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Samuel Bowles University of Siena Santa Fe Institute

Samuel Bowles University of Siena Santa Fe Institute. Research Topics. Niche construction and the evolution of social institutions Parochial altruism and its evolution Governing a cooperative species. Networking.

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Samuel Bowles University of Siena Santa Fe Institute

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  1. Samuel BowlesUniversity of SienaSanta Fe Institute

  2. Research Topics • Niche construction and the evolution of social institutions • Parochial altruism and its evolution • Governing a cooperative species

  3. Networking SFI will seek to support networking among partners through ‘at large’ pre- and post- doctoral visits and shorter term recurrent visits by senior scientists associated with the TECT grant.

  4. Parochial Altruism and its Evolution • Many animals recognize group membership and condition their behavior on it, favoring insiders and inflicting lethal costs on outsiders. • Insider bias supports within group cooperation, but impedes mutually beneficial exchange with outsiders. • Hypothesis: parochial altruism evolved because groups in which the behavior was prevalent had a survival advantage in periods of inter-group conflict.

  5. Niche Construction andthe Evolution of Social Institutions • Pleistocene humans developed such reproductive leveling behaviors as information- and food-sharing, and monogamous mating systems. These involved property-rights systems that reduced intra-group conflict. • Human socialization institutions biased developmental processes towards group beneficial cooperative behaviors. • Hypothesis: under late Pleistocene and early Holocene conditions, these group level institutional niches could have co-evolved with individual social preferences through inter-demic selection in the face of military and environmental challenges.

  6. Governing a Cooperative Species • An understanding of human capacities for cooperation may contribute to the design of more effective public policies, high performance firms and other institutions. • Policies and institutions that are designed to work well if individuals are entirely self-regarding will not generally be successful when a significant fraction of the population is other-regarding. • We will use behavioral experiments and models of complex social interactions to explore our hypothesis that policies designed to mobilize self-interest for the public good may crowd out social preferences, resulting in inferior outcomes.

  7. Related papers • Bowles, Samuel. 2006. "Group competition, reproductive leveling and the evolution of human altruism." Science, 314, predicts South African migrant workers' remittances to their families." Nature, 434:17. • Bowles, Samuel, Jung-Kyoo Choi, and Astrid Hopfensitz. 2003. "The coevolution of individual behaviors and group level institutions." Journal of Theoretical Biology, 223:2, pp. 135-47. • Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 2004. "The evolution of strong reciprocity: cooperation in a heterogeneous population." Theoretical Population Biology, 65, pp. 17-28. • Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 2004. "Persistent Parochialism: The Dynamics of Trust and Exclusion in Networks." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 55. • Bowles, Samuel. 2000. "Economic Institutions as Ecological Niches." Behavior and Brain Sciences, 23:1

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