Search for: All records

There is limited research about how groups solve collective action problems in uncertain environments, especially if groups are confronted with unknown unknowns. We aim to develop a more comprehensive view of the characteristics that allow both groups and individuals to navigate such issues more effectively. In this article, we present the results of a new online experiment where individuals make decisions of whether to contribute to the group or pursue self-interest in an environment with high uncertainty, including unknown unknowns. The behavioral game, Port of Mars is framed as a first-generation habitat on Mars where participants have to make decisions on how much to invest in the shared infrastructure to maintain system health and how much to invest in personal goals. Participants can chat during the game, and take surveys before and after the game in order to measure personality attributes and observations from the game. Initial results suggest that a higher average social value orientation and more communication are the key factors that explain why some groups are more successful than others in surviving Port of Mars. Neither other attributes of players nor the group’s communication content explain the observed differences between groups. 

This essay describes essential considerations and select methods in computational text analysis for use in the study of history. We explore specific approaches that can be used for understanding conceptual change over time in a large corpus of documents. By way of example, using a corpus of 27,977 articles collected on the microbiome, this paper studies: 1) the general microbiome discourse for 2001 to 2010; 2) the usage and sense of the word “human” from 2001 to 2010; and 3) highlights shifts in the microbiome discourse from 2001 to 2010.