David and Goliath

During several years, Octavio Aburto thought of one photo. Now, he finally got it. The recently published photograph by Aburto, titled “David and Goliath” (it his in fact David Castro, one of his research science colleagues at the center of this stunning image) has been widely shared over the last few weeks. It was taken at Cabo Pulmo National Park (Mexico) and submitted to the National Geographic photo contest 2012. Here, he captures the sheer size of fish aggregations in perspective with a single human surrounded by abundant marine life. On a recent interview, he explains:

[…] … this “David and Goliath” image is speaking to the courtship behavior of one particular species of Jack fish. […] Many people say that a single image is worth a thousand words, but a single image can also represent thousands of data points and countless statistical analyses. One image, or a small series of images can tell a complicated story in a very simple way. […] The picture you see was taken November 1^st, 2012. But this picture has been in my mind for three years — I have been trying to capture this image ever since I saw the behavior of these fish and witnessed the incredible tornado that they form during courtship. So, I guess you could say this image took almost three years. […], in mission-blue.org , Dec. 2012.

Video – Behind the scenes of David and Goliath image. This photo was taken at Cabo Pulmo National Park and submitted to the National Geographic photo contest 2012. You can see more of his images from this place and about Mexican seas on Octavio‘s web link.

Connection and contagion in Human networks

Recent research have increasingly being focused on the relationship between Human-Human interaction, social networks (no, not the Facebook) and other Human-activity areas, like health. Nicholas Christakis (Harvard Univ. research link) points us that, people are inter-connected, and so as well, their health is inter-connected. This research engages two types of phenomena: the social, mathematical, and biological rules governing how social networks form (“Connection“) and the biological and social implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviours (“Contagion“), as in the self-organized stigmergy-like dynamics of Cognitive Collective Perception (link).

Above, Nicholas Christakis (in a 56m. documentary lecture produced by The Floating University, Sept. 2011) discusses the obvious tension and delicate balance between agency (one individual choices and actions) and structure (our collective responsibility), where here, structure refers not only to our co-evolving dynamic societal environment as well as to the permanent unfolding entangled nature of topological structure on complex networks, such as in human-human social networks, while asking: If you’re so free, why do you follow others? The documentary (YouTube link) resume states:

“If you think you’re in complete control of your destiny or even your own actions, you’re wrong. Every choice you make, every behaviour you exhibit, and even every desire you have finds its roots in the social universe. Nicholas Christakis explains why individual actions are inextricably linked to sociological pressures; whether you’re absorbing altruism performed by someone you’ll never meet or deciding to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, collective phenomena affect every aspect of your life. By the end of the lecture Christakis has revealed a startling new way to understand the world that ranks sociology as one of the most vitally important social sciences.”

While cooperation is central to the success of human societies and is widespread, cooperation in itself, however, poses a challenge in both the social and biological sciences: How can this high level of cooperation be maintained in the face of possible exploitation? One answer involves networked interactions and population structure.

As perceived, the balance between homophily (where “birds of a feather flock together”) and heterophily (one where most of genotypes are negatively correlated), do requires further research. In fact, in humans, one of the most replicated findings in the social sciences is that people tend to associate with other people that they resemble, a process precisely known as homophily. As Christakis points out, although phenotypic resemblance between friends might partly reflect the operation of social influence, our genotypes are not materially susceptible to change. Therefore, genotypic resemblance could result only from a process of selection. Such genotypic selection might in turn take several forms. For short, let me stress you two examples. What follows are two papers, as well as a quick reference (image below) to a recent general-audience of his books:

1) Rewiring your network fosters cooperation:

“Human populations are both highly cooperative and highly organized. Human interactions are not random but rather are structured in social networks. Importantly, ties in these networks often are dynamic, changing in response to the behavior of one’s social partners. This dynamic structure permits an important form of conditional action that has been explored theoretically but has received little empirical attention: People can respond to the cooperation and defection of those around them by making or breaking network links. Here, we present experimental evidence of the power of using strategic link formation and dissolution, and the network modification it entails, to stabilize cooperation in sizable groups. Our experiments explore large-scale cooperation, where subjects’ cooperative actions are equally beneficial to all those with whom they interact. Consistent with previous research, we find that cooperation decays over time when social networks are shuffled randomly every round or are fixed across all rounds. We also find that, when networks are dynamic but are updated only infrequently, cooperation again fails. However, when subjects can update their network connections frequently, we see a qualitatively different outcome: Cooperation is maintained at a high level through network rewiring. Subjects preferentially break links with defectors and form new links with cooperators, creating an incentive to cooperate and leading to substantial changes in network structure. Our experiments confirm the predictions of a set of evolutionary game theoretic models and demonstrate the important role that dynamic social networks can play in supporting large-scale human cooperation.”, abstract in D.G. Rand, S. Arbesman, and N.A. Christakis, “Dynamic Social Networks Promote Cooperation in Experiments with Humans,” PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 2011). [full PDF];

Picture – (book cover) Along with James Fowler, Christakis has authored also a general-audience book on social networks: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, 2011 (book link). For a recent book review, access here.

2) We are surrounded by a sea of our friends’ genes:

“It is well known that humans tend to associate with other humans who have similar characteristics, but it is unclear whether this tendency has consequences for the distribution of genotypes in a population. Although geneticists have shown that populations tend to stratify genetically, this process results from geographic sorting or assortative mating, and it is unknown whether genotypes may be correlated as a consequence of nonreproductive associations or other processes. Here, we study six available genotypes from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to test for genetic similarity between friends. Maps of the friendship networks show clustering of genotypes and, after we apply strict controls for population strati!cation, the results show that one genotype is positively correlated (homophily) and one genotype is negatively correlated (heterophily). A replication study in an independent sample from the Framingham Heart Study veri!es that DRD2 exhibits signi!cant homophily and that CYP2A6 exhibits signi!cant heterophily. These unique results show that homophily and heterophily obtain on a genetic (indeed, an allelic) level, which has implications for the study of population genetics and social behavior. In particular, the results suggest that association tests should include friends’ genes and that theories of evolution should take into account the fact that humans might, in some sense, be metagenomic with respect to the humans around them.”, abstract in J.H. Fowler, J.E. Settle, and N.A. Christakis, “Correlated Genotypes in Friendship Networks,” PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (January 2011). [full PDF].

One year away…

Figure (click to enlarge) – Time dependence of FAO Food Price Index from January 2004 to May 2011. Red dashed vertical lines correspond to beginning dates of “food riots” and protests associated with the major recent unrest in North Africa and the Middle East. The overall death toll is reported in parentheses [26-55]. Blue vertical line indicates the date, December 13, 2010, on which we submitted a report to the U.S. government, warning of the link between food prices, social unrest and political instability [56]. Inset shows FAO Food Price Index from 1990 to 2011. [From arXiv:1108.2455, page 3]

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.” ~ Aristotle.

By crossing data on food price, and food price peaks with an ongoing trend of increasing prices, as well as the date of riots around the world, 3 of my colleagues at NECSI – the New England Complex Systems Institute (link), Boston,  found out a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. By doing so, unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. That was the past. NECSI team however, expects a perilous trend in rising food prices to continue (link). Even before the extreme weather scrambled food prices this year, their 2011 report predicted that the next great breach would occur in August 2013, and that the risk of more worldwide rioting would follow. So, if trends hold, these complex systems model say we’re less than one year and counting from a fireball of global unrest riots.

The abstract and PDF link into their work follows:

[…] Social unrest may reflect a variety of factors such as poverty, unemployment, and social injustice. Despite the many possible contributing factors, the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global food prices. We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. These observations suggest that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption. Underlying the food price peaks we also found an ongoing trend of increasing prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in 2012-2013. This implies that avoiding global food crises and associated social unrest requires rapid and concerted action. […] in Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand and Yaneer Bar-Yam, “The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East“, arXiv:1108.2455, August 10, 2011. [PDF link]

The rhizome century

Video – Lynn Hoffman (social worker, link) talks about a shift that has been taking place in our world, a shift that simmered in the background for many years and has recently erupted onto the world stage. This shift is akin to a revolution, and often gives a renewed impetus to contemporary revolutionary movements. The shift is related to what Lynn sees as a move from the system metaphor, with its emphasis on symmetry, order and a return to the same, to the rhizome with its more messy and horizontal plane of endless relations.

“Gregory Bateson and the Rhizome Century” is an interdisciplinary event inspired by the vision of family therapy pioneer, Lynn Hoffman. The conference is for anyone who: Appreciates the pressing significance of honoring the complexities of our interrelations with one another, with nature, and also with our technologies; Understands that a primary responsibility for our generation is to move beyond the individualism’s and negations so prominent in Western thought, towards a work that generates sustaining and sustainable webs of relationship. [http://www.therhizomecentury.com, Vancouver, Canada, Oct. 2012].

The Divided Brain

Video – The Divided Brain (Oct. 2011) – In this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA’s free public events programme. To view the full lecture “The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World“, do jump yourself into another YouTube video.

Super Cooperators

” […] What I refused to see is what the prisoner’s dilemma teaches: anyone who plays the “All Cooperate” strategy is a sucker, and incents the other to defect on every move. I now believe that the lesson of the prisoner’s dilemma is that a robust ethic succeeds where a weak one fails. Be fair, be strong, reward cooperation and punish defection, and you will have nothing to regret. […] “, in An Ethic Based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, The Ethical Spectacle, September, 1995.

[…] Martin Nowak is known for his many influential papers on cooperation and in theoretical biology. This book is a popular writing on his scientific adventures, personal motivations and collaborations. Given his work it is remarkable is that this book does contain nor mathematical equations neither graphical illustrations. Nowak is currently a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. Moreover, he directs since 2003 his own research program on Evolutionary Dynamics. This program has been made possible by a 30 million pledge by Wall Street tycoon Jeffrey Epstein. This is just one ingredient of the remarkable story of Nowak scientific life. The book starts with laying out the puzzle of cooperation illustrated by the prisoner’s dilemma. If both players are selfish and rational they will defect. Why do we see so much cooperation in human societies and other domains of the biological world? This puzzle was introduced to Nowak by Karl Sigmund, a professor in mathematics from the University of Vienna, while Nowak was a student in biochemistry. Sigmund talked about the famous Axelrod tournament and Nowak got hooked. The tournament of Axelrod assumed that the strategies did not make errors. What if there are errors? Will Tit for Tat still be a good strategy? His analysis showed that a more promising strategy is a more Win Stay, Loose Shift. This strategy leads to cooperation if both agents do the same, and defect if not. Hence agents can forgive.

The analysis of strategies that do well in direct reciprocity is one of the five chapters in which Nowak discuss five ways in which the prisoner’s dilemma can be solved. The second chapter is on indirect reciprocity. In a landmark paper with Karl Sigmund Nowak showed that when agents derive information on their reputation (image score) cooperation can evolve in one-shot prisoner’s dilemma. The third chapter is on spatial games and features another landmark paper on spatial chaos. This paper, written with Lord Robert May, shows that cooperation can evolve if agents interact with neighbours and imitate the best strategy of their neighbours. The forth chapter is on group selection. This controversial approach is now better known as multi-level selection. Finally, the fifth chapter is on kin-selection, the first theory on cooperation based on genetic relatedness. The discussion on the five ways to overcome the prisoner’s dilemma is especially interesting due to the discussion on the scientific process. How long hikes with Sigmund let to inspirations that let Nowak drop all other activities he was working on. How chance meetings let to new ideas. How he got, to Oxford, Princeton and finally Harvard.

In the second part of the book discusses cooperation in biology. It covers his applications to the origins of life, the study of cancer and the dominance of ant colonies. This work might be less familiar to the readers of JASSS. Especially the work on cancer, defectors in our own biology, can lead to practical applications. The final part of the book focuses on human societies. Humans are called supercooperators since they are the only organism that uses all five ways to solve social dilemmas. First the evolution of language is discussed. Nowak made important contributions to the study of language by simulating agents benefiting from mutual understanding in language games. According to Nowak, the emergence of language is the most important development in life since 600 million years. It resulted to new types of cooperation. Especially in the context of indirect reciprocity it is key to have language. We need gossip and other types of information transmission to derive reliable estimates on the reputation of strangers.

Then Nowak discusses public goods and the use of costly punishment to derive cooperation. This is the only part of the book where he discusses empirical research. With two graduate students he performed experiments which showed that punishment is not something special, but in line with earlier work on reciprocity and tit for tat. Then Nowak continues with his recent work on network theory and set theory. The book closes with a reflection on the consequences of his work. Cooperation is a crucial ingredient to evolution, but there always will be cycles. The question is how to re-establish cooperation after it has been collapsed. This book provides a nice overview of the findings of Nowak’s work. Note however, that Nowak has substantial work in other areas of research not discussed in the book such as infectious diseases. Together with science writer Roger Highfield, Nowak provides an inspirational story on science in practice. This covers the importance of his mentors in his early years, and his current role of a mentor to his students at Harvard. In conclusion, this is a marvellous book. Although I may not always agree with the findings of Nowak’s research, it is a motivating account on the messy practice of science. I highly recommend this book for students and faculty in social simulation and science in general. […], Reviewed by Marco A. Janssen
(Arizona State University) on JASSS 2011 [Nowak, Martin, Supercooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed, ISBN 9781439100189 (pb), Free Press (The): New York, NY, 2011].

Commercial break

“I think an influencer has a certain confidence,… that probably not many people have, that … they know that what they are doing is the right thing, cause they are comfortable with it…” ~ Rob Stone, in “Influencers”, June 2011.

[…] “Influencers” is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment. The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach. Written and Directed by Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, the film is a Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives (advertising, design, fashion and entertainment) who are shaping today’s pop culture. “Influencers” belongs to the new generation of short films, webdocs, which combine the documentary style and the online experience. […] from Vimeo, June 2011.

Forbidden Images

Forbidden Images (from CineGraphic Studios, 2007) is a short documentary made for the 72 Hour Film Festival in Frederick, Maryland. All of the clips used in this film came from a reel of 35mm nitrate found in an old theatre somewhere in Pennsylvania. The projectionist clipped these scenes to meet local moral standards of the time. Amazing how sadly all images refer to women. The short 2007 documentary starts with the following paragraphs:

[…] In the past film makers and theatre owners were forced to remove the following so-called scandalous scenes or face arrest. Will our current forms of censorship and moral standards appear just as ridiculous to future audiences? Do NOT let others dictate how you should present yourself or your art…; Risk more than other’s think it’s safe […]

Large Stakes, Big Mistakes…

Animated Video – Lively RSA Animate [April 2010], adapted from Dan Pink‘s talk at the RSA (below), illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. [Inspired from the work of Economics professor Dan Ariely at MIT along with his colleagues].

What drives us? Some quotes: […] Once the task called for even rudimentary COGNITIVE skills a larger reward led to poorer performance […] Once you get above rudimentary cognitive skills, rewards do not work that way [linear], this defies the laws of behavioural physics ! […] But when a task gets more complicated, it requires some conceptual, creative thinking, these kind of motivators do not work any more […] Higher incentives led to worse performance. […] Fact: Money is a motivator. In a strange way. If you don’t pay enough, people won’t be motivated. But now there is another paradox. The best use of money, and that is: pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. […] …Socialism…??

[…] Most upper-management and sales force personnel, as well as workers in many other jobs, are paid based on performance, which is widely perceived as motivating effort and enhancing productivity relative to non-contingent pay schemes. However, psychological research suggests that excessive rewards can in some cases produce supra-optimal motivation, resulting in a decline in performance. To test whether very high monetary rewards can decrease performance, we conducted a set of experiments at MIT, the University of Chicago, and rural India. Subjects in our experiment worked on different tasks and received performance-contingent payments that varied in amount from small to large relative to their typical levels of pay. With some important exceptions, we observed that high reward levels can have detrimental effects on performance. […] abstract, Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Loewenstein, and Nina Mazar, “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes“, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working paper no. 05-11, Research Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision-Making, US, July 2005. [PDF available here] (improved 2009 version below)

Video lecture – On the surprising science of motivation: analyst Daniel Pink examines the puzzle of motivation [Jul. 2009], starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. So maybe, there is a different way forward. [Inspired from the work of Economics professor Dan Ariely at MIT along with his colleagues].

[…] Payment-based performance is commonplace across many jobs in the marketplace. Many, if not most upper-management, sales force personnel, and workers in a wide variety of other jobs are rewarded for their effort based on observed measures of performance. The intuitive logic for performance-based compensation is to motivate individuals to increase their effort, and hence their output, and indeed there is some evidence that payment for performance can increase performance (Lazear, 2000). The expectation that increasing performance-contingent incentives will improve performance rests on two subsidiary assumptions: (1) that increasing performance-contingent incentives will lead to greater motivation and effort and (2) that this increase in motivation and effort will result in improved performance. The first assumption that transitory performance-based increases in pay will produce increased motivation and effort is generally accepted, although there are some notable exceptions. Gneezy and Rustichini (2000a), for example, have documented situations, both in laboratory and field experiments, in which people who were not paid at all exerted greater effort than those who were paid a small amount (see also Gneezy and Rustichini, 2000b; Frey and Jegen, 2001; Heyman and Ariely, 2004). These results show that in some situations paying a small amount in comparison to paying nothing seems to change the perceived nature of the task, which, if the amount of pay is not substantial, may result in a decline of motivation and effort.

Another situation in which effort may not respond in the expected fashion to a change in transitory wages is when workers have an earnings target that they apply narrowly. For example, Camerer, Babcock, Loewenstein and Thaler (1997) found that New York City cab drivers quit early on days when their hourly earnings were high and worked longer hours when their earnings were low. The authors speculated that the cab drivers may have had a daily earnings target beyond which their motivation to continue working dropped off. Although there appear to be exceptions to the generality of the positive relationship between pay and effort, our focus in this paper is on the second assumption – that an increase in motivation and effort will result in improved performance. The experiments we report address the question of whether increased effort necessarily leads to improved performance. Providing subjects with different levels of incentives, including incentives that were very high relative to their normal income, we examine whether, across a variety of different tasks, an increase in contingent pay leads to an improvement or decline in performance. We find that in some cases, and in fact most of the cases we examined, very high incentives result in a decrease in performance. These results provide a counterexample to the assumption that an increase in motivation and effort will always result in improved performance. […] in Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Loewenstein, and Nina Mazar, “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes“, Review of Economic Studies (2009) 75, 1-19 0034-6527/09. [PDF available here]

Now, these are not stories, these are facts. These are one of the most robust findings in social science,… yet, one of the most ignored [sic]. And they keep coming in. Such as the fallacy of the supply and demand model (March 2008). Anyway, enough good material (a simple paper with profound implications)… for one day. But hey, …Oh, if you are still wondering what other paper inspired the specific drawings at minute 7′:40” and on, in the first video over this post, well, here it is: Kristina Shampan’er and Dan Ariely (2007), “How Small is Zero Price? The True Value of Free Products“, in Marketing Science. Vol. 26, No. 6, 742 – 757. [PDF available here]… Got it ?!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Fig. – Christ having some problems on passing the right message. Comic strip from Zach Weiner (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal blog – smbc-comics.com ).

Social psychologists, sociologists, and economists have all proposed theories of norm emergence. In general, they views norm emergence as depending on three factors: (i) actors’ preferences regarding their own behaviour (inclinations); (ii) actors’ preferences regarding the behaviour of others (regulatory interests); and (iii) measures for enforcing norms (enforcement resources), such as access to sanctions and information. Whereas most studies of norm emergence have focused on inclinations or enforcement resources, this article analyses the role of regulatory interests in norm emergence. Specifically, it analyses systems of collective sanctions in which, when and individual violates or complies with a rule, not merely the individual but other members of that person’s group as well are collectively punished of rewarded by an external agent. These collective sanctions give individuals an incentive to regulate one another’s behaviour. This paper demonstrates that when a group is subjected to collective sanctions, a variety of responses may be rational: the group may either create a secondary sanctioning system to enforce the agent’s dictates, or it may revolt against the agent to destroy its sanctioning capacity. According to the proposed theoretic model. the optimal response depends quite sensitively on the group’s size, internal cohesion, and related factors. Abstract: D.D. Heckathorn, “Collective sanctions and the creation of prisoner’s dilemma norms“, American Journal of Sociology (1988), Volume: 94, Issue: 3, Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Pages: 535-562.

…

Video – […] see, in this world, there are two kinds of people, … my friend, … those with ‘loaded guns’ and those who dig. You dig. […] Last 8 minutes finale of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo), a 1966 Italian epic spaghetti western film directed by Sergio Leone, starring Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood in the title roles, playing a kind of 3-agent Prisoner’s dilemma game. Now, one of them, the Good (Clint Eastwood) is the only who knows he is in fact just playing a 2-agent PD game. And that,  besides the inner non-linearity complexity of the ‘game’, makes all the difference…