Group items tagged

We designed this public goods experiment to isolate the effects of being shamed or honoured, with no monetary consequences to either experience, and test whether the expectation of negative or positive reputational information enforces social behaviour.

If players know that only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, will they cooperate more as a group?

In games that offer players anonymity, uncooperative behaviour is more prevalent [7] while the opposite is true of games in which players know that each of their decisions will be linked to their real identities [8–10]

confirming that, even when only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, players cooperate more as a group

expected that shame might be more effective than honour

n contrast to our expectations, we found no significant differences in group contributions over the first 10 rounds between the shame and honour treatments.

We hypothesized that the threat of shame or the prospect of honour would lead to increased public contributions.

Our results show that a promise to single out free-riding individuals for public scrutiny can lead to greater cooperation from the whole group, as can singling out the most generous individuals.

Group cooperation in the shame treatment significantly declined following round 10 (paired t-test between 10th and 12th round, t = 3.67, p = 0.005), corroborating our finding that the threat of being singled out as a free rider had been driving cooperation.

Cues of being watched enhance cooperation [11] and when humans lived in small groups, it was easy to observe individual behaviour.

language, replaced direct observation

the absence of shaming by the state does not preclude the absence of shame altogether in society, especially as social media increases the frequency, speed and inclusiveness of communication.

The Internet increasingly creates a global town square where controls are harder to implement and enforce, gossip travels fast, and where shame as well as honour therefore might experience resurgence.

Transparency also enhances cooperation [8–10] but can be costly to provide and its use can be limited. Transparency requires time evaluating and determining a satisfactory performance.

difficult in our current era, where human attention, not information, is a scarce resource [15].

You advocate “programming literacy” in the online platforms we use every day. How much can the average web user be expected to understand?

I don’t think the average web users of this century will achieve basic programming literacy.

If they don’t know how to make the programs, then I’d at least want them to know what the programs they are using are for. It makes it so much more purposeful. You get much more predictable results using the right technologies for the right jobs.

I want people to be able to ask themselves, “What does this website want me to do? Who owns it? What is it for?”

You note how our traditional social contracts (e.g. I can steal anything I want, but I won’t do it out of shame, fear, etc.) break down due to the anonymity and distance of the web. How can we change this and still maintain an open online culture?

We have an economic operating system based in scarcity — that’s how we create markets — so we don’t have a great way yet of sharing abundant resources.

It’s a problem of imagination, not reality. We have imaginary boundaries.

rather than getting people to use the web responsibly and intelligently, it may be easier to build networks that treat the humans more responsibly and intelligently. Those of us who do build stuff, those of us who are responsible for how these technologies are deployed, we have the opportunity and obligation to build technologies that are intrinsically liberating — programs that reveal their intentions, and that submit to the intentions of their users.