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Howard Rheingold at SDForum

Howard Rheingold spoke on Thursday night at PARC as part of the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series. They’ll make the audio available on ITConversations, probably in a couple weeks. I was especially eager to hear this talk because I’ve been tracking Howard’s work at Stanford Humanities Lab, especially Towards a Literacy of Coorperation, the course he just completed. I wasn’t able to prioritize attending because it competed with the more work-relevant Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders program (more online video!). But that’s why we document these things.

Howard’s course just concluded a couple weeks ago, so this was among the first public presentations of what they’ve been working on. They’re working on editing down video from the class, but for the time being there are some video and audio files on their site. I took notes primarily on things I wasn’t as familiar with, so if this is new to you I recommend tuning in directly (I recall the Peter Kollack session discussing more of the fundmentals of cooperation research).

Howard’s talk took us from the dawn of time til now, ending up at the question of whether our new tools can give us additional means to create even more robust cooperation. My background is in International Relations and Policial Economy, so I’ve spent a lot time on the theories underlying Howard’s work. He mentioned Robert Axelrod’s seminal quick-read, The Evolution of Cooperation which is great for anyone interested a more robust exploration the commonly cited maxim “tit for tat works”.

Howard discussed a new-to-me game called Ultimatum. It’s a single play game, where participant A is told they will be given $100 to divide between them and another player, who is faced with the choice of accepting the payout or ending the game with both players receiving $0. In developed countries, with higher standards of living, studies showed that there was a strong sense of fairness. Player A seemed to know that Player B would not accept a division that benefitted Player A too much more than Player B. Howard said the split happened below about 25%, and that by far most outcomes were between 50-50 and 75-25. Splits less fair than 75-25 were rejected as being unacceptable, despite the net-economic-gain that Player B would receive. Strikingly, this ratio did not extend to the devloping world: where subsistence was less certain, any gain was viewed as desirable, regardless of the equality of the division. (for my thinking, this is the mechanism at work in the bloghercon debates.)

This may sound of trivial interest, but for us econ fiends, this sort of outcome blows the central tenet of REMs (rational economomizing maximizers) out of the water - with tremendous implications in economic and social theory. See this paper by Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau, for a thorough, though academic, overview. This line of research adds to findings of behavioral economists that there are strong social and personal motivations for actions beyond just the cash-value calculation, and is opening a new frontier of academic research which folks like Howard are mining. As a staunch libertarian, I see nothing but good coming from a more subtle understanding of what humans seek from economic activity.

Continuing this theme, Howard went on to discuss research on altruistic punishment (see here and here) , which is a tantalizing topic I read about several months ago, and then lost track of. The question of enforcement has long puzzled researchers: why do some people waste their time, money, personal capital etc in taking action to prevent negative behavior (free-riding, rules enforcement, cheating, inequality)? From a survival perspective, why aren’t they just concerned with their own welfare? Why are they going out on a limb, or patrolling the range at night when they could be in bed, or even wasting the breath to speak out? All of this begs the question of why we aren’t the savages that economic theory presumes.

This line of research looks at general human behavior to say why the general person seems to be biased toward cooperation, beyond the generally 20-30% who chronically pursue their own gain. Howard didn’t mention this research, but in the fall, I recall reading on PET-scan based research showing that, on an individual level, some people receive stimulation in an area of the brain associated with pleasure when they take actions enforcing actions “retribution”. This is satisfaction received from “doing the right thing” as they perceive it. And thus the mystery is solved: these people are getting a chemical benefit from their otherwise calorie- or capital-expending effort - even outside of just the “we need to keep this place from going insane” sense of collective action. I was keenly interested in this when I first ran across it (via the serendipity engine that is Google News), because I am unhesitatingly one of those people. Underdogs? Defended. Injustice? Pointed out. Hypocrisy? Mocked. Puffery? Deflated. Well-poisioning? Countered. It’s curious to see some basis for why I still like to defend the dork that gets beaten up in the schoolyard.

Howard cited further studies (that I haven’t yet found) show people will take action to punish those who fail to punish; that there is an additional layer of enforcement around regimes of cooperation. A system of nudging, rib-poking and hazing so we all hew to same behavior.

Back to the talk, Howard wrapped it up by stating his belief (hope?) that these “new forms of communication will create new forms of wealth”. This was an echo to how he started the talk, when he discussed how eons ago banding together to hunt large game created a new form of protein-wealth that both expanded communities (the weaker could be more easily supported from the excess as it was not an economic loss to share the new abundance) and stregthened their bonds (the best place to store food is in your neighbor’s stomach — not cannibalism — but the foundation of a system of reciprocity!!). A new form of wealth changes the game, and can hopefully take us another step up from savagery.

My final note from the evening might have come from Howard’s response to a question, but contains perhaps the most profound statement on the logic of the “corporate altruism” that I know had the folks at NEC baffled (and me lacking a coherent explanation). Howard said something along the lines of “corporate support of Linux is seeking to turn Prisoner’s Dilemma into Assurance/Stag Hunt” . Which means it’s moving the zero-sum game of platform-committted devlopment to a more open application environment. And it is a very elegant way of saying “Growing the Pie”.

Perhaps anticipating Howard’s talk, Christopher Allen blogged about altrusitic punishment on Thursday morning, connecting these otherwise-game-theoretic concerns to the blogosphere, with his continued focus on the fundmental characteristics of group interaction. From my view Dunbar’s number is an observation that’s tied to the current-state of cooperation - both our collective skill at cooperating and the state of our tools, rather than a core observation on human nature itself.

For another take on this, check out Elisa’s view on Howard’s talk…. her overview is different than mine (funny how she slacked on writing this until today as well).
There’s certainly a fertile discussion gaining mometum around these important concepts.