| 1. |
- Jansson, Fredrik
(author)
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What games support the evolution of an ingroup bias?
- 2015
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In: Journal of Theoretical Biology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0022-5193 .- 1095-8541. ; 373, s. 100-110
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- There is an increasing wealth of models trying to explain the evolution of group discrimination and an ingroup bias. This paper sets out to systematically investigate the most fundamental assumption in these models: in what kind of situations do the interactions take place? What strategic structures - games - support the evolution of an ingroup bias? More specifically, the aim here is to find the prerequisites for when a bias also with respect to minimal groups - arbitrarily defined groups void of group-specific qualities - is selected for, and which cannot be ascribed to kin selection.Through analyses and simulations of minimal models of two-person games, this paper indicates that only some games are conducive to the evolution of ingroup favouritism. In particular, this class does not contain the prisoners׳ dilemma, but it does contain anti-co-ordination and co-ordination games. Contrasting to the prisoners׳ dilemma, these are games where it is not a matter of whether to behave altruistically, but rather one of predicting what the other person will be doing, and where I would benefit from you knowing my intentions.In anti-co-ordination games, on average, not only will agents discriminate between groups, but also in such a way that their choices maximise the sum of the available payoffs towards the ingroup more often than towards the outgroup. And in co-ordination games, even if agents do manage to co-ordinate with the whole population, they are more likely to co-ordinate on the socially optimal equilibrium within their group. Simulations show that this occurs most often in games where there is a component of risk-taking, and thus trust, involved. A typical such game is the stag hunt or assurance game.
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| 2. |
- Bursell, Moa, et al.
(author)
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Diversity preferences among employees and ethnoracial workplace segregation
- 2018
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In: Social Science Research. - : ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE. - 0049-089X .- 1096-0317. ; 74, s. 62-76
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Ethno-racial workplace segregation increases already existing ethno-racial inequality. While previous research has identified discriminatory employers as drivers of workplace segregation, this study addresses the role of the employees. Sociological and social psychological theory suggest that people prefer to surround themselves with people who positively confirm their social identity or who contribute with higher group status. Through web-based surveys, we measure employee attitudes and preferences concerning ethno-racial workplace diversity, to what extent they differ by ethnicity/race, and if they contain intersectional patterns. Thereafter, we use simulation models to analyze the consequences for workplace segregation that these preferences would have, if realized. The main survey results showed that all ethno-racial groups favored their own in-group as colleagues, especially European Americans. As a secondary choice, the respondents preferred the out-group with the highest labor market status. Intersectional patterns were identified, as minority women were preferred as colleagues over minority men. Our simulation model, based on the results of two surveys on stated vs. indirectly revealed preferences, showed that employee preferences were at best not diverse enough to desegregate workplaces. When based on the most common preferences (i.e. excluding a few outliers), the simulations even suggested that these preferences can cause segregation. We relate these findings to Schelling's model of segregation.
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| 3. |
- de Barra, Mícheál, et al.
(author)
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Aversive medical treatments signal a need for support : a mathematical model
- 2019
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In: Evolutionary Human Sciences. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 2513-843X. ; 1, s. 1-15
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Ineffective, aversive and harmful medical treatments are common cross-culturally, historically and today. Using evolutionary game theory, we develop the following model to explain their persistence. Humans are often incapacitated by illness and injury, and are unusually dependent on care from others during convalescence. However, such caregiving is vulnerable to exploitation via illness deception, whereby people feign or exaggerate illness in order to gain access to care. Our model demonstrates that aversive treatments can counter-intuitively increase the range of conditions where caregiving is evolutionarily viable, because only individuals who stand to gain substantially from care will accept the treatment. Thus, contemporary and historical “ineffective” treatments may be solutions to the problem of allocating care to people whose true need is difficult to discern.
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| 4. |
- Eriksson, Kimmo, 1967-, et al.
(author)
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Procedural priming of a numerical cognitive illusion
- 2016
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In: Judgment and Decision Making. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 1930-2975. ; 11:3, s. 205-212
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- A strategy activated in one task may be transferred to subsequent tasks and prevent activation of other strategies that would otherwise come to mind, a mechanism referred to as procedural priming. In a novel application of procedural priming we show that it can make or break cognitive illusions. Our test case is the 1/k illusion, which is based on the same unwarranted mathematical shortcut as the MPG illusion and the time-saving bias. The task is to estimate distances between values of fractions on the form 1/k. Most people given this task intuitively base their estimates on the distances between the denominators (i.e., the reciprocals of the fractions), which may yield very poor estimations of the true distances between the fractions. As expected, the tendency to fall for this illusion is related to cognitive style (Study 1). In order to apply procedural priming we constructed versions of the task in which the illusion is weak, in the sense that most people do not fall for it anymore. We then gave participants both “strong illusion” and “weak illusion” versions of the task (Studies 2 and 3). Participants who first did the task in the weak illusion version would often persist with the correct strategy even in the strong illusion version, thus breaking the otherwise strong illusion in the latter task. Conversely, participants who took the strong illusion version first would then often fall for the illusion even in the weak illusion version, thus strengthening the otherwise weak illusion in the latter task.
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| 5. |
- Jansson, Fredrik, et al.
(author)
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Cooperation and Shared Beliefs about Trust in the Assurance Game
- 2015
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In: PLOS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 10:12
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Determinants of cooperation include ingroup vs. outgroup membership, and individual traits, such as prosociality and trust. We investigated whether these factors can be overridden by beliefs about people's trust. We manipulated the information players received about each other's level of general trust, "high" or "low". These levels were either measured (Experiment 1) or just arbitrarily assigned labels (Experiment 2). Players' choices whether to cooperate or defect in a stag hunt (or an assurance game)-where it is mutually beneficial to cooperate, but costly if the partner should fail to do so-were strongly predicted by what they were told about the other player's trust label, as well as by what they were told that the other player was told about their own label. Our findings demonstrate the importance for cooperation in a risky coordination game of both first- and second-order beliefs about how much people trust each other. This supports the idea that institutions can influence cooperation simply by influencing beliefs.
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| 6. |
- Jansson, Fredrik, et al.
(author)
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Cultural Systems
- 2024
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Many cultural phenomena cannot be understood by studying traits in isolation. Instead, they are embedded in webs of relations, layered with rich social meaning, and sequentially acquired and evaluated, \emph{filtered}, in light of previously acquired traits. Incorporating multiple traits and their relations is needed to understand the organization, dynamics, and emergent products of cultural evolution. We argue that a systems approach offers the potential for: (i) a more thorough understanding of the source and character of emergent phenomena, crucial for understanding the origin and historical development of culture; (ii) an increased scope of cultural evolution, whereby faithful transmission, self-organization and filtering of culture can be accounted for by systems dynamics without the need for strong assumptions about innate machinery; and (iii) a more robust theoretical connection between cultural evolution and processes of development as they are studied in developmental psychology and related fields.
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| 7. |
- Jansson, Fredrik, et al.
(author)
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Cultural Systems
- 2023
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In: The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution. - : Oxford University Press. - 9780198869252
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Many cultural phenomena cannot be understood by studying traits in isolation. Instead, they are embedded in webs of relations, layered with rich social meaning, and sequentially acquired and evaluated, filtered, in light of previously acquired traits. Incorporating multiple traits and their relations is needed to understand the organization, dynamics, and emergent products of cultural evolution. This chapter argues that a systems approach offers the potential for: (i) a more thorough understanding of the source and character of emergent phenomena, crucial for understanding the origin and historical development of culture; (ii) an increased scope of cultural evolution, whereby faithful transmission, self-organization and filtering of culture can be accounted for by systems dynamics, without the need for strong assumptions about innate machinery; and (iii) a more robust theoretical connection between cultural evolution and processes of development as they are studied in developmental psychology and related fields.
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| 8. |
- Jansson, Fredrik, et al.
(author)
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Modeling the Evolution of Creoles
- 2015
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In: Language Dynamics and Change. - : Brill. - 2210-5824 .- 2210-5832. ; 5:1, s. 1-51
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Various theories have been proposed regarding the origin of creole languages. Describing a process where only the end result is documented involves several methodological difficulties. In this paper we try to address some of the issues by using a novel mathematical model together with detailed empirical data on the origin and structure of Mauritian Creole. Our main focus is on whether Mauritian Creole may have originated only from a mutual desire to communicate, without a target language or prestige bias. Our conclusions are affirmative. With a confirmation bias towards learning from successful communication, the model predicts Mauritian Creole better than any of the input languages, including the lexifier French, thus providing a compelling and specific hypothetical model of how creoles emerge. The results also show that it may be possible for a creole to develop quickly after first contact, and that it was created mostly from material found in the input languages, but without inheriting their morphology.
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| 9. |
- Jansson, Fredrik, et al.
(author)
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Modelling cultural systems and selective filters
- 2024
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- A specific goal of the field of cultural evolution is to understand how processes of transmission and selection at the individual level lead to population-wide patterns of cultural diversity and change. Models of cultural evolution have typically assumed that traits are independent of one another and essentially exchangeable. But culture has a structure: traits bear relationships to one another that affect the transmission and selection process itself. Here we introduce a modelling framework to explore the effect of cultural structure on the process of learning. Through simulations, we find that introducing this simple structure changes the cultural dynamics. Based on a basic filtering mechanism for parsing these relationships, more elaborate cultural filters emerge. In a mostly incompatible cultural domain of traits, these filters organise culture into mostly (but not fully) consistent and stable systems. Incompatible domains produce small homogeneous cultures, while more compatibility increases size, diversity, and group divergence. When individuals copy based on a trait's features (here, its compatibility relationships) they produce more homogeneous cultures than when they copy based on the agent carrying the cultural trait. We discuss the implications of considering cultural systems and filters in the dynamics of cultural change.
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| 10. |
- Jansson, Fredrik, et al.
(author)
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Modelling cultural systems and selective filters
- 2021
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In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences. - : The Royal Society. - 0962-8436 .- 1471-2970. ; 376:1828
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- A specific goal of the field of cultural evolution is to understand how processes of transmission and selection at the individual level lead to population-wide patterns of cultural diversity and change. Models of cultural evolution have typically assumed that traits are independent of one another and essentially exchangeable. But culture has a structure: traits bear relationships to one another that affect the transmission and selection process itself. Here we introduce a modelling framework to explore the effect of cultural structure on the process of learning. Through simulations, we find that introducing this simple structure changes the cultural dynamics. Based on a basic filtering mechanism for parsing these relationships, more elaborate cultural filters emerge. In a mostly incompatible cultural domain of traits, these filters organise culture into mostly (but not fully) consistent and stable systems. Incompatible domains produce small homogeneous cultures, while more compatibility increases size, diversity, and group divergence. When individuals copy based on a trait's features (here, its compatibility relationships) they produce more homogeneous cultures than when they copy based on the agent carrying the cultural trait. We discuss the implications of considering cultural systems and filters in the dynamics of cultural change.
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