possibility that property future – think biomedical research, post-apartheid restitution, hybrid residential associations, perhaps cyberspace – may have the same analytic structure, be subject to a similar punishing legal regime, and face the same fate as the black rural landowner. Overcoming the tragic fate of commons property should not be so hard. Until now, however, legal theorists have often worked within a framework that makes happier solutions difficult to imagine. Typically, theorists have relied on a thin utilitarian language yoked to a narrow conceptual map of property. One school, worrying that rational owners will overconsume commons resources, has embraced the so-called Biackstonian image of private property with sole and despotic dominion at the core. Another school, after showing how small, close-knit groups can successfully conserve commons resources if they sharply restrict exit, has advocated a version of commons property. For both schools, the image of tragic outcomes proves an ideal foil, one that implicitly points theorists toward their preferred normative solutions. Privatization seems inevitable for utilitarians with a liberal bent, because they believe that locking people together violates a fundamental concern for individual autonomy. By contrast, illiberal communitarian solutions seem relatively attractive to those who are ready to sacrifice individual autonomy for collective goals. While these underlying normative commitments drive the familiar debate over tragic outcomes, they never surface as the focus for analysis of commons resource management
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