These experiments are about trying to explain what you mean by "cooperate". Your points feel right, but even if they're true they aren't very helpful in actually explaining behavior. For example, your explanation seems to directly apply to adoption, but most people don't choose to adopt despite the enormous number of orphans in the world. Why not?
Really? Billions and billions of Euros, hundreds of thousand of metric tons of concrete, hundreds of MW of power, thousands of gallons of fresh water-per-minute, tends of thousands of nuclear waste, to run a "management experiment"?? This has to be the most ludicrous, expensive and ill-designed case study in the history of mankind.
Also, it seems the word "experiment" is inadequate. An experiment requires
1/ a theory and an expectation of what should happen
2/ a rigorous, controlled and replicable setup, where you test the theory and compare the actual result to the expected one
Having many people from different nations working together does not qualify as a "experiment"; maybe it's an experience, or a happening (like a concert). It's the Woodstock of science; it must certainly be fun for all involved but it's unlikely humanity will make much progress because of it.
I find the experiment skewed. Or more precisely, that it is not meant to investigate human behaviour or psychology. It is rather precisely designed to support a chosen result to support a given world view. The fact that it has been ran for 50 years is a strong indication of this.
IOW, the experimenter wanted to be able to arrive at the conclusion that difference in performance was unrelated to workers and designed the experiment so it would give this result. In short, this demonstrate few things outside of a very artificially setup situation, where the workers have no say and the job is predestined to fail.
Anyone who worked anywhere knows very well that there are actually vast difference between two workers.
I'm not an expert, but story described within the article looks like normal bump on the road to get desired result. When putting together rules for the game researchers did not think that in resulting environment it might be more rewarding to chose observed action than to do what they intended. As much as it looks like nice story, is it not just what researchers encounter on daily basis?
We can take a default view that what "a professor of behavioral science" calls an experiment is likely an experiment. Feels presented "without evidence or any elaboration" don't make it an anecdote.
The real answer would be to consult with an expert in the field over the details of this experiment.
Exactly, the paper also expresses hopes that people continue to study of human social interaction:
>> Moving forward, experiments in artificial social contexts like ours appear to be a very powerful tool to examine strategic behavior in socially relevant situations. We hope that our work will stimulate further work along these lines.
It is clear it will be nearly impossible to account for all the factors in one controlled experiment. Note that such "total experiments" in the other scientific fields is challenging as well. Usually one first tries to understand certain fundamental processes, then they move on to the interactions between them.
> The utility of even the basic stuff like operant conditioning breaks down outside of all but the most constrained lab conditions
If you want to see it at work go visit the slot machines at your local casino.
Edit:
I've heard about the Rat Park saga from a few mouths before, so I won't read the wiki article. One thing I've noticed is that people forget that the original claim of the study stands: if the only interesting option is the addictive stimulant, the rats keep going back. The other claim that there's pernicious effects to a utopia is in addition to the other, and both claims I regard as equally instructive to how one would think about incentives in society, that goes beyond rats.
Another edit: A better example of a fraudulent study would be the Stanford Prison Experiment. I don't disagree that bad faith and misguided research is a big problem is social psychology. But I think the problem is more visible in the field now, and hopefully being addressed. 'Behavioural biology' probably holds more promise in the longer term.
> isn’t this the curse of most experimental research in programming techniques?
Of most experimental research with humans in general, for that matter. It's a big topic of controversy in psychology, because a lot of quantitative psych results are from synthetic tasks in lab settings, which leads to argument over the extent to which those are accurate proxies for real-world behavior.
> the subjects who held on to their first choice the longest received 10x the reward
If the experiment was designed right, there wasn't a second offer to the same subject and it was made clear that there won't be one. Instead separate test groups were offered different amounts. Or at the very least the game was repeated.
I don't get it. This "experiment" could have been replicated by a simple computer simulation, given that worker output is entirely random. The supposed moral of the story is that system design defines outcome, not individual performance but how does that even count as "science" when you don't have control and experimental group. He designed a system with inherent flaws and, surprise, it has flaws. We can see there is variance in "productivity" but we have no idea how this same variance would have affected output if workers actually had agency.
I'm really suspicious of that study, even if I mostly think it's emblematic of the real-world effect it's supposedly studying. Was the difference in rules/situation communicated to the players? What exactly were they asked at the end of the game? I just find it hard to believe people would be that crass in what they know is an artificial environment where they know there are stark and obvious advantages. This feels like the Stanford Prison Experiment where the results are "too true to check".
Maybe this result will not be replicated, as many first results are not. But the question presented by this paper is not so much what the mechanism of the problem is, but whether or not the intervention is helpful to the learners. The place of first publication being Science,
the most selective journal of all, is a good sign, and it certainly looks to me like this issue is worthy of further investigation, especially as it is consistent with other recent findings in positive psychology and possibly generalizable to how hackers running start-ups can maintain their relentless resourcefulness.
It seems to be that is a demonstration of the following:
1) Take a task that can only be minimally affected by skill or effort (drawing random beads)
2) Pretend it's a task that can be affected by skill or effort, leading to natural interventions like worker incentives, praise, etc.
And together you get that 2) doesn't affect 1) at all. And maybe people feel bad about it afterwards. This illustrates the point that you can't just use worker incentives to optimize the system, you might need to change the system (e.g. suggest new tools). (Please correct me if this interpretation is way off).
I can see why this is an important point: many managers do think it's all about employee skill and effort, and don't look at the system.
But here is my criticism: I would say it's not an experiment, but instead a demonstration or even illustration. I (and many people) can easily predict the outcome of this illustration if it was just verbally described.
Also, 2) not working in situation 1) dangerously should not be read to mean 2) will never work. There can be many situations where the opposite of 1) applies: where the only thing that matters is worker skill and effort, like moving bricks from one pile to another without tools (presuming that is a necessary and irreducible task). In that case 2) can be the largest lever possible.
The stated purpose is to try to reproduce the same experiments and behaviors that observed in other primates.
Some insights I get:
1. In those conditions, our behavior is very similar to other primates.
2. The splitting phase is not influenced by the collaboration phase (I can't avoid to note that you don't choose to apply this insight to start ups).
3. There is some component that we don't understand that account for the difference with the Nash equilibrium.
4. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail
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