T T heir relationship began innocently enough. He started to pay extra attention to her, and her attraction to him grew over time. One day, however, the dynamic changed. While she was peacefully sitting having a meal, he attacked her without warning. The unprovoked abuse continued, yet she stayed with him, still feeling the attraction and too afraid to go anywhere else. Later, his presence benefitted their youngsters.

Such is a typical story of a wild, female chacma baboon, which in many ways is a tale that mirrors those of certain chimpanzees and human domestic abuse survivors the world over, a new study published in the journal Current Biology indicates. Males of all three species may use long-term sexual intimidation to control their mates, suggesting that this mating strategy has a long history in primates, including humans.

The behavior has often been reported in our species, and has been documented in male chimps over the past decade. The new study focuses on chacma baboons, which are among the largest of all monkeys.

What is interesting is that the forms of sexual violence reported in chacma baboons may resemble some common patterns of sexual intimidation in humans, namely domestic violence, in the sense that they are similarly expressed in the context of long-term relationships between one male and one female, which are otherwise characterized by close spatial proximity and sometimes high levels of affiliation, said senior author Elise Huchard of the University of Montpelliers Institute of Evolutionary Sciences.

There is nothing paradoxical in forming a strong bond with someone, and displaying aggression in the context of such relationship, added Huchard. Conflict is an integral part of social life in every species including humans, and it's often with those people that you often see that you may have a conflict.

Huchard, lead author Alice Baniel, and co-author Guy Cowlishaw studied wild chacma baboons at Tsaobis Nature Park, a semi-arid environment in Namibia. The study occurred over four different periods from 20052014, during which time the researchers documented 222 chases or attacks led by males.

The researchers observed that males often formed social bonds with particular fertile females, which they then attacked and chased repeatedly usually without provocation in the weeks preceding her ovulation and prior to their mating.

It can also be that there is an event triggering the attack, such as a rival approaching or vocalizing, or the proximity of another baboon group, Huchard said. The latter case is typical: males often chase and attack some females of their own group when meeting another group, and they generally target sexually receptive females in such occasions.

RELATED: Human Hands More Primitive Than Chimp Hands

Some of the females were badly injured in the attacks, with certain individuals suffering premature deaths after repeated bouts of injuries.

The prior studies on sexual intimidation in chimps found that fertile females have higher levels of cortisol, a hormone indicative of stress. Increased stress can alter immune response. It can also disrupt reproduction and growth.

If a female baboon does give birth to offspring sired by the male, his behavior somewhat changes.

Several studies (on baboons) have shown that its often the male who has been monopolizing a female during her conceptive estrus who becomes her friend when she gives birth, Huchard explained. The female follows the male everywhere with her newborn, and the male essentially tolerates her presence; however, studies have shown that males defend their female friend's offspring against predators or infanticidal attacks, which are not uncommon in baboons.

She continued, Male-female bonds progressively dissolve as infants grow towards independency, and are often finished when a female becomes fertile again, when her juvenile is fully weaned.

A common factor among primates that practice long-term sexual intimidation is that the species tend to have males that are larger than the females. Such size differences, in turn, appear to be driven by patterns of male-to-male competition. This can happen when there are several adult males for each sexually receptive female within a population.

Since sexual coercion can stunt a victims growth, it might even further drive sexual size dimorphism, helping to keep the vicious cycle going.

Not all primate species have males that engage in long-term sexual intimidation, though. In lemurs, for example, it is common that females are larger than males. Even among baboons, chimps, and certainly humans, not all males practice sexual coercion.

There is increasing research to show that animals are capable of innovations, rational decisions, self-control, empathy, strategic behavior, etc., Huchard said. So, it's possible that male baboons are just driven by their sexual hormones, but it's also very possible that their actions are strategic and adjusted to the social context.

In humans, the intensity and frequency of long-term sexual intimidation by males vary widely across cultures. This points to a strong cultural component affecting the behavior.

Its even possible that there is a cultural basis for baboon sexual intimidation, as for human sexual intimidation, Huchard said. Thats a question for future research, but it wont be an easy one to answer.

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Sexual Violence Among Baboons Shows Links to Human Behavior ... - Seeker

In BriefA study has found that it would be fairly simple to programautonomous vehicles to make similar moral decisions as humandrivers. In light of this, the question becomes whether we wantdriverless cars to emulate us or behave differently. Programming Morality

A new study from The Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrck has found that the moral decisions humans make while driving are not as complex or context dependent as previously thought. Based on the research, which has been published inFrontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience,these decisions follow a fairly simple value-of-life-based model, which means programming autonomous vehicles to make ethical decisions should be relatively easy.

For the study, 105 participants were put in a virtual reality (VR) scenario during which they drove around suburbia on a foggy day. They then encountered unavoidable dilemmas that forced them to choose between hitting people, animals, and inanimate objects with their virtual car.

The previous assumption was that these types of moral decisions were highly contextual and therefore beyond computational modeling. But we found quite the opposite, Leon Stfeld, first author of the study, told Science Daily. Human behavior in dilemma situations can be modeled by a rather simple value-of-life-based model that is attributed by the participant to every human, animal, or inanimate object.

Alot of virtual ink has been spilt online concerning the benefits of driverless cars. Elon Musk is in the vanguard, stating emphatically that those who do not support the technology are killing people.His view is that the technology can be smarter, more impartial, and better at driving than humans, and thus able to save lives.

Currently, however, the cars are large pieces of hardware supported byrudimentary driverless technology. The question of how many lives they could save is contingent upon how we choose to program them, and thats where the resultsof this study come into play. If we expect driverless cars to be better than humans, why would we program them like human drivers?

As Professor Gordon Pipa, a senior author on the study, explained, We need to ask whether autonomous systems should adopt moral judgements. If yes, should they imitate moral behavior by imitating human decisions? Should they behave along ethical theories, and if so, which ones? And critically, if things go wrong, who or what is at fault?

The ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) remains swampy moral territory in general, and numerous guidelines and initiatives are being formed in an attempt to codify a set of responsible laws for AI.The Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society is composed of tech giants, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft, while the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure has developed a set of 20 principles that AI-powered cars should follow.

Just how safe driverless vehicles will be in the future is dependent on how we choose to program them, and while that task wont be easy, knowing how we would react in various situations should help us along the way.

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Study Finds That Human Ethics Could Be Easily Programmed Into Driverless Cars - Futurism

Imagine you are driving down the street when two peopleone child and one adultstep onto the road. Hitting one of them is unavoidable. You have a terrible choice. What do you do?

Now imagine that the car is driverless. What happens then? Should the car decide?

Until now, no one believed that autonomous carsrobotic vehicles that operate without human control could make moral and ethical choices, an issue that has been central to the ongoing debate about their use. But German scientists now think otherwise. They believe eventually it may be possible to introduce elements of morality and ethics into self-driving cars.

To be sure, most human drivers will never face such an agonizing dilemma. Nevertheless, with many millions of cars on the road, these situations do occur occasionally, said Leon Stfeld, a researcher in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrck and lead author of a new study modeling ethics for self-driving cars. The paper, published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, was co-authored by Gordon Pipa, Peter Knig, and Richard Gast, all of the institute.

The concept of driverless cars has grown in popularity as a way to combat climate change, since these autonomous vehicles drive more efficiently than most humans. They avoid rapid acceleration and braking, two habits that waste fuel. Also, a fleet of self-driving cars could travel close together on the highway to cut down on drag, thereby saving fuel. Driverless cars will also encourage car-sharing, reducing the number of cars on the road and possibly making private car ownership unnecessary.

Improved safety is also an energy saver. [Driverless cars] are expected to cause fewer accidents, which means fewer cars need to be produced to replace the crashed ones, providing another energy savings, Stfeld said. The technology could help [fight climate change] in many ways.

The study suggests that cars can be programmed to model human moral behaviors involving choice, deciding which of multiple possible collisions would be the best option. Scientists placed human subjects into immersive virtual reality settings to study behavior in simulated traffic scenarios. They then used the data to design algorithms for driverless cars that could enable them to cope with potentially tragic predicaments on the road just as humans would.

Participants drove a car in a typical suburban neighborhood on a foggy day when they suddenly faced collision with an animal, humans or an inanimate object, such as a trash can, and had to decide what or whom to spare. For example, adult or child? Human or animal? Dog or other animal? In the study, children fared better than adults. The dog was the most valued animal, the others being a goat, deer and boar.

When it comes to humans versus animals, most people would certainly agree that the well-being of humans must be the first priority, Stfeld said. But from the perspective of the self-driving car, everything is probabilistic. Most situations arent as clear cut as should I kill the dog, or the human? It is more likely should I kill the dog with near certainty, or alternatively spare the dog but take a 5 percent chance of a minor injury to a human? Adhering to strict rules, such as always deciding in favor of the human, might just not feel right for many.

Other variables also come into play. For example, was the person at fault? Did the adult look for cars before stepping into the street? Did the child chase a ball into the street without stopping to think? Also, how many people are in harms way?

The German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure attempted to answer these questions in a recent report. It defined 20 ethical principles for self-driving cars, several of which stand at odds with the choices humans made in Stfelds experiment. For example, the ministrys report says that a child who runs onto the road is more to blameand less worthy of savingthan an adult standing on the footpath as a non-involved party. Moreover, it declares it unacceptable to take a potential victims age into account.

Most peopleat least in Europe and very likely also Northern American cultureswould save a child over an adult or elderly person, Stfeld said. We could debate whether or not we want cars to behave like humans, or whether we want them to comply to categorical rules such as the ones provided by the ethics committee report.

Peter Knig, a study co-author, believes their research creates more quandaries than it solves, as sometimes happens in science. Now that we know how to implement human ethical decisions into machines we, as a society, are still left with a double dilemma, he said. Firstly, we have to decide whether moral values should be included in guidelines for machine behavior and secondly, if they are, should machines should act just like humans?

The study doesnt seek to answer these questions, only to demonstrate that it is possible to model ethical and moral decision-making in driverless cars, using clues as to how humans would act. The authors are trying to lay the groundwork for additional studies and further debate.

It would be rather simple to implement, as technology certainly isnt the limiting factor here, Stfeld said. The question is how we as a society want the cars to handle this kind of situation, and how the laws should be written. What should be allowed and what shouldnt? In order to come to an informed opinion, its certainly very useful to know how humans actually do behave when theyre facing such a decision.

Marlene Cimons writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

Continued here:
What moral code should your self-driving car follow? - Popular Science

Interactions between gut bacteria and the brain may play an important role in human health and behavior.

In a new study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have discovered that microbiota in the gut interacts with brain regions associated with mood and behavior in healthy humans.The findings add to the growing body of evidence of a significant link between the gut and the brain.

Earlier studies have shown that microbiota, a community of microorganisms in the gut, can influence behavior and emotion. Rodent models have demonstrated the effects of gut microbiota on emotional and social behaviors, such as anxiety and depression, but there has been little scientific evidence in humans.

For the new study, the researchers wanted to identify brain and behavioral characteristics of healthy women clustered by gut microbiota profiles. A total of 40 women gave fecal samples for profiling, and magnetic resonance images were taken of their brains as they looked at images of individuals, activities, or other objects that evoked an emotional response.

The women were divided by their gut bacteria composition into two groups: 33 had more of a bacterium called Bacteroides; the remaining seven had more of the Prevotella bacteria.

Women in the Bacteroides group showed greater thickness of the gray matter in the frontal cortex and insula, brain regions involved with complex processing of information. These women also had larger volumes of the hippocampus, a region involved in memory processing.

In contrast, women in the Prevotella group displayed more connections between emotional, attentional and sensory brain regions and lower brain volumes in several regions, such as the hippocampus.

In this group, the womens hippocampus was less active as they looked at negative images. They also rated higher levels of negative feelings such as anxiety, distress and irritability after looking at photos with negative images than did the women in the Bacteroides group.

The new findings support the concept of brain-gut-microbiota interactions in healthy humans. Researchers still do not fully understand whether the bacteria in the gut influence the development of the brain and its activity when unpleasant emotional content is encountered, or if existing differences in the brain influence the type of bacteria that reside in the gut.

In either case, however, the findings could lead to important changes in how we perceive human emotions.

Source: University of California, Los Angeles Health Sciences

APA Reference Pedersen, T. (2017). Gut Bacteria May Be Linked to Mood, Behavior in Healthy Humans. Psych Central. Retrieved on July 5, 2017, from https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/07/05/gut-bacteria-may-be-linked-to-mood-behavior-in-healthy-humans/122846.html

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Gut Bacteria May Be Linked to Mood, Behavior in Healthy Humans - PsychCentral.com

Urban environmentalist Jenny Price gave a lecture at the UW on July 3 in an attempt to help students and others understand how a change in human behavior can become a way of addressing environmental crises. The goal was to bring together the perspectives of urban environmentalism and the hard sciences with the humanities.

The lecture is a part of the summer institute City/Nature: Urban Environmental Humanities, which is sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The institute provides UW scholars the opportunity to connect with other academics and provide professional development across disciplines. Price is visiting the university from Princeton.

The lecture addressed how to help environmentalists understand why people think and respond to environmentalism the way they do, as a way to address climate change. As important as technological or scientific solutions are, these solutions lack the ability to address social behaviors as a means of creating social change.

Its a critique about 21st century environmentalism, Price said when discussing her work and the book she is writing: Stop Saving the Planet 8 Other Tips for 21st-Century Environmentalists.

I really want to emphasize right up front that Im not critiquing all environmentalists, she said.

The frustration between environmentalists and those most affected by the negative effects of climate change as well as environmental damage aligns with the growing distance between humans and nature. Lower-income communities often fall into this gap.

There is a long American tradition that nature is a world that is away from humans, Price said.

This social distancing alienates what is in fact intertwined in the life of the city.

Environment is the very foundation of our lives, Price said.

Environmentalists and non-environmentalists alike need to change the notion that the planet needs to be saved, according to Price. She explained that the language of saving nature does not help people understand the environment as the center of their lives. How resources are accessed, controlled, and allocated brings nature squarely into the framework of community, class, and social change, she said.

Companies often use green initiatives to emphasize their care for environmental change, a characteristic Price calls green virtue. The result, Price said, is a corporation that maintains a high and mighty attitude, shifting responsibility off of their shoulders.

The responsibility then shifts to the public buying the product. These are who Price labels virtuous consumers, or those who carry the weight of environmental problems. She calls this trickle-down environmentalism.

What Price pointed out is that the people who are contributing least to environmental problems are often given responsibility for solutions solutions that happen to be expensive. This leaves the public angry, Prince continued, and antagonistic towards environmentalists and environmentalism.

The big question that hung in the air during the lecture was simple: how to make the responsibility for sustainability that of the government and large corporations.

According to Price, if the solution is salvation then environmentalists are missing 93 percent of environmental activities. She tracks this thinking through actions, policies, and solutions.

The environmental movement has not yet penetrated the popular discourse, Price said. Yet the concept of nature is deeply rooted in the way humans think, and incidentally making the environment the focus of a growing conversation paves the way toward social change. In the long run, this means environmental changes.

Its really about sustainable cities. Price said, when discussing what urban environmentalism is.

Preserving areas outside of the city has been the primary focal point of traditional environmentalism to date, but within the realm of urban environmentalism, the focus shifts to the city and how to create sustainability within it.

The long-term goal is to make urban environmentalism a common course in universities, fully integrating environmentalists perspectives within the hard sciences with the humanities.

UW Italian and French studies professor Richard Watts is not an environmentalist. At least, not in the literal sense of the word. Watts work has focused on the post-colonial world and he explores the social landscape of the places that France colonized.

However, he is heading the City/Nature: Urban Environmental Humanities institute.

One of the things I realized [was that] environmentalism was a constant in this literature and cinema, Watts said.

The intersection between the two fields created an avenue for art to act as a means of environmental change. The future of the environment, environmentalism, the role of the humanities and higher education merges in this seminar.

These summer programs bring some of the best and most creative minds in humanities fields together in real time to examine important subjects in depth and then seed the results of this process in classrooms and lecture halls around the country. NEHs Director of Education Programs Carol Peters said in an email.

The City/Nature institute will be running from June 26 to July 14 at the UW. According to the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the institute will offer participants the chance to engage in the development of an undergraduate course syllabus that is interdisciplinary. Visiting scholars will explore this approach in seminars and discussions.

Reach reporter Hannah Pickering at news@dailyuw.com. Twitter: Hannah_Pick95

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Making 'greenness' human: UW lecture highlights environmentalism for the everyday student - Dailyuw

FILE In this Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016, file photo, an Uber driverless car waits in traffic during a test drive in San Francisco. In just a few years, well-mannered self-driving robotaxis will share the roads with reckless, law-breaking human drivers. The prospect is causing migraines for the people developing the robocars and is slowing their development. But experts say eventually the cars will coexist with human drivers on real roads. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

(CN) Is a self-driving vehicle capable of making moral decisions? If it is, which moral values should it use to make such choices?

These questions are among the issues society must consider as artificial intelligence, or AI, systems become more common in various industries, according to Gordon Pipa, co-author of a new study that provides a statistical model of human morality.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, is a breakthrough for efforts to equip AI systems with morality which experts had viewed as context-based and therefore impossible to describe mathematically.

But we found quite the opposite, said lead author Leon Sutfeld, a researcher at the University of Osnabruck in Germany. Human behavior in dilemma situations can be modeled by a rather simple value-of-life-based model that is attributed by the participant to every human, animal, or inanimate object.

In order to examine human behavior in road traffic scenarios, the team asked study participants to drive a car in a simulated, virtual-reality suburban neighborhood where they experienced unexpected, unavoidable dilemmas involving animals, inanimate objects and humans forcing the participants to prioritize which to save.

The authors then used the results to conceptualize statistical models that established rules, along with an associated degree of explanatory power to understand the observed behavior.

The findings come amid growing debate over the behavior of self-driving vehicles and other machines in unavoidable accidents.

Stakeholders and experts have operated under the assumption that human moral behavior could not be modeled, and have focused on outlining critical variables for engineering AIsystems. For example, a new initiative from the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, or BMVI, has defined 20 ethical principles for self-driving cars.

Now that applying human morality to machines seems to be possible, the team argues that debate should now focus on how such morals are programmed into, and employed by, AI.

Now that we know how to implement human ethical decisions into machines we, as a society, are still left with a double dilemma, said senior author Peter Konig, a professor at the University of Osnabruck. Firstly, we have to decide whether moral values should be included in guidelines for machine behavior and secondly, if they are, should machinesact just like humans.

The team also warns that society is at the beginning of a technological revolution that requires clear rules. Without them, machines could begin making decisions without us.

In conclusion, Papa wonders: Should they imitate moral behavior by imitating human decisions, should they behave along ethical theories and if so, which ones and critically, if things go wrong who or what is at fault?

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Driverless Cars Could Learn to Make Moral Choices - Courthouse News Service

Psychopaths, with their superficial charms but lack of empathy, may act the way they do because their brains are wired to overvalue immediate rewards, a new study finds.

Psychopaths' brain wiring may also lead them to avoid thinking about the consequences of their potentially immoral actions, the study found.

Psychopaths are thought to make up about 1 percent of the general population and up to 25 percent of the prison population. Scientists who investigate psychopathy commonly define people with the disorder as having a lack of conscience or remorse, as well as impulsivity or a lack of self-control, shallow experiences of emotions, superficial charm and a grandiose sense of their own worth. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

More than three-quarters of incarcerated psychopaths are in prison because of a violent offense, according to a 2011 review of studies. Although not all psychopaths are violent, they can prove socially destructive in other ways, by lying, cheating and stealing, that review added.

"Psychopaths commit an astonishing amount of crime, and this crime is both devastating to victims and astronomically costly to society as a whole," Joshua Buckholtz, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Harvard University, said in a statement.

Scientific research into psychopathy "has for many years focused on emotion in particular, this idea that psychopaths are cold-blooded super-predators who lack the ability to experience emotions," Buckholtz told Live Science. In the new study, the researchers wanted to focus more on psychopaths' behaviors.

"Regardless of what they feel, they engage in a lot of behavior marked by a lack of self-control, and we were interested in the neuroscience of that poor decision making," he said.

Buckholtz and his colleagues brought a mobile MRI scanner on a tractor trailer to a pair of medium-security prisons in Wisconsin. They scanned the brains of 49 inmates as the prisoners took part in a delayed gratification test that asked them to choose between two options receiving a smaller amount of money immediately or a larger amount later. The researchers also had the inmates take a test to assess their level of psychopathy.

The researchers found that inmates who scored high for psychopathy showed greater activity in a brain region called the ventral striatum for the more immediate choice than those who scored lower in psychopathy. Previous studies suggested that the ventral striatum is linked with the ability to evaluate the value of different choices.

In addition, the scientists found that in psychopaths, the connection between the ventral striatum and another brain region known as the ventral medial prefrontal cortex were much weaker than normal. Prior work suggested that the ventral medial prefrontal cortex "is important for 'mental time travel' that is, thinking about the future consequences of actions," Buckholtz said. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

These findings suggest that psychopaths often behave antisocially because their brains are wired in a way that makes them both overvalue immediate rewards and neglect the future costs of potentially immoral actions. In fact, the more abnormal inmates' brains were in both of these regards, the more crimes the prisoners were convicted of.

"The pattern of decision making we see in psychopathic individuals is not all that different from that in people with other kinds of self-destructive behavior, such as substance abusers, compulsive over-eaters or compulsive gamblers," Buckholtz said. "Whatever else may be going in psychopathy, such as deficits of emotion, our findings put psychopathy in the sphere of things that can be intervened in."

Future research can investigate whether there may be ways to help psychopaths improve their thinking about the future, such as through behavioral therapies or noninvasive brain stimulation, Buckholtz said.

The scientists detailed their findings online today (July 5) in the journal Neuron.

Original article on Live Science.

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Psychopaths' Brains Reveal Secrets of Their Immoral Behavior - Live Science

Robert M. Sapolsky is that rara avis whos both eminent scientist and elegant prose stylist. Three decades ago, at the ripe old age of 28, he won a MacArthur genius grant before settling into a storied career as neurobiologist and primatologist at Stanford University, conducting field work among baboons in Kenya and publishing books with such whimsical titles as Why Zebras Dont Get Ulcers and The Trouble With Testosterone.

His new book is his magnum opus, but is also strikingly different from his earlier work, veering sharply toward hard science as it looms myriad strands of his ruminations on human behavior. The familiar, enchanting Sapolsky tropes are here his warm, witty voice, a sleight of hand that unfolds the mysteries of cognition but Behave keeps the bar high.

The book opens with a conceit: Consider a simple, everyday tic chewing gum, say, or bickering with a spouse and then pivot backward in time. In the instant before the action, Sapolsky charts the intricate web of neurons as they fire up, the seemingly infinite synapses that spark across the organs widespread regions. In the hours leading up to the behavior, hormones play a critical role; here Sapolsky offers a tutorial on the waves of hormones that wash over us. Wind the clock back to childhood, and there are environmental factors at work, from affluence to poverty, safe neighborhoods versus violent ones. Wind the clock back to conception, and he plumbs how our DNA, as well as epigenetic components, shape us from day to day, year to year. He dials back even further, probing the dice theory of evolution, lizard brains beneath our mammalian gray matter.

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REVIEW: 'Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,' by Robert M. Sapolsky - Minneapolis Star Tribune

July 4, 2017 Genoeconomics looks for genetic ties to life outcomes and economic behavior. Credit: Janice Kun

When Daniel Benjamin was just beginning his PhD program in economics in 2001, he attended a conference with his graduate school advisers. They took in a presentation on neuroeconomics, a nascent field dealing with how the human brain goes about making decisions.

Afterward, as they took a stroll outside, they couldn't stop talking about what they had learned, how novel and intriguing it was. What would be next, they wondered. What would come after neuroeconomics?

"The human genome project had just been completed, and we decided that even more fundamental than the brain would be genes, and that someday this was going to matter a lot for social science," said Benjamin, associate professor (research) of economics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Science's Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR). Indeed, his excitement that day was the foundation of a visionary academic path.

Fast forward to today. Genoeconomics is now an emerging area of social science that incorporates genetic data into the work that economists do. It's based on the idea that a person's particular combination of genes is related to economic behavior and life outcomes such as educational attainment, fertility, obesity and subjective well-being.

"There's this rich new source of data that has only become available recently," said Benjamin, also co-director of the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, which brings about cooperation among medical researchers, geneticists and social scientists.

Collecting genetic data and creating the large data sets used by economists and other social scientists have become increasingly affordable, and new analytical methods are getting more and more powerful as these data sets continue to grow. The big challenge, he said, is figuring out how scientists can leverage this new data to address a host of important policy questions.

"We're ultimately interested in understanding how genes and environments interact to produce the kinds of outcomes people have in their lives, and then what kinds of policies can help people do better. That is really what economics is aboutand we're trying to use genetics to do even better economics."

The mission at hand

Only a handful of economists are working with genetics, but this brand of research is perfectly at home at CESR. The center, founded three years ago, was conceived as a place where visionary social science could thrive and where research could be done differently than in the past.

"Being in a place where that's the shared vision is pretty rare," said econometrician Arie Kapteyn, professor (research) of economics and CESR director. "There's no restriction on which way you want to go or what you want to do. It doesn't mean that there are no restrictions on resources, but it's the opportunity to think about your vision of what's really exciting in social science research. Then being able to actually implement it is absolutely fantastic."

The mission of CESR is discovering how people around the world live, think, interact, age and make important decisions. The center's researchers are dedicated to innovation and combining their analysis to deepen the understanding of human behavior in a variety of economic and social contexts.

"What we try to do is mold a disciplinary science in a very broad sense," Kapteyn said. "Because today's problems in society, they're really all multidisciplinary."

Case in point: Benjamin's work combining genetics and economics.

The flagship research effort for Benjamin's CESR research group deals with genes and education. In a 2016 study, the team identified variants in 74 genes that are associated with educational attainment. In other words, people who carry more of these variants, on average, complete more years of formal schooling.

Benjamin hopes to use this data in a holistic way to create a predictive tool.

"Rather than just identifying specific genes," he said, "we're also creating methods for combining the information in a person's entire genome into a single variable that can be used to partially predict how much education a person's going to get."

The young field of genoeconomics is still somewhat controversial, and Benjamin is careful to point out that individual genes don't determine behavior or outcome.

"The effect of any individual gene on behavior is extremely small," Benjamin explained, "but the effects of all the genes combined on almost any behavior we're interested in is much more substantial. It's the combined information of many genes that has predictive power, and that can be most useful for social scientists."

Learning about behavior

While the cohort of researchers actively using the available genome-wide data in this way is still somewhat limited, Benjamin says it is growing quickly.

"I think across the social sciences, researchers are seeing the potential for the data, and people are starting to use it in their work and getting excited about it, but right now it's still a small band of us trying to lay the foundations.

"We're putting together huge data sets of hundreds of thousands of peopleapproaching a million people in our ongoing work on educational attainmentbecause you need those really big sample sizes to accurately detect the genetic influences."

As CESR works to improve social welfare by informing and influencing decision-making in the public and private sectors, big data such as Benjamin's is a growing part of that process, according to Kapteyn.

"What big data reflects is the fact that nowadays there are so many other ways in which we can learn about behavior," he said. "As a result, I think we'll see many more breakthroughs and gain a much better understanding of what's going on in the world and in social science than in the past.

"I think we're really at the beginning of something pretty spectacular. What we are doing is really only scratching the surfacethere's so much more that can be done."

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Can genetics play a role in education and well-being? - Medical Xpress

27 June 2017: Member States and stakeholders discussed behavioral insights and their applications for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 on climate change, during a training organized by the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). The workshop aimed to build participants understanding of defaults, social norms and steps necessary for tackling climate change.

Moderator Lori Foster Thompson, North Carolina State University, opened the course, titled Behavioural Insights towards the Implementation of Sustainable Develoment Goal (SDG) 13 (Climate Action), which took place at the UN Headquarters in New York, US, on 27 June 2017. She noted that sustainable consumption and production, which is key to achieving SDG 13, is essentially about human behavior, and thus incentives to promote changes in behavior are needed. Foster Thompson highlighted the value of using behavioral insights for designing evidence-based polices. She added that even though there are pockets focused on behavioral insights that operate in different UN agencies, an overarching structure focused on behavioral insights is yet to be formalized within the system.

Elke U. Weber, Princeton University, challenged the idea of Homo Economicus who makes decisions rationally, by explaining that Homo Sapiens is not primarily a creature of rational deliberation, but rather a creature of habit who learns best from personal experience and uses emotions, associations, rules and habits to guide action. She said humans have always too many goals, often conflicting. Weber added that policy makers and communicators therefore need to find ways to activate those goals that are more forward looking and more environment friendly. She noted that inaction is the current behavioral status-quo, which was formed in a period in which people were not facing climate change issues. Weber stressed that this behavioral status-quo is the current barrier to change.

She cautioned against using fear or guilt-based messaging, explaining that even though this type of messages attract attention, they do not retain peoples attention as they tend to dissociate from unpleasant emotions. She advised that in order to keep peoples attention, messaging should be focused on effective solutions and appeal to the moral sense of people doing the right/good thing. She stressed that policy makers should not allow for behavior preferences to influence policies, but policies need to be evidence-based because people will end up adopting them.

Filippo Cavassini, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), explained that the OECD conducted a world-wide mapping of the use of behavioral insights in public policy. He added that the mapping found that local governments have applied a lot in terms of behavioral insights because they are the interface with the public, and the use of behavioral insights is usually spearheaded by politicians. He gave the example of the UK, which currently has a world-wide known behavioral insights team. Cavassini explained that overall behavioral insights are applied across sectors, especially in the financial sector after the financial crisis because consumers need to be better educated about financial choices.

Cavassini noted that behavioral insights are currently mainly used in the implementation stage, while they could also be used in designing policies that are effective. He announced that the OECD will look at behavioral insights for complex policy issues, such as digital tools and how they can be used, for instance, to promote sustainable energy consumption. He concluded that, even though so far behavioral insights have been applied to individuals, there are opportunities to apply them to institutions.

Irina Feygina, Climate Central, underlined that most people do not care about climate change thus choices need to be framed through needs that are very stringent.

Mary MacLennan, London School of Economics (LSE), spoke about her experience in working with the government of Ontario, Canada. She highlighted that the use of behavioral insights builds skills across government with regards to knowledge and evidence-based policy. She said behavioral insights use in governance needs to be thought in terms of its added value for things such as cost-savings, balancing budgets or innovation. Underlining the importance of having a multidisciplinary approach to behavioral insights that brings together sociology, psychology and anthropology, MacLennan also noted challenges to work across departments and ministries. She recalled significant interest, enthusiasm and buy-in for the use of behavioral insights at the lower and highest levels of governments. She also pointed to problems and resistance with the middle management, stressing that it is much more risk-adverse.

Irina Feygina, Climate Central, underscored the importance of how choices are framed, noting that small changes to the framing of a policy or choice can improve its effectiveness. She explained that decision making is not cost-benefit but driven by needs and desires, and that attitudes and values interfere in the way we process information. She therefore called for putting peoples needs first when messaging (such as health, safety, children, capacity to strive, community safety) rather than speaking about climate change, underlining that most people do not care about climate change thus choices need to be framed through needs that are very stringent.

Feygina said people prefer narratives and stories than facts, because they have a hard time encoding facts. She added that facts are hard to feed the need to belong, which is the most stringent human need after the needs of food, shelter and safety. She stressed the need to give people very simple, attractive and simplified options, and to communicate to them that other people they admire are doing it.

In the ensuing discussion, participants underscored the need to: provide incentives and secure political courage; downgrade the scientific thinking to make it more accessible to the public at large; and look at the structural macro-systems in place, like the capitalist system built on continuous growth. They also discussed ways to design experiments with larger-systems interventions. [IISD Sources] [UNITAR Website]

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UNITAR Workshop Looks at Behavioral Insights for SDG 13 - IISD Reporting Services