Learned at my seminar on Fundamentals of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) that I may have been a subject in a study of Social-Ecological Systems published in Science in April. The presentation today by Dr. Marco Janssen was essentially a brief on the study within the CAS context.
It was interesting hearing the theoretical interpretation of something I got to participate in. The explanations of why we were asked to do certain things makes sense at this level.
Although the article is linked to above, the basic research idea was to look at the effects of communication and punishment schemes in self-regulation of an artificial ecology. Basically, the participants--5 to a group--"harvested" items from a closed space where the regrowth of the items depended on the density of items remaining. (More dense areas = higher regrowth) If the items were depleted, nothing grew back. In scenarios where punishment was allowed, the participant could pay some of their harvested items to reduce the items of someone else. When communication was allowed, there was a 4 minute text chat between scenarios.
My personal experience with the game was one of frustration. We had a group member that--to be blunt--was an antagonistic *insert expletive* who intentionally sabotaged any and all efforts for the rest of us to succeed. After a while, the game devolved into a group effort to ensure the antagonist walked away with zero items. We were awarded a small number of extra credit points based on our performance and I think only one or two of the group accrued more than the minimal amount.* I have to be honest, I was a bit nihilistic in my pursuit of and punishment of the antagonist, primarily due to his harassment of the others.
What might be interesting--and what I suggested during the seminar--would be the ability to eject an antagonist like that from either the scenario or to create two areas within the scenario's field where a consensus of members could restrict another member (or members) from. Essentially, using banishment as a cost of punishment reducer.
A second idea would be to test the ability to set a leader who could punish at a lower (shared?) cost. I can't remember where, I need to find the reference, but I was glancing over a paper that looked at leaders and hierarchy as a means to lower individual costs of costly punishment. This could explain both the utility of hierarchy as territoriality shows up in studies of hunter-gatherers and some measure of the parochial altruism paradigm.
Regardless, it was enjoyable to see that study from both perspectives.
* - As befits a student of governance and social-ecological control, Dr. Janssen set up his extra-credit scheme so as to make it impossible to exceed 100% of the normal points. Therefore, I didn't really need the points, it just would have been nice to be able to earn them.
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