Whether they're incremental or cataclysmic, shifts in behavior often prompt feedback effects through social systems.
For example, a wartime labor shortage, postwar economic growth, and a growing sense of gender egalitarianism are a few of the interrelated factors that have led to women in Western European countries to work outside the home.
Often, drivers of change in attitudes and behaviors among people, social groups, and institutions in turn affect other sources of governance. These reciprocal relationships are what SFI's Coevolution of Behaviors and Institutions working group has explored since it started meeting in 1998. The group meets again January 13-15 at SFI.
The group is led by SFI Professor Sam Bowles, head of the Institute’s Behavioral Sciences Program; others include SFI Cowan Professor Robert Boyd, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, and economists Larry Blume (Cornell, SFI External Professor), Peyton Young (Oxford) and Herbert Gintis (Central European University, SFI External Professor).
They study how the institutions that regulate social interactions – such as economic exchange, marital matching, and cooperation and conflict within and between groups – shape the evolution of individual preferences, norms, and other motivations, and in turn how the resulting individual behaviors shape the evolution of social institutions.
“To sharpen the theory-building process, we address such empirical puzzles as the innovation, persistence, and demise of institutions regulating economic activity and the distribution of wealth,” explains Bowles. By applying methods including empirical cases, agent-based simulations, and stochastic evolutionary game theory, they hope to use their understanding of these system dynamics to find ways that they can better serve the needs of all people, particularly the least well-off, he says.
Among the attendees this January are Diego Gambetta, a sociologist from Oxford with expertise in trust within extra-legal systems like the mafia; he will present results of behavioral experiments seeking to understand cultural differences between North and South Italy. Presenter Amanda Lea Robinson, a political scientist at Ohio State University, will show how collective identity affects trust and cooperation between ethnic groups in her session “The Geography of Ethnic Diversity.”
More about the SFI working group