Sociological Theory II Week 2: (Strategic) Interaction Hilary 2019 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Sociological Theory II Week 2: (Strategic) Interaction

Hilary 2019 Dr Anna Krausova

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sant3223/

Last week: ‘rational action’?

▪ ‘Society is not something external to the individual; it is internalized through emotions such as shame and anger.’ ▪ Recall the example of protest from Bolivia?

▪ Aymara and Quechua indigenous communities protest attendance

▪ normal for nearly all to join or support protests ▪ talk of solidarity, feelings of outrage ▪ but also fines for not attendance

➔ What if the outcome is the most ‘rational’ (the greatest pay-off), but the motivation is ‘emotional’?

Game theory’s rational action (RA)

▪ Theory of interdependent decisions’

▪ Players; Payoffs; Preference Order ▪ Strategies; Best Response ➔

▪ Equilibrium

▪ Nash equilibrium

▪ Strategic interaction

▪ (Rational) belief formation ▪ Optimal collection of information ▪ Rational preferences

▪ Essence of RA:

1) conditional (if you want X, do Y) 2) outcome-oriented

(Elster, 2016)

Prisoner’s Dilemma Assurance Game:

(one last time!) e.g. Stag Hunt

4

B A Cooperate Defect Cooperate

6, 6 0, 10

Defect

10, 0 2, 2

B A Cooperate Defect Cooperate

4, 4 0, 1

Defect

1, 0 1, 1

Assurance games

Coordination Games

Chicken Game Bach or Stravinsky

B A Cooperate Defect Cooperate 2, 2 1, 3 Defect 3, 1 0, 0 B A Cooperate Defect Cooperate 1, 2 0,0 Defect 0,0 2, 1 B A Cooperate Defect Cooperate 1, 1 0, 0 Defect 0,0 1, 1

Focal Point Game

Focal points

▪ Shelling’s Strategy of Social Conflict (1960)

▪ Lack of information & inability to communicate ▪ How do we decide when the choice appears to be arbitrary, but we need to coordinate?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0MY923XLtY

Focal points

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0MY923XLtY

Focal points

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0MY923XLtY

Focal points

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0MY923XLtY

Focal points

▪ Most common answers:

▪ Problem 1: A6 ▪ Problem 2: $1,000,000 / $20 ▪ Problem 3: January 1st ▪ Problem 4: Heads ▪ Most people pick A6 ▪ 8 of 34 people picked exactly as above ($1,000,000, not $20)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0MY923XLtY

Culture and norms

▪ Focal points – influenced by (cultural) expectations ▪ Can we integrate culture / social norms into game theory? ▪ Gintis The Bounds of Reason (2014)

▪ “social norms as choreographer of a correlated equilibrium” ▪ Players will follow the choreographers’ direction to cooperate as long as the cost of violating the social norm is higher than the individual benefit of defecting ▪ The folk theorem:

“Indeed, when a game G is repeated an indefinite number of times by the same players, many of the anomalies associated with finitely repeated games disappear... The exact nature of these equilibria is the subject of the folk theorem, which shows that when self-regarding individuals are Bayesian rational, have sufficiently long time horizons, and there is adequate public information concerning who obeyed the rules and who did not, efficient social cooperation can be achieved in a wide variety

• f cases. The folk theorem requires that each action taken by each player carry a signal that is

conveyed to the other players.” (Gintis, 2014: 175)

Sequential Games: e.g. Assurance Game

12

Player A Player B 2, 2 3,1 1,3 4,4 D D D C C C D=Defect; C=Cooperate

▪ Do individual ‘intentions’ matter, or are external incentives more important?

▪

“The addition of sanctions may change the utilities for a basically egotistic agent, or they may provide assurance for an agent who is basically cooperative” (Williams in Gambetta, 1988: 4)

Trust

Motivations for cooperation Motivation

Egoistic Non-egoistic

Level

Micro Individual benefit in this situation (e.g. Personal liking; friendly relations; family; etc. * Macro Individual benefit in general (e.g. fear of sanctions by state) Moral/ethical disposition; religious belief; etc.

▪ Psychologically rewarding (Good in Gambetta, 1988) ▪ But, harder to earn than to lose (recent evidence: Bozoyan & Vogt, 2016) ▪ Mechanisms of trust?

▪ e.g. sharing compromising secrets (Flashman & Gambetta, 2014) ▪ or previous displays of (non-instrumental) generosity (Gambetta & Przepiorka, 2014)

➔ Reputation (Dasgupta in Gambetta, 1988) ➔ Signalling Theory (Hamill, 2010; Gambetta, 2009)

Trust

Mechanisms of sequential games

▪ E.g. Gambetta & Przepiorka, 2014:

▪ generosity and trustworthiness highly correlated - former can be a sign of latter

“A generous choice made naturally by uninformed trustees and reliably revealed is more effective in persuading trusters to trust than a generous choice that could be strategic

• r a lie.”

▪ Importance of signal interpretation

▪ How to communicate trustworthiness?

▪ Hamill’s The Hoods: Crime and Punishment in Belfast (2010) ▪ ‘Unorganised’ crime ▪ Trust low - information scarce ➔engaging in violent, risky behaviour (high cost) ➔Seemingly ‘irrational’ behaviour – BUT ‘rational’ if a signal

▪ Cf. violence as a result of interaction dynamics (Collins, 2008)

Signalling

▪ Are interactions occasions for us to pursue our goals (or adjust our beliefs/expectations), or does social reality develop in them? ▪ Example: a parcel delivery

▪ A delivery driver asks you to keep a parcel for your neighbour. ▪ Do you? Why/why not?

How ‘strategic’ is interaction?

▪ Are interactions simply occasions for us to pursue our goals (or adjust our beliefs/expectations)? ▪ Example: a parcel delivery

▪ A delivery driver asks you to keep a parcel for your neighbour. Do you? Why/why not? ▪ Think about what goes through your mind in that instance. If you keep it, were you calculating in that very moment that we would all be better off if neighbours helped each other this way? Or did you simply not want to be rude/it would have been uncomfortable to say no? Then, does the latter depend on how friendly the delivery driver was?

▪ Or: ▪ Producers of both structures and the individual (interactionism(s) of Mead; Goffman; Collins) ▪ Occasions for structures to determine our behaviour / outcomes (e.g. Stanford Prison Experiment)?

How ‘strategic’ is interaction?

➔

BBC Prison Study (2002)

▪ Reaction to Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) ▪ Not a direct replication

➔Very different findings! (Reicher & Haslam, 2006)

▪ Leadership matters ▪ In the SPE, guards being directed by warden to be ‘tough’ ▪ Here, without such input, guards ‘leaderless’ ▪ Prisoners more organised; union leader able to instigate riot ▪ However, ultimately fails – even more authoritarian

• utcome

➔

BBC Prison Study

➔

• Beliefs changes based on

interactions

• Goals changes based on

external incentives (initially, prisoners could ‘move up’)

• External validity?

“There is always a balance between existing constraints and future possibilities” (Haslam & Reicher, 2007: 128).

▪ How important are the intentions of the ‘intentional’ actor? ▪ E.g. persistence of racial inequality

▪ To what extent does it matter if

▪ a person is intentionally discriminating, ▪ or maximising self-interest (e.g. avoiding minority status: Schelling’s segregation models), ▪ or exhibiting internalised cognitive patterns / learnt behaviours ➔ discriminatory in everyday interactions? (e.g. microaggressions (e.g. Shoshana, 2016))

▪ If the outcome is persistence of racial inequality?

➔Gender next week

How ‘strategic’ is interaction?

Essay questions:

▪ What factors lead to the depletion of trust in a community? ▪ Can economic exchange take place without trust? Further revision questions:

▪ Why do people trust each other? ▪ Are social norms always functional for solving problems of collective action? ▪ Can sociologists explain ‘irrational’ beliefs?

Any questions?

anna.krausova@sociology.ox.ac.uk

References

Core readings:

• Collins, R. (2008). Violence : a micro-sociological theory. Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
• Elster, J. (2007). Explaining social behavior : more nuts and bolts for the social sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gambetta, D. (1988). Trust : making and breaking cooperative relations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Gambetta, D. (2009). Codes of the underworld : how criminals communicate. Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
• Gintis, H. (2014). The bounds of reason : game theory and the unification of the behavioral sciences (Revised edition. ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Schelling, T. C. (1960). The strategy of conflict. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Schelling, T. C. (2006). Micromotives and macrobehavior. New York ; London: W.W. Norton.

Extra resources:

▪ Bozoyan, C., & Vogt, S. (2016). The Impact of Third-Party Information on Trust: Valence, Source, and Reliability. PLoS ONE, 11(2). ▪ Elster, J. (2016). Tool-box or toy-box? Hard obscurantism in economic modeling. Synthese, 193(7) ▪ Flashman, J., & Gambetta, D. (2014). Thick as thieves: Homophily and trust among deviants. Rationality and Society, 26(1), 3-45. ▪ Gambetta, D., & Przepiorka, W. (2014). Natural and Strategic Generosity as Signals of Trustworthiness. PLoS ONE, 9(5). ▪ Hamill, H. (2011). The hoods : crime and punishment in Belfast. Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford: Princeton University Press. ▪ Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. (2007). Identity Entrepreneurship and the Consequences of Identity Failure: The Dynamics of Leadership in the BBC Prison Study. Social Psychology Quarterly, 70(2), 125- 147. ▪ Shoshana, A. (2016). The language of everyday racism and microaggression in the workplace: Palestinian professionals in Israel AU Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(6), 1052-1069. ▪ Microaggressions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1zLzWtULig

The lectures slides were also informed by previous lectures notes by Prof. Federico Varese.