Idioticon: Altruistic Punishment

When Maia Szalavitz wrote recently in some ghastly bit of Time magazine about behaviour in NYC, it felt as if she somehow imagined the city quite different from other cities, towns and villages around the globe. Which, of course, it is and it isn't.

"For many residents of New York City, our bodies are our cars. So rather than engaging in "road rage" against slow or erratic drivers on a highway, New Yorkers descend into "sidewalk rage," paroxysms of fury directed at people who exhibit irrational, obstructive walking behavior on Manhattan's crowded concrete. But is this reaction a sign of mental illness — or could it perhaps reflect an evolutionary adaptation that may have enabled the development of cooperation?

Well Maia, even pedestrians in rural West Dorset can be troubled by dawdling monks or teenagers on their mobile phones blocking the gateway to the Jurassic Coast. While we may not be members of the Facebook group called "I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head", which apparently boasts nearly 15,000 members, we are certainly signed up to the "I am still learning to lessen my attachment to feeling distaste when city dwellers lean over my garden wall and patronise the shit out of me" group..

Maia continues:

"For the rare folks who act out in dangerous ways, sidewalk or road rage may indeed signal illness. But the idea raises the much more interesting question of why so many otherwise normal people also feel the same intense emotion when navigating around slow hordes — and have to temper their impulses to act on their anger — in the first place.

Which brings me to what researchers call 'altruistic punishment'. While it sounds like an oxymoron, altruistic punishment is basically how social norms get enforced. So when you expel a huffy "Excuse me!" to the rude sidewalk clogger in front of you who has stopped midstride to check his BlackBerry, you're trying to discourage behavior that endangers other members of the society. It's called 'altruistic' punishment, because your efforts to protect civility come at personal cost with little chance of personal benefit: you are far more likely to get an obscene gesture or even a punch in the mouth than a thank you.

Many evolutionary psychologists believe, however, that without altruistic punishment, cooperation could not have evolved. In simulations of "selfish" versus "cooperative" strategies for living, for instance, researchers have found that altruistic or cooperative creatures beat out selfish ones only in an environment in which the failure to cooperate is actively detected and punished. Sidewalk rage — anger over the selfish violation of a cooperative social norm that protects the group — is a nice example of that.

Reinforcing that theory is the result of a recent study that explored whether altruistic punishment is an act of deliberation and self-control, or, as one might expect from the case of sidewalk rage, an emotional impulse. Researchers found a connection between impulsiveness and altruistic punishment, suggesting that the phenomenon is more the result of emotion (like sidewalk rage) than reason.

In the study, researchers measured participants' impulse control by subjecting them to a test similar to the famous Stanford marshmallow test, which allows people to gain more goodies later if they can resist the temptation of a smaller reward now.

The participants were also asked to play an "ultimatum game" in which two people have to split a sum of money. The first person gets to decide how the loot is divided, but if the second person rejects the offer, no one gets anything. In other words, it's a situation in which you can punish someone for being unfair or selfish — but only at a cost to yourself.

Adding a twist to the experiment, some volunteers were given medication that depleted the amount of serotonin in their brains; others were given placebo. Low levels of serotonin have been linked with impulsive and irrational behavior, so reducing it could help determine whether self-control and altruistic punishment are affected by it in the same way.

And indeed, in the low serotonin condition, participants were more likely both to make impulsive choices in the delayed-reward test and to punish those who behaved uncooperatively in the ultimatum game, supporting the idea that altruistic punishment is driven by emotion, specifically, anger.

So take heart, readers. If you find yourself fuming at those who behave in ways that are uncivil in your culture, you may be exhibiting an emotion that was a key part in allowing civilization to exist in the first place. And to those who want to avoid enraging New Yorkers: keep right and let us pass!"

Credits and references: Time magazine

Idioticon: Ecological Thinking

"Ecological thinking sees the properties and behaviours of parts as determined by the pattern of the whole. Rather than look at an individual species, we look at the interactions of all the organisms, and how they are maintained by, and themselves maintain, the overall flows of resources. Thus the trees on a mountainside themselves play a part in the formation of the clouds and rainfall that maintain them and that contribute to the viability of other species around them. Lose the trees and the cycle of rain is lost, the heat of the sun dries the ground, and the whole ecosystem moves to a much lower level of fecundity. 

Economic thinking is particularly concerned with issues of resources and how they are allocated. Consideration of such issues lies naturally within an ecological framework. However, in our common parlance, ‘the economy’ has come to refer to the pattern of activity that is supported by our use of money, and we generally have money in mind when we refer to ‘economic value’. From this habit of language and thought much confusion arises that this set of essays is trying to clear up. We will be developing the idea of an economy in later essays, but for now, in order to introduce the discussion, we’ll stay with the conventional sense of ‘an economy’ to mean what goes on when we take things to market and trade them for money. 

In the case of natural resources it is very clear that the ecosystem ‘works’ without the need for any money to circulate; it is the input of energy from the sun, and the flow of resources such as water through rainfall, and other material exchanges that sustain it. When an ecosystem interacts with the economy then an additional dynamic is set up. If you want to log a forest for timber sustainably then you must understand the ecosystem that maintains its viability, or you will be in danger of taking too much from it, and tipping it into decline.
What is this economic dynamic – what happens when an ecosystem becomes entwined with economic activity? At the simplest level, some components of the ecosystem become detached from their role in the system, in which they and the system maintain each other through their mutual and original properties, and get put to some ‘other’ use which bears no systemic relationship to the health or viability of the original system. 

I cut down a tree and take it away to make furniture. Two things happened here: the tree came down, and it was removed. The first would happen naturally at some point, but its removal inevitably changes the ecosystem. The pattern of resource circulation that was a part of the system that produced the tree has been disturbed. The cutting down might also matter because the seeds might not yet have been produced; or they might need fire to germinate, and felling may change the undergrowth such that the conditions for fire and germination are lost, etc. 

The basic point is that ecosystems do not exist ‘for’ any purpose – they just are what they are, and they develop along certain paths based on the conditions they are in. Once we start to connect them with economies, in which parts of them are ‘for something’ that lies outside the ecosystem, then we perturb them, and thereby we become instrumental in their continued viability. We create a mutual dependence between our own needs and the needs of the ecosystem. If we need it for something, to make furniture or whatever, then it also needs us to ensure that our perturbations don’t destroy its essential system properties. At the most basic level our responsibility is to ensure we do not draw  own too much resource at once, and that we allow the system time to ‘recover’; in other words, we rely on some self-maintaining, homeostatic process to put back the things we are removing, or remove the things we are dumping."

Bill Sharpe: Homo Ecologicus and Homo Economicus

Credits and references: 
Economies of Life