Drawing upon work in evolutionary game theory and experimental philosophy, I argue that one of the roles the concept of knowledge plays in our social cognitive ecology is that of enabling us to make adaptively important distinctions between different kinds of blameworthy and blameless behaviors. In particular, I argue that knowledge enables us to distinguish which agents are most worthy of blam...

The tuples in a generalized relation (i.e., a summary generated from a database) are unique, and therefore, can be considered to be a population with a structure that can be described by some probability distribution. In this paper, we present and empirically compare sixteen heuristic measures that evaluate the structure of a summary to assign a single real-valued index that represents its inte...

In order to survive, self-serving agents in various kinds of complex adaptive systems (CASs) must compete against others for sharing limited resources with biased or unbiased distribution by conducting strategic behaviors. This competition can globally result in the balance of resource allocation. As a result, most of the agents and species can survive well. However, it is a common belief that ...

Although ecological forces are known to shape the expression of sociality across a broad range of biological taxa, their role in shaping human behavior is currently disputed. Both comparative and experimental evidence indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods promote cooperation among humans, a behavioral attribute known to correlate with environmental harshness in nonhuman animals. Here we...

The Information Ecology project at DSTC is constructing a Social Portal. This article explains what we mean by a Social Portal, what user needs we believe we are serving by building one, what research goals we think we are serving and how we intend to go about it.

When business is bad, as the Chinese proverb goes, paint the store. The social sciences unendingly seem to be repainting the store with new fads, yet business remains bad. Some would argue that it is time to tear down the store (I.Wallerstein 1991). Others see this as precisely the problem. We are forever slaying old paradigms. Instead of standing on the shoulders of our predecessors, we take a...

Social-ecological systems are governed by a complex of ecology of games featuring multiple actors, policy institutions, and issues, and not just single institutions operating in isolation. We update Long's (1958) ecology of games to analyze the coordinating roles of actors and institutions in the context of the ecology of water management games in San Francisco Bay, California. The ecology of g...

the present study has been carried out with the aim of content analysis (ca) of newly-preparedtextbooks for social studies and science of the sixth grade based on the three environment education grounds, i.e.ecology, environment, and human activity. it is of caand descriptive nature. the statistical population was all thesixth grade textbooks pages and the statistical sample was equal to the st...

Recent research in ecology suggests that generic indicators, referred to as early warning signals (EWS), may occur before significant transformations, both critical and non-critical, in complex systems. Up to this point, research on EWS has largely focused on simple models and controlled experiments in ecology and climate science. When humans are considered in these arenas they are invariably s...