The Experts below are selected from a list of 37680 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Amadou Moreau - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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dynamics of change in the practice of female genital cutting in senegambia testing predictions of Social Convention theory
Social Science & Medicine, 2011Co-Authors: Bettina Shellduncan, Katherine Wander, Ylva Hernlund, Amadou MoreauAbstract:Recent reviews of intervention efforts aimed at ending female genital cutting (FGC) have concluded that progress to date has been slow, and call for more efficient programs informed by theories on behavior change. Social Convention theory, first proposed by Mackie (1996), posits that in the context of extreme resource inequality, FGC emerged as a means of securing a better marriage by signaling fidelity, and subsequently spread to become a prerequisite for marriage for all women. Change is predicted to result from coordinated abandonment in intermarrying groups so as to preserve a marriage market for uncircumcised girls. While this theory fits well with many general observations of FGC, there have been few attempts to systematically test the theory. We use data from a three year mixed-method study of behavior change that began in 2004 in Senegal and The Gambia to explicitly test predictions generated by Social Convention theory. Analyses of 300 in-depth interviews, 28 focus group discussions, and survey data from 1220 women show that FGC is most often only indirectly related to marriageability via concerns over preserving virginity. Instead we find strong evidence for an alternative Convention, namely a peer Convention. We propose that being circumcised serves as a signal to other circumcised women that a girl or woman has been trained to respect the authority of her circumcised elders and is worthy of inclusion in their Social network. In this manner, FGC facilitates the accumulation of Social capital by younger women and of power and prestige by elder women. Based on this new evidence and reinterpretation of Social Convention theory, we suggest that interventions aimed at eliminating FGC should target women's Social networks, which are intergenerational, and include both men and women. Our findings support Mackie's assertion that expectations regarding FGC are interdependent; change must therefore be coordinated among interconnected members of Social networks.
Alexander Peysakhovich - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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AIES - Learning Existing Social Conventions via Observationally Augmented Self-Play
Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society, 2019Co-Authors: Adam Lerer, Alexander PeysakhovichAbstract:In order for artificial agents to coordinate effectively with people, they must act consistently with existing Conventions (e.g. how to navigate in traffic, which language to speak, or how to coordinate with teammates). A group's Conventions can be viewed as a choice of equilibrium in a coordination game. We consider the problem of an agent learning a policy for a coordination game in a simulated environment and then using this policy when it enters an existing group. When there are multiple possible Conventions we show that learning a policy via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is likely to find policies which achieve high payoffs at training time but fail to coordinate with the real group into which the agent enters. We assume access to a small number of samples of behavior from the true Convention and show that we can augment the MARL objective to help it find policies consistent with the real group's Convention. In three environments from the literature - traffic, communication, and team coordination - we observe that augmenting MARL with a small amount of imitation learning greatly increases the probability that the strategy found by MARL fits well with the existing Social Convention. We show that this works even in an environment where standard training methods very rarely find the true Convention of the agent's partners.
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Learning Social Conventions in Markov Games.
2018Co-Authors: Adam Lerer, Alexander PeysakhovichAbstract:Social Conventions - arbitrary ways to organize group behavior - are an important part of Social life. Any agent that wants to enter an existing society must be able to learn its Conventions (e.g. which side of the road to drive on, which language to speak) from relatively few observations or risk being unable to coordinate with everyone else. We consider the game theoretic framework of David Lewis which views the selection of a Social Convention as the selection of an equilibrium in a coordination game. We ask how to construct reinforcement learning based agents that can solve the Convention learning task in the self-play paradigm: at training time the agent has access to a good model of the environment and a small amount of observations about how individuals in society act. The agent then has to construct a policy that is compatible with the test-time Social Convention. We study three environments from the literature which have multiple Conventions: traffic, communication, and risky coordination. In each of these we observe that adding a small amount of imitation learning during self-play training greatly increases the probability that the strategy found by self-play fits well with the Social Convention the agent will face at test time. We show that this works even in an environment where standard independent multi-agent RL very rarely finds the correct test-time equilibrium.
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Learning Existing Social Conventions via Observationally Augmented Self-Play
arXiv: Artificial Intelligence, 2018Co-Authors: Adam Lerer, Alexander PeysakhovichAbstract:In order for artificial agents to coordinate effectively with people, they must act consistently with existing Conventions (e.g. how to navigate in traffic, which language to speak, or how to coordinate with teammates). A group's Conventions can be viewed as a choice of equilibrium in a coordination game. We consider the problem of an agent learning a policy for a coordination game in a simulated environment and then using this policy when it enters an existing group. When there are multiple possible Conventions we show that learning a policy via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is likely to find policies which achieve high payoffs at training time but fail to coordinate with the real group into which the agent enters. We assume access to a small number of samples of behavior from the true Convention and show that we can augment the MARL objective to help it find policies consistent with the real group's Convention. In three environments from the literature - traffic, communication, and team coordination - we observe that augmenting MARL with a small amount of imitation learning greatly increases the probability that the strategy found by MARL fits well with the existing Social Convention. We show that this works even in an environment where standard training methods very rarely find the true Convention of the agent's partners.
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Learning Existing Social Conventions in Markov Games
2018Co-Authors: Adam Lerer, Alexander PeysakhovichAbstract:In order for artificial agents to coordinate effectively with people, they must act consistently with existing Conventions (e.g. how to navigate in traffic, which language to speak, or how to work with teammates). A group's Conventions can be viewed as a choice of equilibrium in a coordination game. We consider the problem of an agent learning a policy for a coordination game in a simulated environment and then using this policy when it enters an existing group. When there are multiple possible Conventions we show that learning a policy via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is likely to find policies which achieve high payoffs at training time but fail to coordinate with the real group into which the agent enters. We assume access to a small number of samples of behavior from the true Convention and show that we can augment the MARL objective to help it find policies consistent with the real group's Convention. In three environments from the literature - traffic, communication, and team coordination - we observe that augmenting MARL with a small amount of imitation learning greatly increases the probability that the strategy found by MARL fits well with the existing Social Convention. We show that this works even in an environment where standard training methods very rarely find the true Convention of the agent's partners.
Maria G. Dias - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?
Journal of personality and social psychology, 1993Co-Authors: Jonathan Haidt, Silvia Helena Koller, Maria G. DiasAbstract:Are disgusting or disrespectful actions judged to be moral violations, even when they are harmless? Stories about victimless yet offensive actions (such as cleaning one's toilet with a flag) were presented to Brazilian and U.S. adults and children of high and low socioeconomic status (JV= 360). Results show that college students at elite universities judged these stories to be matters of Social Convention or of personal preference. Most other Ss, especially in Brazil, took a moralizing stance toward these actions. For these latter Ss, moral judgments were better predicted by affective reactions than by appraisals of harmfulness. Results support the claims of cultural psychology (R. A. Shweder, 1991 a) and suggest that cultural norms and culturally shaped emotions have a substantial impact on the domain of morality and the process of moral judgment. Suggestions are made for building cross-culturally valid models of moral judgment. What sorts of issues do people treat as moral issues? Harm, broadly construed to include psychological harm, injustice, and violations of rights, may be important in the morality of all cultures. But is a harm-based morality sufficient to describe the moral domain for all cultures, or do some cultures have a nonharm-based morality, in which actions with no harmful consequences may be moral violations? This question is being debated in the literature on moral judgment. Researchers in the cognitive-developmental tradition (e.g., Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987) have argued that particular rules may vary from culture to culture, but that in all cultures moral issues involve questions of harm, rights, or justice. An opposing view has been taken by cultural psychologists (Miller, Bersoff, & Har
Andrea Baronchelli - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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vanishing size of critical mass for tipping points in Social Convention
arXiv: Physics and Society, 2021Co-Authors: Iacopo Iacopini, Giovanni Petri, Andrea Baronchelli, Alain BarratAbstract:How can minorities of regular individuals overturn Social Conventions? Theoretical and empirical studies have proposed that when a committed minority reaches a critical group size-ranging from 10% of the population up to 40%-a cascade of behaviour change rapidly increases the acceptance of the minority view and apparently stable Social norms can be overturned. However, several observations suggest that much smaller groups may be sufficient to bring the system to a tipping point. Here, we generalise a model previously used for both theoretical and empirical investigations of tipping points in Social Convention and find that the critical mass necessary to trigger behaviour change is dramatically reduced if individuals are less prone to change their views, i.e., are more resistant to Social influence. We show that groups smaller than 3% of the population are effective on different kinds of Social networks, both when pairwise or group interactions are considered, and in a broad region of the parameter space. In some cases, even groups as small as 0.3% may overturn the current Social norm. Our findings reconcile the numerous observational accounts of rapid change in Social Convention triggered by committed minorities with the apparent difficulty of establishing such large minorities in the first place. We anticipate that they will be of interest for both researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the phenomenon of norm change, and in designing interventions aimed at contrasting such global challenges as climate change and vaccine hesitancy.
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the dynamics of norm change in the cultural evolution of language
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018Co-Authors: Roberta Amato, Lucas Lacasa, Albert Diazguilera, Andrea BaronchelliAbstract:What happens when a new Social Convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population adopts a new Convention, due to the diffculties of finding representative data. Here we address this issue by looking at changes occurred to 2,541 orthographic and lexical norms in English and Spanish through the analysis of a large corpora of books published between the years 1800 and 2008. We detect three markedly distinct patterns in the data, depending on whether the behavioral change results from the action of a formal institution, an informal authority or a spontaneous process of unregulated evolution. We propose a simple evolutionary model able to capture all the observed behaviors and we show that it reproduces quantitatively the empirical data. This work identifies general mechanisms of norm change and we anticipate that it will be of interest to researchers investigating the cultural evolution of language and, more broadly, human collective behavior.
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Experimental evidence for tipping points in Social Convention
Science (New York N.Y.), 2018Co-Authors: Damon Centola, Joshua Becker, Devon Brackbill, Andrea BaronchelliAbstract:Theoretical models of critical mass have shown how minority groups can initiate Social change dynamics in the emergence of new Social Conventions. Here, we study an artificial system of Social Conventions in which human subjects interact to establish a new coordination equilibrium. The findings provide direct empirical demonstration of the existence of a tipping point in the dynamics of changing Social Conventions. When minority groups reached the critical mass—that is, the critical group size for initiating Social change—they were consistently able to overturn the established behavior. The size of the required critical mass is expected to vary based on theoretically identifiable features of a Social setting. Our results show that the theoretically predicted dynamics of critical mass do in fact emerge as expected within an empirical system of Social coordination.
Elliot Turiel - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Thought about actions in Social domains: Morality, Social Conventions, and Social interactions
Cognitive Development, 2008Co-Authors: Elliot TurielAbstract:Abstract Judgments about actual and hypothetical events were examined. The study, conducted in elementary (first, third, and fifth grades) and junior high (seventh grades) schools, included behavioral observations and assessments of judgments. Observations were conducted of 108 events classified as moral, as Conventional, and as mixed type. Participants’ reactions and communications differed by domain of the event. Judgments and justifications of 312 participants in the events showed that they discriminated between the domains on several dimensions. Judgments and justifications corresponded with ones made about comparable hypothetical situations. The study supported the proposition that judgments in the domains of morality and Social Convention about actual events correspond with judgments about hypothetical situations. It was also found that the domains are associated with the ways children interact Socially.
