[MUD-Dev] Decision making...

[Mike Rozak]

J C Lawrence wrote:

>  But if you ignore the equations and focus on how people actually
>  behave, you see something different, says Jonathan D. Cohen,
>  director of the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior
>  at Princeton. People playing B who receive only one or two
>  dollars overwhelmingly reject the offer. Economists have no
>  better explanation than simple spite over feeling
>  shortchanged. This becomes clear when people play the same game
>  against a computer. They tend to accept whatever they're offered,
>  because why feel insulted by a machine? By the same token, most
>  normal people playing A offer something close to an even split,
>  averaging about $4. The only category of people who consistently
>  play as game theory dictates, offering the minimum possible
>  amount, are those who don't take into account the feelings of the
>  other player. They are autistics.

I was flipping channels last week when I came across a TV nature
show that showed economics-related behavior experiments with small
new-world monkeys (not even apes).

The first experiment had a plexiglass wall between the monkeys, with
a hole large enough for the monkeys to reach their arms part-way
through. One monkey had a sharpened flint in his cage. The other had
a container with 4 pieces of fruit; the container was closed in such
a way that the flint was needed to open it. Amazingly, the monkey
with the flint handed it through the hole to the monkey with the
container. Even more amazingly, the monkey with the container passed
approx. half the fruit back through the hole to the first
monkey. (An autistic monkey would have kept all the fruit, I
suppose.)

The other experiment had monkey A being rewarded with pellets when
it did something right. It was happy to receive the pellets. Monkey
B came in, and was rewarded with fruit (better than pellets) for the
same activity. When monkey A saw that monkey B was getting fruit for
the same work, monkey A refused to take any of the pellets, even if
that resulted in it getting nothing. (Again, a sense of fairness.)

At its core, monkey behavior is not that different from human
behavior. Perhaps fairness is built into our genes so that those
individuals that do not play by "the rules" (which are ultimately
beneficial for the group) end up being ostricized by the group. Such
rule-breaking individuals sound a lot like "griefers" to me.

A further question arises: Are griefers attracted to VWs because
they are semi-autistic or sociopaths that have already been
ostricised by their current tribe/clan in the real world?

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au
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