In this paper we use an experimental approach to investigate how linguistic conventions can emerge in a society without explicit agreement. As a starting point we consider the signaling game introduced by Lewis. We find that in experimental settings, small groups can quickly develop conventions of signal meaning in these games. We also investigate versions of the game where the theoretical literature indicates that meaning will be less likely to arise—when there are more than two states for actors to transfer (...) meaning about and when some states are more likely than others. In these cases, we find that actors are less likely to arrive at strategies where signals have clear conventional meaning. We conclude with a proposal for extending the use of the methodology of experimental economics in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

We use game theoretic models to take an in-depth look at the dynamics of discrimination and academic collaboration. We find that in collaboration networks, small minority groups may be more likely to end up being discriminated against while collaborating. We also find that discrimination can lead members of different social groups to mostly collaborate with in-group members, decreasing the effective diversity of the social network. Drawing on previous work, we discuss how decreases in the diversity of scientific collaborations might negatively (...) affect the progress of epistemic communities. (shrink)

This article analyzes the recent debate surrounding inclusive fitness and argues that certain limitations ascribed to it by critics—such as requiring weak selection or providing dynamically insufficient models—are better thought of as limitations of the methodological framework most often used with inclusive fitness. In support of this, I show how inclusive fitness can be used with the replicator dynamics. I conclude that much of the debate is best understood as being about the orthogonal issue of using abstract versus idealized models.

The priority rule in science has been interpreted as a behavior regulator for the scientific community, which benefits society by adequately structuring the distribution of intellectual labor across pre-existing research programs. Further, it has been lauded as part of society's "grand reward scheme" because it fairly rewards people for the benefits they produce. But considerations about how news of scientific developments spreads throughout a scientific community at large suggest that the priority rule is something else entirely, which can disadvantage historically (...) underrepresented or otherwise marginalized social groups. (shrink)

Inclusive fitness has been under intense scrutiny in recent years, with many critics claiming the framework leads to incorrect predictions. We consider one particularly influential heuristic for estimating inclusive fitness in the context of the very case that motivated reliance on it to begin with: the Sir Philip Sidney signalling game played with relatives. Using a neighbour-modulated fitness model, we show when and why this heuristic is problematic. We argue that reliance on the heuristic rests on a misunderstanding of what (...) it means for two organisms to be related and perpetuates a mischaracterization of the role of the ‘relatedness’ parameter in inclusive fitness. _1_ Introduction _2_ Heuristic Inclusive Fitness _3_ The Sir Philip Sidney Game _4_ Model _5_ Results _6_ Conclusion Appendix. (shrink)

The study of social justice asks: what sorts of social arrangements are equitable ones? But also: how do we derive the inequitable arrangements we often observe in human societies? In particular, in spite of explicitly stated equity norms, categorical inequity tends to be the rule rather than the exception. The cultural Red King hypothesis predicts that differentials in group size may lead to inequitable outcomes for minority groups even in the absence of explicit or implicit bias. We test this prediction (...) in an experimental context where subjects divided into groups engage in repeated play of a bargaining game. We ran 14 trials involving a total of 112 participants. The results of the experiments are statistically significant and suggestive: individuals in minority groups in these experiments end up receiving fewer resources than those in majority groups. Combined with previous theoretical findings, these results give some reason to think that the cultural Red King may occur in real human groups. (shrink)

The social identity of a researcher can affect their position in a community, as well as the uptake of their ideas. In many fields, members of underrepresented or minority groups are less likely to be cited, leading to citation gaps. Though this empirical phenomenon has been well-studied, empirical work generally does not provide insight into the causes of citation gaps. I will argue, using mathematical models, that citation gaps are likely due in part to the structure of academic communities. The (...) existence of these ‘structural causes’ has implications for attempts to lessen citation gaps, and for proposals to make academic communities more efficient. These proposals have the potential to create feedback loops, amplifying current structural inequities. (shrink)

In explaining the emergence of conventions surrounding human cooperation and helping of those in need, it seems as though honest communication of need is an essential part of the story. While previous results indicate that punishment promotes cooperation, this paper will argue that the story is more complicated. Namely, whether punishment promotes cooperation depends on what you punish. Punishment of those who lie about their need for a resource may instead impede cooperation, as the attempts to deceive that arise in (...) cooperative endeavors may be too costly to make cooperation worthwhile. (shrink)

Diversity of social identities can improve the performance of groups through varied cognitive and communicative pathways. Recently, research efforts have focused on identifying when we should expect to see these potential benefits in real-world settings. While most research to date has studied this topic at individual and interpersonal levels, in this paper, we develop an agent-based model to explore how various aspects of homophily, the tendency of individuals to associate with similar others, affects performance at a larger scale. Study 1 (...) examines how two types of homophily---identity-driven and opinion-driven---impact collective performance on a sequential decision-making task via modulating network formation and trust relations. Study 2 considers how the presence of identity-based conformity pressure can affect the findings from the first study. Overall, we find that the effect of homophily on performance is complex, depending on the operative dimensions of similarity, mediating pathways, and the specific outcome of interest. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for policy interventions aiming to improve group performance. (shrink)

According to Grice's `Cooperative Principle', human communicators are involved in a cooperative endeavor. The speaker attempts to make herself understood and the listener, in turn, assumes that the speaker is trying to maximize the ease and effectiveness of communication. While pragmatists recognize that people do not always behave in such a way, the Cooperative Principle is generally assumed to hold. However, it is often the case that the interests of speakers and listeners diverge, at least to some degree. Communication can (...) arise in such situations when the cost of signaling is high enough that it aligns the interests of speaker and listener, but what happens when the cost of signaling is not sufficient to align the interests of those communicating? In these cases the theoretical prediction is that they will reach a partially informative system of communication. Using methods from experimental economics, we test whether theoretical predictions are borne out. We find that subjects do learn to communicate without the cooperative principle. (shrink)

While prior models of the evolution of altruism have assumed that organisms reproduce asexually, this paper presents a model of the evolution of altruism for sexually reproducing organisms using Hardy–Weinberg dynamics. In this model, the presence of reciprocal altruists allows the population to evolve to a stable polymorphic population where the majority of organisms are altruistic. Further, adding stochasticity leads to even larger numbers of altruists, while adding stochasticity to an analogous asexual model leads to more selfish organisms. The contrast (...) between these outcomes demonstrates why it may be important to pay attention to the underlying genetics of a population. (shrink)

The ‘phenotypic gambit,’ the assumption that we can ignore genetics and look at the fitness of phenotypes to determine the expected evolutionary dynamics of a population, is often used in evolutionary game theory. However, as this paper will show, an overlooked genotype to phenotype map can qualitatively affect evolution in ways the phenotypic approach cannot predict or explain. This gives us reason to believe that, even in the long-term, correspondences between phenotypic predictions and dynamical outcomes are not robust for all (...) plausible assumptions regarding the underlying genetics of traits. This paper shows important ways in which the phenotypic gambit can fail and how to proceed with evolutionary game theoretic modeling when it does. (shrink)

In this paper we use an experimental approach to investigate how linguistic conventions can emerge in a society without explicit agreement. As a starting point we consider the signaling game introduced by Lewis. We find that in experimental settings, small groups can quickly develop conventions of signal meaning in these games. We also investigate versions of the game where the theoretical literature indicates that meaning will be less likely to arise---when there are more than two states for actors to transfer (...) meaning about and when some states are more likely than others. In these cases, we find that actors are less likely to arrive at strategies where signals have clear conventional meaning. We conclude with a proposal for extending the use of the methodology of experimental economics in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have become increasingly dissatisfied with how science funding is distributed. Traditional grant funding processes are seen as stifling the creativity of researchers, in addition to being bureaucratic, slow, and inefficient. Consequently, there have been increasing popular calls to make “fast funding” – fast, unbureaucratic grant applications – a new standard for scientific funding. Though this approach to funding, implemented by Fast Grants, has been successful as a pandemic response strategy, we believe there (...) are serious costs to its wide-scale adoption, particularly for transparency and equity, and that the purported benefits – increased creativity and efficiency – are unlikely to materialize. While traditional funding mechanisms are certainly not perfect, scientific communities should think twice before adopting fast funding as a new standard for funding. (shrink)

The concept of fitness is central to evolutionary biology. Models of evolutionary change typically use some quantity called “fitness” which measures an organism’s reproductive success. But what exactly does it mean that fitness is such a measure? In what follows, we look at the interplay between abstract evolutionary models and quantitative measures of fitness and develop a measurement-theoretic perspective on fitness in order to explore what makes certain measures of fitness significant.

Recently, game theory and evolutionary game theory - mathematical frameworks from economics and biology designed to model and explain interactive behavior - have proved fruitful tools for philosophers in areas such as ethics, philosophy of language, social epistemology, and political philosophy. This methodological osmosis is part of a trend where philosophers have blurred disciplinary lines to import the best epistemic tools available. In this vein, experimental philosophers have drawn on practices from the social sciences, and especially from psychology, to expand (...) philosophy's grasp on issues from morality to consciousness. We argue that the recent prevalence of formal work on human interaction in philosophy opens the door for new methods in experimental philosophy. In particular, we discuss methods from experimental economics, focusing on a small literature we have been developing investigating signaling and communication in humans. We describe results from a novel experiment showing how environmental structure can shape signaling behavior. (shrink)

Humans are often altruistic in a variety of contexts, even toward strangers they may never meet again. What explains this behavior? Many argue that kin selection cannot explain it but group selecti...

While there are many important similarities between evolution in biology and learning in economics, we should be cautious when importing ideas from one evolutionary context to the other. I will argue that there is a lack of caution is behind the tendency to think of measures of correlation (e.g., ‘relatedness’) as akin to attitudes of economic agents (e.g., as capturing how much an organism or agent ‘values’ or ‘cares about’ a social partner), leading to use of unreliable heuristics and misunderstandings (...) in biology, as well as to misuse of biological results in economics. (shrink)