According to Adam Adam Smith (1790), human selfishness can be restrained by introspection. We test the effect of introspection on people’s willingness to cooperate in a public good game. Drawing on the concept of identity utility (George A. Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton, 2000), we show theoretically that introspection may enhance cooperation by increasing the relative cost of deviating from one...

This essay analyses Namwali Serpell’s seminal novel The Old Drift from a postcolonial perspective. In pursuing this goal, the utilises some aspects of theory, semiotics, onomastics and linguistics. particular, it looks at how Serpell reinterprets history colonial Zambia as projected interpreted by writers. findings suggest that epitomises new drift in Zambian literature. problematises views imp...

Hand hygiene remains the single most important measure that can be undertaken by healthcare workers to prevent nosocomial infections. It has been 167 years since the pioneering study by Semmelweiss proved it effective1, and with the recent spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria in hospitals, hand hygiene is now more important than ever2. Despite being simple, effective, safe, and cheap, the wor...

Traditional models of how cooperative strategies succeed in evolution have largely focused on social interactions among individuals and selection acting at kin and group levels. A recent study at the genetic level suggests that cooperation may also be promoted by the evolution of gene-trait relationships that limit the range of possible cheating mechanisms that can evolve.

How to design an "evolvable" artificial system capable to increase in complexity? Although Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection obviously offers a firm foundation, little hope of success seems to be expected from the explanatory adequacy of modern evolutionary theory, which does a good job at explaining what has already happened but remains practically helpless at predicting what w...

Mobile crowdsensing is an emerging approach to data collection by exploiting the sensing abilities offered by smart phones and users' mobility. Data collection can be implemented by exploiting the forwarding opportunities given by the contacts between nodes. However, as cell phones are still resource constrained, most people are socially selfish so that they may not always cooperate with each o...

Decisions involving charitable giving often occur under the shadow of risk. A common finding is that potential donors give less when there is greater risk that their donation will have less impact. While this behavior could be fully rationalized by standard economic models, this paper shows that an additional mechanism is relevant: the use of risk as an excuse not to give. In a laboratory study...

Spatial evolutionary games are studied with myopic players whose payoff interest, as a personal character, is tuned from selfishness to other-regarding preference via fraternity. The players are located on a square lattice and collect income from symmetric two-person two-strategy (called cooperation and defection) games with their nearest neighbors. During the elementary steps of evolution a ra...

Adaptation does not necessarily lead to traits which are optimal for the population. This is because selection is often the strongest at the individual or gene level. The evolution of selfishness can lead to a 'tragedy of the commons', where traits such as aggression or social cheating reduce population size and may lead to extinction. This suggests that species-level selection will result when...

Locally multipath adaptive routing (LMAR) protocol, classified as a new reactive distance vector routing protocol for MANETs is proposed in this paper. LMAR can find an ad-hoc path without selfish nodes and wormholes using a random search algorithm in polynomial-time. Also when the primary path fails, it discovers an alternative safe path if network graph remains connected after eliminating sel...