3,422 research outputs found
Understanding recurrent crime as system-immanent collective behavior
Containing the spreading of crime is a major challenge for society. Yet,
since thousands of years, no effective strategy has been found to overcome
crime. To the contrary, empirical evidence shows that crime is recurrent, a
fact that is not captured well by rational choice theories of crime. According
to these, strong enough punishment should prevent crime from happening. To gain
a better understanding of the relationship between crime and punishment, we
consider that the latter requires prior discovery of illicit behavior and study
a spatial version of the inspection game. Simulations reveal the spontaneous
emergence of cyclic dominance between ''criminals'', ''inspectors'', and
''ordinary people'' as a consequence of spatial interactions. Such cycles
dominate the evolutionary process, in particular when the temptation to commit
crime or the cost of inspection are low or moderate. Yet, there are also
critical parameter values beyond which cycles cease to exist and the population
is dominated either by a stable mixture of criminals and inspectors or one of
these two strategies alone. Both continuous and discontinuous phase transitions
to different final states are possible, indicating that successful strategies
to contain crime can be very much counter-intuitive and complex. Our results
demonstrate that spatial interactions are crucial for the evolutionary outcome
of the inspection game, and they also reveal why criminal behavior is likely to
be recurrent rather than evolving towards an equilibrium with monotonous
parameter dependencies.Comment: 9 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in PLoS ON
A double-edged sword: Benefits and pitfalls of heterogeneous punishment in evolutionary inspection games
As a simple model for criminal behavior, the traditional two-strategy
inspection game yields counterintuitive results that fail to describe empirical
data. The latter shows that crime is often recurrent, and that crime rates do
not respond linearly to mitigation attempts. A more apt model entails ordinary
people who neither commit nor sanction crime as the third strategy besides the
criminals and punishers. Since ordinary people free-ride on the sanctioning
efforts of punishers, they may introduce cyclic dominance that enables the
coexistence of all three competing strategies. In this setup ordinary
individuals become the biggest impediment to crime abatement. We therefore also
consider heterogeneous punisher strategies, which seek to reduce their
investment into fighting crime in order to attain a more competitive payoff. We
show that this diversity of punishment leads to an explosion of complexity in
the system, where the benefits and pitfalls of criminal behavior are revealed
in the most unexpected ways. Due to the raise and fall of different alliances
no less than six consecutive phase transitions occur in dependence on solely
the temptation to succumb to criminal behavior, leading the population from
ordinary people-dominated across punisher-dominated to crime-dominated phases,
yet always failing to abolish crime completely.Comment: 9 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Scientific
Report
Promoting religious freedom and peace through cross-cultural dialogue
This report contributes to the debate on the international religious freedom agenda and suggests that the simultaneous promotion of religious freedom on the one hand and cross-cultural and inter-religious dialogue on the other can represent a consensual and effective platform to combat intolerance, discrimination, and violence based on religion or belief and to build in the long term a peaceful socio-political environment
The nature of resilience
The advent of resilience strategies in the field of emergency planning and response has been premised on a profound re-evaluation of the referents of security governance. Together, the discovery of the ‘myth’ of panic and the natural resilience of populations has encouraged the spread of resilience strategies which aim to promote the adaptive and self-organizational capacities of populations in emergency. This chapter seeks to advance an alternative to this positivist explanation: that the appearance of ‘resilient populations’ is the correlate of a broader restructuring of rationalities and practices comprising liberal governance. Tracing the evolution of the figure of the natural underpinning liberal governmentalities through the historical development of Ecology and Economics, this chapter looks to make explicit the epistemological order supportive of neoliberal governance. In doing so, this chapter identifies the historical conditions of possibility for ‘resilient populations’ to emerge as a referent of governance
Sociological rythms as a basis for prediction
Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University, 1949. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive
The supernatural guilt trip does not take us far enough
Belief in souls is only one component of supernatural thinking in which individuals infer the presence of invisible mechanisms that explain events as paranormal rather than natural. We believe it is important to place greater emphasis on the prevalence of supernatural beliefs across other domains, if only to counter simplistic divisions between rationality and irrationality recently aligned with the contentious science/religion debate
The nature of resilience
The advent of resilience strategies in the field of emergency planning and response has been premised on a profound re-evaluation of the referents of security governance. Together, the discovery of the ‘myth’ of panic and the natural resilience of populations has encouraged the spread of resilience strategies which aim to promote the adaptive and self-organisational capacities of populations in emergency. This article seeks to advance an alternative to this positivist explanation: that the appearance of ‘resilient populations’ is the correlate of a broader restructuring of rationalities and practices comprising liberal governance. Tracing the evolution of the figure of the ‘natural’ underpinning liberal governmentalities through the historical development of ecology and economics, this article looks to make explicit the epistemological order supportive of neoliberal governance. In doing so, this article identifies the historical conditions of possibilit
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