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Ethics Biology: Are There Ethical Genomes?
Published in Howard Winet, Ethics for Bioengineering Scientists, 2021
Hamilton’s rule and other cooperative behavior models have been incorporated into models of more complex behavior, using algorithms we call “game theory” (Axelrod and Dion 1988). The traditional starting point for game theory models is the prisoner’s dilemma game:A crime has been committed. Two suspects have been arrested. Police are interrogating them in separate rooms, assuring they have no contact with each other. Besides, “I’m innocent”, the suspects have two choices for answers that do not accept full burden for the crime: 1) “Defect”, say the other suspect is the only guilty one. 2) “Cooperate”, say nothing. If both suspects cooperate (say nothing) the police have sufficient circumstantial evidence to jail each for a year. If both defect, they go to jail for three years. Finally, if only one suspect defects, but his partner remains silent, the defector walks away a free man, but his partner goes to jail for five years.
Good People / Moral Enhancement
Published in Jonathan Anomaly, Creating Future People, 2020
Some of the most interesting ways of testing this are in the context of Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments. The Prisoner’s Dilemma (hereafter ‘PD’) is a simple game first described in 1950, and it has become synonymous with any situation in which there are joint gains from cooperation but in which each player of the game is best off defecting from a cooperative agreement (see Appendix B for details).
The Picoeconomics of Addiction
Published in Hanna Pickard, Serge H. Ahmed, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction, 2019
Once someone has noticed this phenomenon she is apt to propose bundles deliberately: resolutions, or diets, or tests of character. In effect she is defining a game resembling a repeated prisoner’s dilemma, intertemporal bargaining with her expected future selves, stabilized by self-enforcing contracts in which single defections (SS choices) have more impact than single cooperations (LL choices—modeled in Monterosso et al. 2002). The reason the dieter doesn’t eat the single chocolate éclair is not that it will cause a noticeable gain in weight, but that it will damage the credibility of her diet. The struggle between impulse and control now turns not so much on how close she gets to a temptation—although this remains a factor—but on whether she expects a later self to see her current choice as a defection and thus have less reason in turn not to defect. Her self-prediction has become the basis of personal rules. The bundling tactic has the greatest impact when a person sees the stake as her belief about her character—whether she is “the kind of person who” abuses her children, is the slave of an addiction, or has a disgusting paraphilia. The game theory of such high-stake “self-signaling” was formally worked out by Ronit Bodner and Drazen Prelec (2003).
Towards a multi-brain framework for hypnosis: a review of quantitative methods
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2021
Yeganeh Farahzadi, Zoltan Kekecs
Not only joint behaviors but joint decisions can be characterized by the degree of synchrony between two brains. In the context of the prisoner’s dilemma, a common decision-making task in game theory, De Vico Fallani et al. (2010) found that there is significantly more interbrain coupling between the brains of cooperators compared to defectors. They also demonstrated that the decision to defect can be predicted in advance based on the connectivity patterns between the two brains. In fact, when individuals are following a common purpose, as in cooperation, they show greater connectivity in the interbrain networks, e.g., between the members of the winning team in a bridge game (Astolfi et al., 2010) and between cooperating airplane pilots in a simulated flight (Toppi et al., 2016).
The associations of chronotype and social jetlag with prosocial behavior problems among Chinese adolescents
Published in Chronobiology International, 2022
Zichong Long, Anda Zhao, Yiting Chen, Rong Li, Yuanqing Xia, Yongmei Guo, Shenghui Li
To date, there was a paucity in the research on the effects of social jetlag on prosocial behavioral problems among adolescents. In this study, we filled in this gap with the finding that higher social jetlag was a risk factor for prosocial behavior problems in adolescents, especially in the female adolescents with intermediate chronotype. Social jetlag is determined by the inherent cycle of the biological clock, the strength of zeitgebers, of which the most pervasive zeitgeber is light, and the social time (for example, school time and work time) (Foster et al. 2013). A possible pathway could be that adolescents with higher social jetlag exposed with higher night-time artificial light and shorter daytime natural daylight on weekends, while in the weekdays, school time compelled them to alter their bed-wake time, which inevitably brought irregular light exposure, and in turn leads to the circadian disruption (Matsumura et al. 2015). This pathway may contribute to prosocial behavior problems by affecting levels of neurotransmitters such as 5-HT (5-hydroxytryptamine). A study has exposed the rats in an artificial light/dark cycle to observe physiological parameters change of the rats under circadian disturbance, and found that some neurotransmitter especially the 5-HT level, has decreased in cell bodies and circadian rhythm-related functional areas (Zerbini et al. 2020); However, evidence based on human is scarce, but this provides a certain basis for the follow-up work. The role of the 5-HT play in the facilitating of prosociality has be explored comprehensively by prior experiments (Declerck and Boone 2016), of which the increase of 5-HT was found to be linked with the economically rational decision, cooperation intention and other prosocial-related behavior (Moskowitz et al. 2001; Tse and Bond 2002); to the contrary, the decreasing of 5-HT may have impact on cooperation behavior in some prisoner’s dilemma games (Wood et al. 2006), and some anti-prosocial behavior such as impulsion and aggressivity (Frankle et al. 2005). Additionally, 5-HT involves in emotional regulation as well, of which may be a crucial contributor in meditating the relationships between social jetlag and prosocial behavior. However, future studies are warranted to investigate the specific physiological pathways through which social jetlag contributes to circadian disruption among adolescents.
Virtue Theory for Moral Enhancement
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2021
Moreover, there is uncertainty concerning the near future feasibility of moral enhancement (Agar 2013b; Harris 2013; Sparrow 2014b), which I will not address here. A reasonable chance that we will attempt to develop those technologies and that they may be dangerous are sufficient motivation for the development of a safety framework. There are already studies on their development with a modest level of success, indicating these two conditions are met. Studies depleted participants’ serotonin and found it made them more likely to continue overharvesting a common resource pool (Bilderbeck et al. 2014), less likely to reject an unfair distribution of resources in an Ultimatum Game (Crockett et al. 2008), and less likely to co-operate in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma (Wood et al. 2006). In contrast, participants whose serotonin levels were artificially increased were more likely to have deontological judgements in moral dilemmas (Crockett et al. 2010) and more likely to co-operate in repeated prisoner's dilemma (Tse and Bond 2002). Furthermore, exogenous oxytocin administration was found to be correlated with trust (Kosfeld et al. 2005), generosity (De Dreu and Kret 2016), empathy (Shamay-Tsoory et al. 2009), and several other traits related to co-operation (Fischer-Shofty et al. 2013; Krueger et al. 2013). Common variants in the oxytocin receptor seem to underlie individual differences in co-operation (Israel et al. 2009). Whether these findings may lead to reliable improvement of moral dispositions is surely an open question. Douglas (2014) notes that there is no nomological violation in the concept of moral enhancement, i.e., it does not seem to violate any known natural law, hence it is at least physically possible. Furthermore, development of technologies that attempt to produce moral improvement will likely happen regardless of possible unresolved conceptual issues in the moral enhancement debate (Shook 2012). In fact, technological interventions that we already make wide use of, such as anti-depressants and ADHD medication, have a modest but measurable impact on our moral capacities (Levy et al. 2014). Despite pessimism about empirical feasibility being a defensible position, it is a position that can lead to ignoring potential risks if the project turns out to be feasible. Moreover, even those who think proper moral enhancement is unfeasible will agree that failed attempts at it can be dangerous (e.g., Agar 2013b).