Spurious normativity enhances learning of compliance and enforcement behavior in artificial agents

How do societies learn and maintain social norms? Here we use multiagent reinforcement learning to investigate the learning dynamics of enforcement and compliance behaviors. Artificial agents populate a foraging environment and need to learn to avoid a poisonous berry. Agents learn to avoid eating poisonous berries better when doing so is taboo, meaning the behavior is punished by other agents. The taboo helps overcome a credit assignment problem in discovering delayed health effects. Critically, introducing an additional taboo, which results in punishment for eating a harmless berry, further improves overall returns. This “silly rule” counterintuitively has a positive effect because it gives agents more practice in learning rule enforcement. By probing what individual agents have learned, we demonstrate that normative behavior relies on a sequence of learned skills. Learning rule compliance builds upon prior learning of rule enforcement by other agents. Our results highlight the benefit of employing a multiagent reinforcement learning computational model focused on learning to implement complex actions.

The good, the bad and the ugly: A qualitative secondary analysis into the impact of doping and anti-doping on clean elite athletes in five European countries

Background: Although a precise percentage of athletes doping has remained elusive, evidence to date suggest that the majority of athletes are ‘clean’. Protecting clean sport, and the rights of athletes to a clean sport environment, is at the centre of anti-doping policies. To better support and enable clean athletes and sport, an understanding of the clean athlete lifeworld is required. This study explores and discusses several ways that clean athletes have been and are affected by doping and anti-doping. Methods: Qualitative Secondary Analysis (QSA) was used to re-analyse and interpret 13 focus group transcripts generated from the ‘Research-Embedded Strategic Plan for Anti-Doping Education Clean Sport Alliance Initiative for Tackling Doping’ (RESPECT) project to explore the impact of doping and anti-doping on clean athletes (see Petroczi et al. 2021). The sample in the parent study included 82 self-declared clean elite athletes, active and recently retired, from Germany (n=23) Ireland (n=14), the Netherlands (n=15), Slovenia (n=14), and the UK (n=16), who collectively represented 36 different sports. Results: Reflexive thematic analysis generated three themes. The first overarching theme captured the harm done by clean athletes having to coexist with dopers (i.e., denied medals, money, moments and memories; altered expectations and perceptions of the self; incite suspicion). The second overarching theme highlighted how clean athletes are undermined by lenient and poor treatment of dopers and clean athletes respectively. The third overarching theme described the anxiety experienced by clean athletes over mistakes that could lead to anti-doping rules violations. Conclusion: The impacts of doping on clean athletes - direct or indirect - are experienced by all clean athletes in some way. The results indicate that current approaches to anti-doping rule compliance frequently undermine clean athletes and the perceive legitimacy of the anti-doping system. With considerable qualitative data on athletes’ views available, secondary data analysis offers a cost effective, quick, and feasible approach for anti-doping research.

Developing a COVID-19 module for the European Social Survey

This short report describes the development of a COVID-19 module for Round 10 of the European Social Survey (ESS). The module is formed of 20 items, including 10 agreed with ESS National Coordinators and 10 developed by two academic teams following an external call for content. The majority of ESS participating countries will field the module for Round 10 fieldwork in 2020–2021. This report provides the rationale for the module, presents challenges of developing such a module for ESS, and gives an overview of the question development and testing process. The two external sub-modules—Government authority and legitimacy in the age of a pandemic and COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and government rule compliance—are also introduced.

Primate selfies and anthropozoonotic diseases: lack of rule compliance and poor risk perception threatens orangutans.

Our understanding of the transmission of anthropozoonotic diseases between humans and nonhuman primates, particularly great apes due to their close genetic relationship with humans, highlights a serious potential threat to the survival of these species. This is particularly the case at tourism sites where risk of disease transmission is increased. We focus on the interaction between tourists and the Critically Endangered Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) at Bukit Lawang in the Gunung Leuser National Park, Indonesia, before and after the park was closed due to the threat of Covid-19 in April 2020. Through analysis of posts on Instagram we determine the extent of compliance by visitors with the rule to keep a minimum distance of 10 meters from orangutans and assess the positional behaviours of the orangutans. Of the 2,229 photographs we assessed between November 2019 and July 2020, 279 depicted one or more orangutans. Forty-two of these contained both a human and an orangutan, and of these all showed inappropriate behaviours (direct contact, feeding orangutans, close proximity <5m) providing direct evidence of noncompliance with the 10m distance rule. Most of these photographs additionally showed orangutans performing abnormal positional behaviours such as being low to or on the ground rather than their natural high position in the canopy; being near the ground and in close proximity to humans increases the risk of anthropozoonotic disease transmission. As expected, we found a significant decrease in number of photographs that were posted following the closure, and a decrease in the proportion of photographs that showed orangutans or tourists feeding orangutans. Tourists do not seem to perceive that they pose risks to the orangutans and therefore increased awareness, education and enforcement of rules by all stakeholders, tourism bodies and government officials need to be actioned in order to safeguard this important population, which is crucial to the future survival of the Sumatran orangutan.

Every Book You Take: Evaluating Compliance Behavior in an Information Commons

There has been a heated debate related to the effects of business background on ethical behavior. According to some authors, students majoring in business courses - such as accounting, economics, and management - would be more likely to free ride or defect from coalitions in collective action situations, given the emphasis of such courses on individualistic values. Other authors have challenged that view, presenting empirical evidence that questions the link between business education and opportunistic behavior. The present paper revisits this debate, by studying the impact of business education on rule compliance in a specific type of information commons (libraries). Employing a novel dataset related to more than 700,000 library transactions during a 10-year period (2006-2015), I correlate business background with users’ compliance behavior, while controlling for their time-invariant characteristics. I find no evidence of a significant effect of business education on rule compliance in this specific setting. In fact, some of the estimates here reported suggest a negative correlation between business background and compliance behavior. These results have important implications for ethical theories in economics, suggesting that compliance behavior is context-dependent.