Hannah Rubin

Inclusive fitness has been under intense scrutiny in recent years, with many critics claiming the framework leads to incorrect predictions. We show that one particularly influential heuristic for estimating inclusive fitness is unreliable, yielding incorrect predictions in the very case that motivated reliance on it to begin with: communication among relatives with conflicting interests. Using a neighbor-modulated fitness model, we show when and why this heuristic fails. We do not argue that the inclusive fitness framework as a whole is problematic, but that a heavily relied on method for calculating inclusive fitness misrepresents the biological reality of interactions among kin.

The priority rule in science has been interpreted as a behavior regulator for the scientific community, which benefits society by adequately structuring the distribution of intellectual labor across pre-existing research programs. Further, it has been lauded as part of society's "grand reward scheme " because it fairly rewards people for the benefits they produce. But considerations about how news of scientific developments spreads throughout a scientific community at large suggest that the priority rule is something else entirely, which can disadvantage historically underrepresented or otherwise marginalized social groups.

Philosophers of science and social scientists have argued that diverse perspectives, methods, and background assumptions are critical to the progress of science. One way to achieve such diversity is to ensure that a scientific community is made up of individuals from diverse personal backgrounds. In many scientific disciplines, though, minority groups are underrepresented. In some cases minority members further segregate into sub-fields, thus decreasing the effective diversity of research collaborations. In this paper, we employ agent-based, game theoretic models to investigate various types of initiatives aimed at improving the diversity of collaborative groups. This formal framework provides a platform to discuss the potential efficacy of these various proposals. As we point out, though, such proposals may have unintended negative consequences.

We use game theoretic models to take an in-depth look at the dynamics of discrimination and academic collaboration. We find that in collaboration networks, small minority groups may be more likely to end up being discriminated against while collaborating. We also find that discrimination can lead members of different social groups to mostly collaborate with in-group members, decreasing the effective diversity of the social network. Drawing on previous work, we discuss how decreases in the diversity of scientific collaborations might negatively impact the progress of epistemic communities.

The study of social justice asks: what sorts of social arrangements are equitable ones? But also: how do we derive the inequitable arrangements we often observe in human societies? In particular, in spite of explicitly stated equity norms, categorical inequity tends to be the rule rather than the exception. The cultural red king hypothesis predicts that differentials in group size may lead to inequitable outcomes for minority groups even in the absence of explicit or implicit bias. We test this prediction in an experimental context where subjects divided into groups engage in repeated play of a bargaining game. We ran 14 trials involving a total of 112 participants. The results of the experiments are significant and suggestive: individuals in minority groups do indeed end up receiving fewer resources than those in majority groups.

Recently, game theory and evolutionary game theory – mathematical frameworks from economics and biology designed to model and explain interactive behavior – have proved fruitful tools for philosophers in areas such as ethics, philosophy of language, social epistemology, and political philosophy. This methodological osmosis is part of a trend where philosophers have blurred disciplinary lines to import the best epistemic tools available. In this vein, experimental philosophers have drawn on practices from the social sciences, and especially from psychology, to expand philosophy's grasp on issues from morality to consciousness. We argue that the recent prevalence of formal work on human interaction in philosophy opens the door for new methods in experimental philosophy. In particular, we discuss methods from experimental economics, focusing on a small literature we have been developing investigating signaling and communication in humans. We describe results from a novel experiment showing how environmental structure can shape signaling behavior.

According to Grice's `Cooperative Principle', human communicators are involved in a cooperative endeavor. The speaker attempts to make herself understood and the listener, in turn, assumes that the speaker is trying to maximize the ease and effectiveness of communication. While pragmatists recognize that people do not always behave in such a way, the Cooperative Principle is generally assumed to hold. However, it is often the case that the interests of speakers and listeners diverge, at least to some degree. Communication can arise in such situations when the cost of signaling is high enough that it aligns the interests of speaker and listener, but what happens when the cost of signaling is not sufficient to align the interests of those communicating? In these cases the theoretical prediction is that they will reach a partially informative system of communication. Using methods from experimental economics, we test whether theoretical predictions are borne out. We find that subjects do learn to communicate without the cooperative principle.