5,027 research outputs found
Why Trust Out-groups? The Role of Punishment Under Uncertainty
We conducted a hidden-effort trust game, in which we assigned subjects to one of two groups. The groups, which were formed through two different group formation processes, included a “social” group that required sharing and exchange among its members, and a “non-social” group that did not. Once assigned, subjects participated in the game with members from both groups, either with or without the opportunity to punish a trustee who may have defected on them. We found that for investors in the non-social group, the opportunity to punish a trustee worked to promote trust, but only when the trustee was a member of the other group. For the social group, the opportunity to punish had no effect on the investors’ trust decisions, regardless of the trustee\u27s group. We provide a theoretical framework to explain this asymmetric effect of punishment on trust. Our results suggest that groups with identities founded in sharing and exchange—a feature of globalized societies—may find it less necessary to engage in costly punishment. As a result, they may enjoy gains in economic efficiency
Politeness in Historical and Contemporary Chinese
Takes a comparative, diachronic perspective on Chinese politeness and its evolution up to the present day, linking diachronic and synchronic approache
Experiment on the Demand for Encompassment
The idea of political community is appealing on a gut-level. Hayek suggested that certain genes and instincts still dispose us toward the ethos and mentality of the hunter-gatherer band, and that modern forms of political collectivism have, in part, been atavistic reassertions of such tendencies. Picking up on Hayek, Klein (2005) has suggested a combination of yearnings: 1) a yearning for coordinated sentiment (like Smithian sympathy); and 2) a yearning that the sentiment encompass the whole group. This paper reports on an experiment designed to explore the demand for encompassment by having subjects sing together. In each trial, one person in the room was designated not to sing unless every one of the others in the room had made a payment sufficient so as to have that person sing. Subjects chose to sacrifice money to achieve encompassment 47.4 percent of the time, with 59.6 percent of the subjects doing so in at least one trial. An exit questionnaire showed that subjects’ chief reason for making such a sacrifice was a belief that the singing would be more enjoyable if it encompassed the whole group, and reported enjoyment is significantly higher with encompassment. We discuss the experiment as a parable for a penchant toward political collectivism.Encompassment; political psychology; Hayek; the people’s romance
Super-luminous X-ray Emission from the Interaction of Supernova Ejecta with Dense Circumstellar Shells
For supernova powered by the conversion of kinetic energy into radiation due
to the interactions of the ejecta with a dense circumstellar shell, we show
that there could be X-ray analogues of optically super-luminous SNe with
comparable luminosities and energetics. We consider X-ray emission from the
forward shock of SNe ejecta colliding into an optically-thin CSM shell, derive
simple expressions for the X-ray luminosity as a function of the circumstellar
shell characteristics, and discuss the different regimes in which the shock
will be radiative or adiabatic, and whether the emission will be dominated by
free-free radiation or line-cooling. We find that even with normal supernova
explosion energies of 10^51 erg, there exists CSM shell configurations that can
liberate a large fraction of the explosion energy in X-rays, producing
unabsorbed X-ray luminosities approaching 10^44 erg/s events lasting a few
months, or even 10^45 erg/s flashes lasting days. Although the large column
density of the circumstellar shell can absorb most of the flux from the initial
shock, the most luminous events produce hard X-rays that are less susceptible
to photoelectric absorption, and can counteract such losses by completely
ionizing the intervening material. Regardless, once the shock traverses the
entire circumstellar shell, the full luminosity could be available to
observers.Comment: Submitted to MNRAS. 12 pages, 4 figure
Personal Volunteer Computing
We propose personal volunteer computing, a novel paradigm to encourage
technical solutions that leverage personal devices, such as smartphones and
laptops, for personal applications that require significant computations, such
as animation rendering and image processing. The paradigm requires no
investment in additional hardware, relying instead on devices that are already
owned by users and their community, and favours simple tools that can be
implemented part-time by a single developer. We show that samples of personal
devices of today are competitive with a top-of-the-line laptop from two years
ago. We also propose new directions to extend the paradigm
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