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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20060306T000000
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DTSTAMP:20201006T231348Z
CREATED:20200922T213756Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201006T231348Z
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SUMMARY:Leeat Yariv - Conformity In The Lab
DESCRIPTION:Leeat Yariv: Caltech Division of Humanities and Social Sciences\, UCLA Department of EconomicsIn this talk\, I will briefly survey the existing literature on social learning and conformity (both theoretical and experimental) and then present evidence from an array of new experiments disentangling conformity\, an intrinsic taste to follow others\, from informational herding in a sequential choice setting. In these experiments\, we use a design reminiscent of the standard social learning setup in which subjects choose the type of information they observe before making a decision. Namely\, subjects choose between observing a private and informative signal or observing a social signal manifested in the history of play of predecessors who have not chosen a private signal. Even though the latter type is essentially a word of mouth signal\, entailing no statistical information\, a significant fraction of subjects choose it persistently. Allowing for payoff externalities by paying subjects according to a collective action chosen by a majority vote amplifies the results. So does an increase in the stakes. Our design allows us to rule out alternative explanations the literature proposes such as confusion and inequality aversion.
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/leeat-yariv-conformity-in-the-lab/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
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CREATED:20200922T213756Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201006T231348Z
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SUMMARY:Terrence Deacon - Devo-Devo: How Relaxed Selection Can Contribute To The Evolution And Self-Organization Of \nComplexity
DESCRIPTION:Terrence Deacon: UC Berkeley Department of AnthropologyAlthough biologists have long recognized examples of regressive processes in evolution as well as a role for regressive processes in the development of brains\, research interest tends to focus on presumably constructive and progressive processes under the influence of natural selection. Particularly in the case of human brains and their evolution\, it is generally assumed that the neurological differences underlying the complexity of human language abilities must have arisen due to progressive improvements of function via selection favoring these traits. In this talk I will explore an alternative possibility: that devolutionary loss-of-function due to reduced selection\,\nincluding degradation of developmental-genetic specificity\, may contribute to the evolution of novel complex neural functions\, such as language. The general logic of this argument originates from a critique of a commonly cited evolutionary mechanism: the Baldwin Effect. Although this theoretical “effect” is often invoked as an evolutionary mechanism leading from functional plasticity to increased specificity of genetic control\, biological examples and simulation studies will be presented that show that the opposite effect is more likely\, and also that there are other surprising correlates of this process. An animal example—song production in a domesticated species of finch—illustrates this effect and its paradoxical consequence. In this breed\, increasingly complex song structure\, expanded involvement of forebrain mechanisms\, greater flexibility of behavior\, and a larger contribution from social learning evolved without positive selection for these traits. Instead\, these birds were bred for feather coloration. Absence of selection on song appears to have led to evolutionary degradation of song control specificity and with it unmasking of otherwise hidden synergies among diverse brain systems able to play some role in song structure. These results suggest some informative parallels with features of human language functions\, and the possibility that regressive evolutionary processes might play an important role in the evolution of biological complexity more generally.
URL:https://bec.ucla.edu/event/terrence-deacon-devo-devo-how-relaxed-selection-can-contribute-to-the-evolution-and-self-organization-of-complexity/
CATEGORIES:Past Presentation,Presentation
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