John Orbell
Biographic Data
| ID | 248503 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Orbell |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Orbell |
| SIGNATURE | ORBELL J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oregon |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 588 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Climate Change, Drought, and Potential Environmental Migration Flows Under Different Policy Scenarios
Unmitigated climate change will likely produce major problems for human populations worldwide. Although many researchers and policy-makers believe that drought may be an important “push” factor underlying migration in the future, the precise relationship between drought and migration remains unclear. This article models the potential scope of such movements for the emissions policy choices facing all nation-states today. Applying insights from cl…
Distinctive Preferences Toward Risk in the Substantive Domain of Sociality
As with standard models of rationality, theorists generally treat prospect theory's demonstration of risk aversion in gains but risk tolerance in losses asdomain‐general. Yet evolutionary psychology suggests that natural selection has designed adomain specificcognitive architecture—with systems specialized for some substantive domains but not others. Here we address risky choices through that lens asking whether humans' risk responses dispose the…
Toward a theory of revolution The legacy of James C. Davies in historical perspective
“Founders” of new scholarly ideas, perspectives, or paradigms are people who advocate for such ideas before wider scholarly audiences accept them or even know they exist. Such scholars have an uphill battle. They must persuade journal and book editors to publish their work. Those gatekeepers depend on reviewers with established reputations in conventional terms, and these reviewers generally oppose anything that threatens their comfortable intell…
An Evolutionary Account of Suicide Attacks: The Kamikaze Case
Explanations for suicide attacks abound. Yet the literature remains conceptually fragmented, with different authors focusing on different attitudes, incentive structures, values, psychological processes, strategic imperatives, and cultural, historical, and personal circumstances. Curiously, however, there have been few efforts to cast suicide bombing within the extensive evolutionary literature on human altruism—in which it clearly belongs. Neith…
Robert E. Agger
Robert E. Agger died at age 80 in September 2007
L. Harmon Zeigler
L. Harmon Zeigler died from a massive heart attack in Tacoma on July 31, 2006. He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Pat; his two children, Mike and Amanda; and three grandchildren, Ben, Zoe and Ruby
Ancestral War and the Evolutionary Origins of “Heroism
Primatological and archeological evidence along with anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherer societies indicate that lethal between-group violence may have been sufficiently frequent during our ancestral past to have shaped our evolved behavioral repertoire. Two simulations explore the possibility that heroism (risking one's life fighting for the group) evolved as a specialized form of altruism in response to war. We show that war selects str…
William C. Mitchell
William C. Mitchell died January 2, 2006, at his home in Eugene, Oregon. He had suffered from pulmonary fibrosis. He was 80. His wife since 1959, Joyce Mitchell, died in 1996; he is survived by a brother James W. Mitchell, of Kingsford, Michigan, and two sisters, Jeanine Watt of Iron River, Michigan and Waverly Jarvis of Withee, Wisconsin
Sociality as a defensive response to the threat of loss
Laboratory research studying behavior in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game is consistent with the commonplace perception that social exchange is risky. Although they often do cooperate, people also often defect. Thus, the decision to enter a PD game with a stranger, about whom one has no good basis for predicting behavior, is a bet on cooperation. Many investigators have explored a range of cognitive processes and individual differences putatively…
Social Poker: A Laboratory Test of Predictions from Club Theory
The theory of clubs addresses the gap between purely private and purely public goods, being concerned with how groups ('clubs') form to provide themselves with goods that are available to their membership, but from which others (non-members) can be excluded. Despite 35 years of formal development, there have been virtually no laboratory studies of club formation. We develop the 'social poker' laboratory paradigm toward .lling this gap, and test t…
"Machiavellian" Intelligence as a Basis for the Evolution of Cooperative Dispositions
How to promote cooperative behavior is classically solved by incentives that lead self-interested individuals in socially desirable directions, but by now well-established laboratory results show that people often do act cooperatively, even at significant cost to themselves. These results suggest that cooperative dispositions might be an evolved part of human nature. Yet such dispositions appear inconsistent with the "Machiavellian intelligence" …
Modeling cognitive evolution: A reply to Stone
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The cost of misinformation in deadly conflicts: Hawk-Dove games and suicidal terrorism
The hijacking and purposeful crashing of airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prompts questions about why the passengers and crew of those airplanes did not act to prevent these attacks, as did at least some passengers on a hijacked flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. We argue, first, that humans have an evolved cognitive bias that leads to the expectation that antagonists hope to survive conflict and, se…
Cognitive requirements for hawk-dove games: A functional analysis for evolutionary design
Like other social animals, humans play adaptively important games, and current evolutionary theory predicts special-purpose, domain-specific cognitive mechanisms for playing such games. We offer a functional analysis of the information requirements for successfully playing one important social game, the "hawk-dove" conflict-of-interest game, developing new graphic conventions for doing so. In particular, we address the orders of recognition neces…
Hawks, doves, and birds of paradise
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Evolution of Political Intelligence: Simulation Results
Several bodies of theory develop the idea that the intelligence of highly social animals – most interestingly, humans – is significantly organized around the adaptive problems posed by their sociality. By this ‘political intelligence’ hypothesis, sociality selects for, among other attributes, capacities for ‘manipulating’ information others can gather about one's own future behaviour, and for ‘mindreading’ such manipulations by others. Yet we hav…
Committees of the American Political Science Association
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Physical Attractiveness, Opportunity, and Success in Everyday Exchange
The role of perceived physical attractiveness in everyday exchange is addressed using a laboratory paradigm that examines both play–versus–not–play and cooperate–versus–defect choices in an ecology of available prisoner's dilemma games. The analysis considers the actions of both subject and other in encounters where exchange relationships are possible and include perceptions of others' and own physical attractiveness. Results indicate that subjec…
Teaching “Evolution, Cooperation, and Ethics”
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Individual Experience and the Fragmentation of Societies
We use computer simulations to show how social fragmentation and consequent social loss can result from six innocuous cognitive and behavioral assumptions. These assumptions govern individuals' choices with respect to each other and are independent of processes associated with fragmentation in various classical literatures. We model society as a set of individuals who encounter each other in circumstances that permit potentially productive but al…
The Advantage of Being Moderately Cooperative
We use computer simulation to identify a process by which cooperation evolves without iteration, and evolves better in large than in small societies. It is based on an empirically supported heuristic for deciding whether to enter noniterated prisoner's dilemma games, namely,Expect others to have the same dispositions as yourself. Players are assigned a probability of cooperating that also defines their expectations about others' behavior and thus…
Hamlet and the Psychology of Rational Choice Under Uncertainty
Shakespeare's Hamlet is the classic case of an individual who cannot make a decision, and classic explanations are in terms of "deep psychology"-a paradigm that searches for causes of behavior deep within the individual's psyche. This article shows, however, that the play can be coherently and simply understood in terms of "shallow psychology"-a paradigm that turns attention to the difficulties attendant on rational decision making, emphasizing, …
Social Welfare, Cooperators' Advantage, and the Option of Not Playing the Game
The AA. outline a model of how freedom to choose between playing and not playing particular Pisoner's dilemma games can (1) increase social welfare and (2) provide relative gains to intending cooperators. When cooperators are relatively more willing to play, they will interact more frequently with each other and their pay off per encounter will be higher - potentially higher than that of intending defectors. The AA. speculate about the cognitive …
Religion, Context, and Constraint toward Strangers
Although it is widely believed that religion can constrain egoistic behavior, this has not been tested with behavioral data. This article provides such a test, using prisoner's dilemma data collected in Logan, Utah, and in Eugene-Springfield, Oregon-contexts that differ sharply in both the incidence of religious affiliation and the extent to which one religious group dominates that context. There were three major findings: a widespread belief, sh…
What Should Rational Cognitive Misers Do
In the June 1991 issue of this Review John Orbell and Robyn Dawes have argued that prisoner's dilemma games are shaped, in part, by "cognitive misers"-players who assume other players are like themselves. In such games, this results in more play and in a higher expected payoff by cooperators than by defectors, lain McLean agrees with the conclusions of Orbell and Dawes but takes issue with their reasons and their model. In turn, Orbell and Dawes …
The Minimal Contributing Set as a Solution to Public Goods Problems
This article reports small group experiments in which subjects may choose to contribute a fixed amount of money toward a monetary public good, and in which the good itself is supplied only if a specified number of contributions (or more) are made. Given the opportunity to communicate, our subjects organized themselves by specifying precisely the number of required contributors and who they would be. This organization, which we call designation of…
Explaining discussion-induced cooperation
A Theory of Neighborhood Problem Solving: Political Action vs. Residential Mobility
People have three ways of responding to neighborhood problems: leaving (exit), political action (voice), and doing nothing (passivity). The model assumes: 1. Voice is more likely to ameliorate neighborhood problems than exit or passivity; exit, in fact, can make things worse, 2. Rational behavior on the part of residents, coupled with constraints that limit options: status, race, the responsiveness of government and the nature of the problems. Su…
Social Welfare, Cooperators' Advantage, and the Option of Not Playing the Game
The AA. outline a model of how freedom to choose between playing and not playing particular Pisoner's dilemma games can (1) increase social welfare and (2) provide relative gains to intending cooperators. When cooperators are relatively more willing to play, they will interact more frequently with each other and their pay off per encounter will be higher - potentially higher than that of intending defectors. The AA. speculate about the cognitive …
A "Cognitive Miser" Theory of Cooperators Advantage
We propose a new model of cooperators' advantage depending neither on supplementary incentives nor on cooperators' capacity to recognize, and play selectively with, other cooperators. It depends, rather, on players' making the play-no play decision by the heuristic of projecting their own "cooperate-defect" choices onto potential partners. Cooperators offer to play more often, and fellow cooperators will more often accept their offer. When certai…
Do Cooperators Exit More Readily than Defectors
Standard prisoners' dilemma games offer players the binary choice between cooperating and defecting, but in a related game there is the third possibility of leaving the game altogether. We conceptualize exiting as taking the individual beyond the reach of externalities generated in the original group, and on that basis-together with the assumption of self-interested (dollar-maximizing) behavior on the part of all players-we derive the prediction …
"Machiavellian" Intelligence as a Basis for the Evolution of Cooperative Dispositions
How to promote cooperative behavior is classically solved by incentives that lead self-interested individuals in socially desirable directions, but by now well-established laboratory results show that people often do act cooperatively, even at significant cost to themselves. These results suggest that cooperative dispositions might be an evolved part of human nature. Yet such dispositions appear inconsistent with the "Machiavellian intelligence" …
Physical Attractiveness, Opportunity, and Success in Everyday Exchange
The role of perceived physical attractiveness in everyday exchange is addressed using a laboratory paradigm that examines both play–versus–not–play and cooperate–versus–defect choices in an ecology of available prisoner's dilemma games. The analysis considers the actions of both subject and other in encounters where exchange relationships are possible and include perceptions of others' and own physical attractiveness. Results indicate that subjec…
An Information-Flow Theory of Community Influence
Organizing Groups for Collective Action
How can the beneficiaries of collective action be persuaded to contribute the resources (time, energy, money) necessary for the effort to succeed? Rational and selfish players will recognize they can free ride on the successful contributions of others. If the effort is not successful, they will lose a contribution-and be "suckered." Other than relying on altruism, organizers of the group effort can modify incentives so that players are more prepa…
Protest Participation among Southern Negro College Students
A recent article in this Review has drawn attention to the inadequacies in our knowledge of how great social movements arise. On the Negro protest movement there are many hypotheses but few attempts to relate them to differences in individual behavior. Considerable confusion also exists in the variety of explanatory terms involved. James A. Geschwinder lists five hypotheses that focus variously on economic conditions and the psychological meaning…
Ancestral War and the Evolutionary Origins of “Heroism
Primatological and archeological evidence along with anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherer societies indicate that lethal between-group violence may have been sufficiently frequent during our ancestral past to have shaped our evolved behavioral repertoire. Two simulations explore the possibility that heroism (risking one's life fighting for the group) evolved as a specialized form of altruism in response to war. We show that war selects str…
Institutional Solutions to the N-Prisoners' Dilemma
The existence of N-prisoners' dilemmas (conflict between individual and collective rationality) is a standard justification for collectivizing decision making through the state, but there is little theory about how different institutions operate to "solve" such dilemmas. The efficiency of majoritarian democracy, "selfish dictatorship" and uncoordinated individualism is explored using a simple nine-person game. Majoritarian democracy is found to p…
An Evolutionary Account of Suicide Attacks: The Kamikaze Case
Explanations for suicide attacks abound. Yet the literature remains conceptually fragmented, with different authors focusing on different attitudes, incentive structures, values, psychological processes, strategic imperatives, and cultural, historical, and personal circumstances. Curiously, however, there have been few efforts to cast suicide bombing within the extensive evolutionary literature on human altruism—in which it clearly belongs. Neith…
Individual Experience and the Fragmentation of Societies
We use computer simulations to show how social fragmentation and consequent social loss can result from six innocuous cognitive and behavioral assumptions. These assumptions govern individuals' choices with respect to each other and are independent of processes associated with fragmentation in various classical literatures. We model society as a set of individuals who encounter each other in circumstances that permit potentially productive but al…
Religion, Context, and Constraint toward Strangers
Although it is widely believed that religion can constrain egoistic behavior, this has not been tested with behavioral data. This article provides such a test, using prisoner's dilemma data collected in Logan, Utah, and in Eugene-Springfield, Oregon-contexts that differ sharply in both the incidence of religious affiliation and the extent to which one religious group dominates that context. There were three major findings: a widespread belief, sh…
The Advantage of Being Moderately Cooperative
We use computer simulation to identify a process by which cooperation evolves without iteration, and evolves better in large than in small societies. It is based on an empirically supported heuristic for deciding whether to enter noniterated prisoner's dilemma games, namely,Expect others to have the same dispositions as yourself. Players are assigned a probability of cooperating that also defines their expectations about others' behavior and thus…
Racial Attitudes and the Metropolitan Context: A Structural Analysis
This paper examines some aspects of the relation between racial hostility and the metropolitan context in which people live. It has the dual purpose of presenting and explaining a body of data and exhibiting a technique that might be used to examine various problems social scientists are interested in. The data suggest that a full understanding of racial tensions in American cities requires consideration of individual and contextual variables; th…
Cognitive requirements for hawk-dove games: A functional analysis for evolutionary design
Like other social animals, humans play adaptively important games, and current evolutionary theory predicts special-purpose, domain-specific cognitive mechanisms for playing such games. We offer a functional analysis of the information requirements for successfully playing one important social game, the "hawk-dove" conflict-of-interest game, developing new graphic conventions for doing so. In particular, we address the orders of recognition neces…
What Should Rational Cognitive Misers Do
In the June 1991 issue of this Review John Orbell and Robyn Dawes have argued that prisoner's dilemma games are shaped, in part, by "cognitive misers"-players who assume other players are like themselves. In such games, this results in more play and in a higher expected payoff by cooperators than by defectors, lain McLean agrees with the conclusions of Orbell and Dawes but takes issue with their reasons and their model. In turn, Orbell and Dawes …
Understanding and cooperation in social dilemmas
Intra-Party Conflict and the Decay of Ideology
Can Leviathan Make the Life of Man Less Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short
This is an attempt to operationalize and test the basic proposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan: namely, that Leviathan (or an all-powerful government) makes the life of man less solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short
Climate Change, Drought, and Potential Environmental Migration Flows Under Different Policy Scenarios
Unmitigated climate change will likely produce major problems for human populations worldwide. Although many researchers and policy-makers believe that drought may be an important “push” factor underlying migration in the future, the precise relationship between drought and migration remains unclear. This article models the potential scope of such movements for the emissions policy choices facing all nation-states today. Applying insights from cl…
Distinctive Preferences Toward Risk in the Substantive Domain of Sociality
As with standard models of rationality, theorists generally treat prospect theory's demonstration of risk aversion in gains but risk tolerance in losses asdomain‐general. Yet evolutionary psychology suggests that natural selection has designed adomain specificcognitive architecture—with systems specialized for some substantive domains but not others. Here we address risky choices through that lens asking whether humans' risk responses dispose the…
Protest Participation among Southern Negro College Students
A recent article in this Review has drawn attention to the inadequacies in our knowledge of how great social movements arise. On the Negro protest movement there are many hypotheses but few attempts to relate them to differences in individual behavior. Considerable confusion also exists in the variety of explanatory terms involved. James A. Geschwinder lists five hypotheses that focus variously on economic conditions and the psychological meaning…
Racial Attitudes and the Metropolitan Context: A Structural Analysis
This paper examines some aspects of the relation between racial hostility and the metropolitan context in which people live. It has the dual purpose of presenting and explaining a body of data and exhibiting a technique that might be used to examine various problems social scientists are interested in. The data suggest that a full understanding of racial tensions in American cities requires consideration of individual and contextual variables; th…
An Information-Flow Theory of Community Influence
The Structure of Professional Education in Departments of Political Science
The organization of graduate programs has received increasing attention lately within political science. Teaching techniques, course requirements, class size, student representation in departmental decision-making processes have all been Investigated. This paper examines another aspect of graduate education, the effect of departmental structure on the learning process. We do not deal with the substance of a political science education, but rather…
The Politics of Community Conflict: The Fluoridation Decision. Robert L. Crain , Elihu Katz , Donald B. Rosenthal
Grass Roots Enthusiasm and the Primary Vote
HE DETERMINANTS of primary election outcomes constitute a surprising lacuna in the voting literature. It is surprising because of the important part primary elections play in deciding who will govern the country, and also because of the relative sophistication of theory about the determinants of partisan election outcomes. Formal models have been developed about partisan elections and a great deal of data has been amassed elaborating on them. Pri…
Grass Roots Enthusiasm and the Primary Vote
A Theory of Neighborhood Problem Solving: Political Action vs. Residential Mobility
People have three ways of responding to neighborhood problems: leaving (exit), political action (voice), and doing nothing (passivity). The model assumes: 1. Voice is more likely to ameliorate neighborhood problems than exit or passivity; exit, in fact, can make things worse, 2. Rational behavior on the part of residents, coupled with constraints that limit options: status, race, the responsiveness of government and the nature of the problems. Su…
Intra-Party Conflict and the Decay of Ideology
Can Leviathan Make the Life of Man Less Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short
This is an attempt to operationalize and test the basic proposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan: namely, that Leviathan (or an all-powerful government) makes the life of man less solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short
Social Peace as a Collective Good or How well does ‘Well does Leviathan…?’ undermine ‘Can Leviathan…?’
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Uses of Expanded Majorities
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Institutional Solutions to the N-Prisoners' Dilemma
The existence of N-prisoners' dilemmas (conflict between individual and collective rationality) is a standard justification for collectivizing decision making through the state, but there is little theory about how different institutions operate to "solve" such dilemmas. The efficiency of majoritarian democracy, "selfish dictatorship" and uncoordinated individualism is explored using a simple nine-person game. Majoritarian democracy is found to p…
The Governance of Rivers
The Minimal Contributing Set as a Solution to Public Goods Problems
This article reports small group experiments in which subjects may choose to contribute a fixed amount of money toward a monetary public good, and in which the good itself is supplied only if a specified number of contributions (or more) are made. Given the opportunity to communicate, our subjects organized themselves by specifying precisely the number of required contributors and who they would be. This organization, which we call designation of…
Do Cooperators Exit More Readily than Defectors
Standard prisoners' dilemma games offer players the binary choice between cooperating and defecting, but in a related game there is the third possibility of leaving the game altogether. We conceptualize exiting as taking the individual beyond the reach of externalities generated in the original group, and on that basis-together with the assumption of self-interested (dollar-maximizing) behavior on the part of all players-we derive the prediction …
A Guide to the Historical Records of British Banking
Organizing Groups for Collective Action
How can the beneficiaries of collective action be persuaded to contribute the resources (time, energy, money) necessary for the effort to succeed? Rational and selfish players will recognize they can free ride on the successful contributions of others. If the effort is not successful, they will lose a contribution-and be "suckered." Other than relying on altruism, organizers of the group effort can modify incentives so that players are more prepa…
Not me or thee but we: The importance of group identity in eliciting cooperation in dilemma situations: Experimental manipulations
Are people who cooperate ‘rational altruists’
Understanding and cooperation in social dilemmas
Explaining discussion-induced cooperation
Selfishness examined: Cooperation in the absence of egoistic incentives
Social dilemmas occur when the pursuit of self-interest by individuals in a group leads to less than optimal collective outcomes for everyone in the group. A critical assumption in the human sciences is that people's choices in such dilemmas are individualistic, selfish, and rational. Hence, cooperation in the support of group welfare will only occur if there are selfish incentives that convert the social dilemma into a nondilemma. In recent year…
What Should Rational Cognitive Misers Do
In the June 1991 issue of this Review John Orbell and Robyn Dawes have argued that prisoner's dilemma games are shaped, in part, by "cognitive misers"-players who assume other players are like themselves. In such games, this results in more play and in a higher expected payoff by cooperators than by defectors, lain McLean agrees with the conclusions of Orbell and Dawes but takes issue with their reasons and their model. In turn, Orbell and Dawes …
A "Cognitive Miser" Theory of Cooperators Advantage
We propose a new model of cooperators' advantage depending neither on supplementary incentives nor on cooperators' capacity to recognize, and play selectively with, other cooperators. It depends, rather, on players' making the play-no play decision by the heuristic of projecting their own "cooperate-defect" choices onto potential partners. Cooperators offer to play more often, and fellow cooperators will more often accept their offer. When certai…
Psychology (29 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Economics (22 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (19 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (14 works) · Microeconomics (14 works)