John Orbell

University of Oregon | UO · Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences

Unmitigated climate change will likely produce major problems for human populations worldwide. Although many researchers and policy-makers believe that drought may be an important “push” factor underlying migration in the future, the precise relationship between drought and migration remains unclear. This article models the potential scope of such...

The human consequences of drought are normally addressed in terms of “water scarcity” originating from human water use. In these terms, a common prediction to the next few decades is that population growth, not climate change, will be the dominant factor determining numbers living under such scarcity. Here we address the relative importance of incr...

Explanations for suicide attacks abound. Yet the literature remains conceptually fragmented, with different authors focusing on different attitudes, incentive structures, values, psychological processes, strategic imperatives, and cultural, historical, and personal circumstances. Curiously, however, there have been few efforts to cast suicide bombi...

“Founders” of new scholarly ideas, perspectives, or paradigms are people who advocate for such ideas before wider scholarly audiences accept them or even know they exist. Such scholars have an uphill battle. They must persuade journal and book editors to publish their work. Those gatekeepers depend on reviewers with established reputations in conve...

“Founders” of new scholarly ideas, perspectives, or paradigms are people who advocate for such ideas before wider scholarly audiences accept them or even know they exist. Such scholars have an uphill battle. They must persuade journal and book editors to publish their work. Those gatekeepers depend on reviewers with established reputations in conve...

Altruism (helping others at a cost to oneself) may evolve via group selection if the cost of altruism to the individual is compensated for by growth differences among groups when (1) there is high genetic variation among members of different groups; (2) more altruistic groups grow faster and (3) between-group migration is low. Nevertheless, group s...

Primatological and archeological evidence along with anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherer societies indicate that lethal between-group violence may have been sufficiently frequent during our ancestral past to have shaped our evolved behavioral repertoire. Two simulations explore the possibility that heroism (risking one's life fighting for t...

L. Harmon Zeigler died from a massive heart attack in Tacoma on July 31, 2006. He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Pat; his two children, Mike and Amanda; and three grandchildren, Ben, Zoe and Ruby.

The willingness of people to risk their lives fighting on behalf of their nation (which we call heroism) is a background assumption in the study of war, thus of international relations, but also an evolutionary puzzle. We use two computer simulations to explore the possibility that heroism could have evolved as a domain specific form of altruism, s...

Synopsis Humans have a rational reason to seek out and selectively play Prisoner’s Dilemma games with others who (for whatever reason) will play cooperatively, while avoiding those who will defect. It follows that they also have reason to try and persuade others that they will personally cooperate if a game is joined (using the term from Evolutiona...

Laboratory research studying behavior in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game is consistent with the commonplace perception that social exchange is risky. Although they often do cooperate, people also often defect. Thus, the decision to enter a PD game with a stranger, about whom one has no good basis for predicting behavior, is a bet on cooperation. M...

The theory of clubs addresses the gap between purely private and purely public goods, being concerned with how groups ('clubs') form to provide themselves with goods that are available to their membership, but from which others (non-members) can be excluded. Despite 35 years of formal development, there have been virtually no laboratory studies of...

How to promote cooperative behavior is classically solved by incentives that lead self-interested individuals in socially desirable directions, but by now well-established laboratory results show that people often do act cooperatively, even at significant cost to themselves. These results suggest that cooperative dispositions might be an evolved pa...

Modeling cognitive evolution: A reply to Stone - Volume 22 Issue 2 - James E. Hanley, Tomonori Morikawa, John Orbell

Tomonori Morikawa, James E. Hanley, and John Orbell have argued that natural selection leads populations who play Hawk-Dove, a game-theoretic stylization of confrontation, to develop the capacity for various "orders of recognition." Such an argument requires a model linking game play to the presence or absence of various cognitive mechanisms. Morik...

How cooperative dispositions might have evolved among social animals has, for many years, been productively addressed within the prisoner's dilemma paradigm. That game captures the intuition that by cooperating, individuals can often produce more than is possible by their separate efforts and also that self-interest can lead individuals to undermin...

Several bodies of theory develop the idea that the intelligence of highly social animals is significantly organized around the adaptive problems posed by their sociality. By this hypothesis, sociality selects for, among other attributes, capacities for information others can gather about one's own future behaviour, and for such manipulations by oth...

Like other social animals, humans play adaptively important games, and current evolutionary theory predicts special-purpose, domain-specific cognitive mechanisms for playing such games. We offer a functional analysis of the information requirements for successfully playing one important social game, the "hawk-dove" conflict-of-interest game, develo...

The hijacking and purposeful crashing of airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prompts questions about why the passengers and crew of those airplanes did not act to prevent these attacks, as did at least some passengers on a hijacked flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. We argue, first, that humans have an ev...

The goal of this project is to establish how social agents can help humans form groups and achieve beneficial outcomes in their task-oriented use of cyberspace. To achieve this goal, the social challenges faced by humans trying to form groups, and the design problems of creating agents that can operate effectively in a mixed human-agent context, mu...

The role of perceived physical attractiveness in everyday exchange is addressed using a laboratory paradigm that examines both play-versus-not-play and cooperate-versus-defect choices in an ecology of available prisoner's dilemma games. The analysis considers the actions of both subject and other in encounters where exchange relationships are possi...

We use computer simulations to show how social fragmentation and consequent social loss can result from six innocuous cognitive and behavioral assumptions. These assumptions govern individuals' choices with respect to each other and are independent of processes associated with fragmentation in various classical literatures. We model "society" as a...

Teaching “Evolution, Cooperation, and Ethics” - Volume 15 Issue 1 - John Orbell

Various authors have pointed to the fitness advantage from a capacity to recognize others' intentions in prisoner's dilemma games, yet cognitive mechanisms supporting such perceptiveness might be no more efficient than the simple and presumably inexpensive rule to 'assume that potential partners have the same behavioral intentions as yourself.' Lab...

We use computer simulation to identify a process by which cooperation evolves without iteration, and evolves better in large than in small societies. It is based on an empirically supported heuristic for deciding whether to enter noniterated prisoner's dilemma games, namely, Expect others to have the same dispositions as yourself. Players are assig...

While the cooperate vs. defect choice in the prisoner's dilemma is not an appropriate paradigm for the study of trust and trusting behavior, the play vs. not play choiceis. We show that femalesas a category are more trusted to cooperate — by both male and female judges — than males. Yet neither male nor female judges use gender to predict cooperati...

We outline a model of how freedom to choose between playing and not playing particular Prisoner's Dilemma games can (1) increase social welfare and (2) provide relative gains to intending cooperators. When cooperators are relatively more willing to play, they will interact more frequently with each other and their payoff per encounter will be highe...

Shakespeare's Hamlet is the classic case of an individual who cannot make a decision, and classic explanations are in terms of “deep psychology”—a paradigm that searches for causes of behavior deep within the individual's psyche. This article shows, however, that the play can be coherently and simply understood in terms of “shallow psychology”—a pa...

Although it is widely believed that religion can constrain egoistic behavior, this has not been tested with behavioral data. This article provides such a test, using prisoner's dilemma data collected in Logan, Utah, and in Eugene-Springfield, Oregon—contexts that differ sharply in both the incidence of religious affiliation and the extent to which...

Social dilemma logic has provided an important paradigm for the laboratory study of how people respond to choice situations in which one option advances individual welfare but detracts from social welfare, and the research agenda based on this logic has been to discover circumstances that promote "cooperation. " Yet the power of various social dile...

In the June 1991 issue of this Review John Orbell and Robyn Dawes have argued that prisoner's dilemma games are shaped, in part, by @'cognitive misers@'--players who assume other players are like themselves. In such games, this results in more play and in a higher expected payoff by cooperators than by defectors. Iain McLean agrees with the conclus...

We propose a new model of cooperators' advantage depending neither on supplementary incentives nor on cooperators' capacity to recognize, and play selectively with, other cooperators. It depends, rather, on players' making the play-no play decision by the heuristic of projecting their own @'cooperate-defect@' choices onto potential partners. Cooper...

social dilemmas occur when outcomes that are good for each group member acting individually are bad for the group as a whole / historically, theorists have concentrated on four proposals to resolve such dilemmas, that is, to encourage (gently or otherwise) people to eschew choice of the dominating strategy in favor of one that avoids the outcome no...

Social dilemmas occur when the pursuit of self-interest by individuals in a group leads to less than optimal collective outcomes for everyone in the group. A critical assumption in the human sciences is that people's choices in such dilemmas are individualistic, selfish, and rational. Hence, cooperation in the support of group welfare will only occ...

Thinking in sociality - Volume 12 Issue 4 - Linnda R. Caporael, Robyn M. Dawes, John M. Orbell, Alphons J. C. van de Kragt

Cooperation in social dilemma situations is often explained in terms of egoistic incentives. These include: (i) explicit side payments in the form of rewards for cooperation and negative sanctions for defection, (ii) expectations of reciprocal altruism from others involved, and (iii) internalized positive utilities (e.g., an enhanced self-esteem) f...

Cooperation in public dilemmas (and in externality dilemmas generally) is sometimes explained as a function of players' experience with the game: The more experience, the less cooperation. Experience, however, can produce both knowledge about how others will play the game (in particular, that they will defect) and improved understanding of the ince...

In a social dilemma game, a period of discussion among subjects substantially increases the incidence of cooperative choices. We conducted two experiments in an effort to explain this effect. Experiment 1 tested and rejected the hypothesis that discussion of the dilemma problem promotes generalized norms in favor of cooperation. Content analysis of...

In experimental games, as in natural situations, people are often observed acting to the benefit of others even at considerable cost to themselves. Such behavior is contrary to the assumption of selfish behavior, but it is not necessarily contrary to the assumption of rationality: People cooperating under these circumstances could be rational altru...

How can the beneficiaries of collective action be persuaded to contribute the resources (time, energy, money) necessary for the effort to succeed? Rational and selfish players will recognize they can free ride on the successful contributions of others. If the effort is not successful, they will lose a contribution—and be “suckered.” Other than rely...

Standard prisoners' dilemma games offer players the binary choice between cooperating and defecting, but in a related game there is the third possibility of leaving the game altogether. We conceptualize exiting as taking the individual beyond the reach of externalities generated in the original group, and on that basis—together with the assumption...

This article reports small group experiments in which subjects may choose to contribute a fixed amount of money toward a monetary public good, and in which the good itself is supplied only if a specified number of contributions (or more) are made. Given the opportunity to communicate, our subjects organized themselves by specifying precisely the nu...

The existence of N-prisoners' dilemmas (conflict between individual and collective rationality) is a standard justification for collectivizing decision making through the state, but there is little theory about how different institutions operate to “solve” such dilemmas. The efficiency of majoritarian democracy, “selfish dictatorship” and uncoordin...

This is an attempt to operationalize and test the basic proposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan: namely, that Leviathan (or an all-powerful government) makes the life of man less solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

The purpose of this note is to point out how the tactic of decomposition can help us explain one of the best-recognized features of party politics during the past 50 years—the tendency for party platforms to become progressively more and more moderate until they converge at the center of some liberal-conservative continuum. This generally-accepted...

People have three ways of responding to neighborhood problems: leaving (exit), political action (voice), and doing nothing (passivity). The model assumes: 1. Voice is more likely to ameliorate neighborhood problems than exit or passivity; exit, in fact, can make things worse, 2. Rational behavior on the part of residents, coupled with constraints t...

The organization of graduate programs has received increasing attention lately within political science. Teaching techniques, course requirements, class size, student representation in departmental decision-making processes have all been Investigated. This paper examines another aspect of graduate education, the effect of departmental structure on...

The extent of community influence on individual attitudes and behavior is a recurring theme in political science literature. As someone has noted, it resembles the medieval argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. De Tocqueville's comments about pressures to conform in the United States are among the earliest, but a number of...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Auckland, 1960. Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-85).

Thesis--University of North Carolina. Microfilm. s

This paper examines some aspects of the relation between racial hostility and the metropolitan context in which people live. It has the dual purpose of presenting and explaining a body of data and exhibiting a technique that might be used to examine various problems social scientists are interested in. The data suggest that a full understanding of...

A recent article in this Review has drawn attention to the inadequacies in our knowledge of how great social movements arise. On the Negro protest movement there are many hypotheses but few attempts to relate them to differences in individual behavior. Considerable confusion also exists in the variety of explanatory terms involved. James A. Geschwi...