Showing papers on "Dilemma published in 1986"

Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma

Abstract: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book of 1987-88 The proportion of children living in households headed by single women in more than one in five There is concern (and some evidence) that children of single parents are less likely to be successful adults The book discusses the trends in public debate about this problem In particular, it examines the issue of providing public assistance to such families and whether doing so fosters long-term welfare dependency

The Continuing American Dilemma: White Resistance to Racial Change 40 Years After Myrdal

Abstract: In the wake of dramatic changes in public opinion and social custom over the past 40 years, why do many white Americans continue to oppose efforts to bring about racial equality? One possible explanation centers on self-interest: from this perspective, whites' resistance to racial change reflects their perception that blacks pose real and tangible threats to their personal lives—to their neighborhoods, their jobs, their children's education, and their safety. Another possible explanation centers on “symbolic racism”: from this perspective, whites' opposition to racial change reflects their endorsement of racist sentiments and traditional American values, particularly individualism. This paper argues against the first explanation, for the second, and more generally that our understanding of the American dilemma would be enhanced by frequent and vigorous empirical confrontations among an expanded set of alternative explanations. With this objective in mind, the paper concludes by promoting several such explanations, each of which has a strong claim on the research agenda of the future.

Democracy and social choice

Abstract: The problem ofjustifying democracy arises when a society sees the need for cooperative, collective action. Collective action may be needed to solve coordination problems, public goods problems, Prisoner's Dilemmas, and other structural problems of human interaction or perhaps to realize common ideals of justice in concrete political institutions. Once the need for collective action is established, one must ask how the goals of a cooperative endeavor are to be secured. Cooperation requires that individuals, at least over a specified range of activity, pursue a joint strategy. To assure voluntary compliance in a joint venture, cooperation must be to each person's advantage. However, each person may have an incentive to induce others to cooperate and to defect from the joint strategy in the hope of enjoying the fruits of cooperation without incurring the opportunity costs of compliance. This is the essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and considerations of this sort suggest that if collective action is to succeed, policies or strategies formed collectively must be coercively enforceable. Coercion, however, requires justification. Because solving the problem of rational noncompliance requires that collective decisions be coercively enforceable, the rules by which collective decisions are reached require justification. Douglas Rae neatly puts the problem of justification that emerges when political solutions are coercively enforceable as follows: "Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: 'How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?"" This is essentially the question to which the principle of democratic rule provides an answer: by what process are collective decisions to be made? Answering Rae's question requires a normative framework. We could say that a procedure for making collective decisions is justified if and

Gender differences in moral reasoning

Abstract: This research tests Gilligan's hypothesis that men are more likely to consider moral dilemmas chiefly in terms of justice and individual rights, whereas women are more likely to be chiefly concerned with questions of care and relationships with others. In addition, we have investigated the effects of dilemma content upon orientation of moral judgment. Protocols from interviews with 50 college students, half women and half men, to three moral dilemmas were coded according to moral orientation. Results indicated that both moral orientations were widely used by both men and women, but that women were more likely to employ prodominantly care considerations. In a test of mean differences in proportion of justice responses, content of the specific moral dilemma showed a strong influence upon moral reasoning. Results suggest that both gender and situational factors need to be considered in our understanding of moral reasoning.

Value Orientation and Conformity A Study Using Three Types of Social Dilemma Games

Abstract: Three different types of N-person social dilemma games were employed: the Prisoner's Dilemma (NPD), the Chicken Dilemma (NCD), and the Trust Dilemma (NTD). Subjects, who were classified a priori as either a cooperator (n = 58) or a defector (n = 68), participated in one of the social dilemma games before they received bogus feedback: they were told that the majority had chosen the defecting alternative D, or that the majority had chosen the cooperative alternative C. As predicted, (1) both before and after feedback, more defecting choices were made in the NPD than in the NCD, whereas in the NCD more defecting choices were made than in the NTD; (2) before and after feedback, defectors made more defecting choices than cooperators; (3) after majority D feedback more defecting choices were made than after majority C feedback. In addition, it appeared that in NPD and in NTD, defectors were especially sensitive to majority D feedback in that it facilitated their natural inclination to prefer D-choices. No support for Kelley and Stahelski's triangle hypothesis was observed.

Anarchy, egoism, and third images: The Evolution of Cooperation and international relations - Robert Axelrod. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic, 1984.

Abstract: The Evolution of Cooperation is not a timid book. Its objective is ambitious; its approach bold; its scope broad. It addresses an issue of central importance to scholars, political leaders, and ordinary mortals alike: how can "cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without central authority?" (p. 3). Its argument, based upon an analysis of an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game, turns conventional wisdom on its head: it rejects the Golden Rule as a guide to behavior and recommends instead something much closer to Hammurabi's Code as a means of eliciting and sustaining cooperation in an anarchic setting. That the recommendation is compelling is a tribute to the power of the argument and to the elegance with which it is presented. This review evaluates Robert Axelrod's claim that ". . . the requirements for the emergence of cooperation have relevance to many of the central issues of international politics" (p. 4). Given the broad sweep of his analysis, Axelrod is necessarily unable to scrutinize critically his belief in the significance of his work for international politics. I propose to examine more deeply than Axelrod is able the applicability of his analysis to the specific situation of nation-states within the world polity. It appears axiomatic that the problem of cooperation among egoists in an anarchic setting would be a central concern of students of international relations. Yet international politics is not populated by as many egoists, strictly defined, as Axelrod's statement of the problem assumes. Nor does the international system, though formally anarchic, lack close substitutes for central authority in at least some critically important subsystems. Because neither

The Conflict Between Randomized Clinical Trials and the Therapeutic Obligation

Abstract: The central dilemma concerning randomized clinical trials (RCTs) arises out of some simple facts about causal methodology (RCTs are the best way to generate the reliable causal knowledge necessary for optimally-informed action) and a prima facie plausible principle concerning how physicians should treat their patients (always do what it is most reasonable to believe will be best for the patient). A number of arguments related to this in the literature are considered. Attempts to avoid the dilemma fail. Appeals to informed consent and mechanisms for minimizing the resulting harm are important for policy, but informed consent is problematic and mechanisms for minimization of harm do not address the dilemma. Appeals to some sort of contract model of justification are promising and illuminating.

The knower and the known

Abstract: In this paper, I address a dilemma in the theory of knowledge and argue that this dilemma can be overcome by invoking the work of two well known social scientists—Marx (here considered as a sociologist) and Piaget (a psychologist). The dilemma considered is that of the relationship between what are here called “independent” (i.e., non-circular) and “relational” definitions; each form of definition has been the basis of a particular approach to the knowable (the independent definition being the basis of empiricism and the relational definition being the basis of Hegelianism) and each of these approaches can be shown to be unsatisfactory: empiricism, brilliantly successful in practice, runs itself, at the theoretical level, into the circular and the relational; while Hegelianism, although impregnable in logic, gains such impregnability at the cost of any delimitation and, hence of precision and refutability. It is argued that Marx (a follower of Hegel) as adapted by Piaget, can indeed overcome these difficulties and so present us with a theory of knowledge that makes possible an approach that is both successful in practice and reputable in logic.

More on the Evolution of Cooperation

Abstract: New structure is discovered in the suggestive “world” created by Axelrod, which is based on iterated play of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, and was studied to reveal how cooperative behavior can aris...

The Foreign Student Dilemma

Abstract: Universities are international institutions. Knowledge has no boundaries and universities have traditionally welcomed individuals from many nations to study and teach. Indeed, the origins of the universities were international. The early European universities used an international language, Latin, and from the first had an international student body. Academic institutions continue to be international-and one of the aspects of internationalism, foreign students, has become an issue of importance and considerable controversy in the modern world. Foreign students constitute an important element of the world higher education equation. It has been estimated that there are more than one million students studying outside the borders of their home countries, with 325,000 studying in the United States, 114,000 in France, and 62,942 in the Soviet Union, the top three “receiving” nations. The bulk of the world’s foreign students come from the developing countries of the Third World and they study in the industrialized nations of the “North.” The impact of foreign students is significant. It has been estimated that more than $2.5 billion is devoted to the education of foreign students in the United States and over 10 percent of total university enrollment in France is foreign. In the United States, graduate study has been especially affected by foreign students, with half of graduate enrollments in fields like engineering and computer science made up of foreign students. Debates concerning appropriate policies regarding foreign study, the economic impact of foreign students, curriculum, ideological ramifications, and other aspects are increasingly common in many countries.’ This article places the multifacted policy, curricular, and economic questions relating to foreign students in a broad comparative context.’ It is my conviction that the foreign student issue has been neglected, that it has broad ramifications for higher education, and that it is in many ways symptomatic of international relationships in higher education relationships that are based on deep-seated inequalities and that are affected not only by educational factors but by economic and political considerations that transcend higher education. Not only are foreign students a significant educational variable, but they reflect basic issues in higher education. Those involved

Paradoxical effects of social behavior : essays in honor of Anatol Rapoport

Abstract: Individual Utilities and Utilitarian Ethics.- Some Paradoxes in Economics.- Pragmatic Intuitions and Rational Choice.- Guidelines for Solving Sen's Paradox.- System Breaks and Positive Feedback as Sources of Catastrophe.- Social Structure and the Emergence of Norms among Rational Actors.- Conditions for Cooperation in Problematic Social Situations.- The Evolution of Reciprocal Cooperation.- Is it Always Efficient to be Nice? A Computer Simulation of Axelrod's Computer Tournament.- The Prisoner's Dilemma and its Evolutionary Iteration.- The Evolution of a Prisoner's Dilemma in the Market.- On Explaining the Rise of the New Social Movements in Germany.- Volunteer's Dilemma. A Social Trap without a Dominant Strategy and some Empirical Results.- Take-Some Games: The Commons Dilemma and a Land of Cockaigne.- Games with Perceptive Commanders but with Indoctrinated or Less Perceptive Subordinates.- Moral Sentiments and Self-Interest Reconsidered.- On the Economic Virtues of Incompetency and Dishonesty.- New Chairman Paradoxes.- Cumulative Effects of Sequential Decisions in Organizations.- Ethnic Segmentation as the Unintended Result of Intentional Action.- The Paradox of Privatization in Consumption.- Declining Life Expectancy in a Highly Developed Nation: Paradox or Statistical Artifact?.- Fallacies and Paradoxes caused by Heterogeneity.- Author Index.

Cooperation among egoists in Prisoners' Dilemma and Chicken games

Abstract: Axelrod has developed an evolutionary approach to the study of repeated games and applied that approach to the Prisoners' Dilemma We apply this approach, with some modifications in the treatment of clustering, to a game that has the Prisoners' Dilemma and Chicken as special cases, to analyze how the evolution of cooperation differs in the two games We find that the main barrier to the evolution of cooperation in Chicken is that cooperation may not always be correctly thought of as socially optimal, but that strong forces do push the players toward socially optimal action We derive some of the results on mixed populations for any game with pairwise interaction

The Dilemma of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History

Abstract: My thesis in this introduction will be that contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy of history is confronted with a dilemma and that the future of philosophy of history depends on the choice that is ultimately reached. I have deliberately avoided the word "crisis" and used the word "dilemma," as the two alternative standpoints in this dilemma do not share a common past in the way that is suggested by the word "crisis." Rather, two different forms of philosophy of history, each with an intellectual ancestry of its own, are opposed to each other, while having remarkably little in common. The choice will therefore be between two different tracks, rather than between the two bifurcations of one and the same track we have all been following up to now. The two sides to the dilemma can be described in a number of different ways. One could speak simply of new philosophy of history versus traditional philosophy of history, of interpretative versus descriptivist philosophy of history, of synthetic versus analytic philosophy of history, of linguistic versus criterial philosophy of history, or, as does Hans Kellner, 1 of postmodernist versus modernist philosophy of history. All these labels have their advantages and disadvantages and they all capture part of the truth. Nevertheless, for reasons that will become clear in the course of this introduction, I prefer the terms narrativist philosophy of history versus epistemological philosophy of history. Epistemological philosophy of history has always been concerned with the criteria for the truth and validity of historical descriptions and explanations; it has attempted to answer the epistemological question as to the conditions under which we are justified in believing the historian's statements about the past (ei-

Conditions for Cooperation in Problematic Social Situations

Abstract: The Prisoner’s Dilemma has intrigued Anatol Rapoport as a model of real life conflict situations — the arms race and price reductions by competing firms being his favorite examples — in which individual rationality and collective rationality are at cross purposes (e.g. Rapoport, 1974: 17–18,24). In the social sciences and particularly in social psychology, the game has attracted above all an impressive array of experimental investigations (cf. the now classic study by Rapoport and Chammah, 1965 and the survey in Rapoport, 1974: 19–29). In contrast to such a micro-approach we will try to sketch some implications of Prisoner’s Dilemmas and related situations of strategic interdependence for a more macrosociological problem. Our analysis refers to conditions of cooperation of (individually rational) actors in situations where cooperation generates efficiency, i.e. collective rationality, but is beset by incentive problems. Section II of this paper contains an explication in terms of game theory of such “problematic social situations”, the classical Prisoner’s Dilemma being a paradigmatic example. In Section III some results of the game theoretical analysis of these situations are outlined. In Section IV, we deal with implications of these results for conditions which are conducive to cooperation.

Volunteer’s Dilemma. A Social Trap without a Dominant Strategy and some Empirical Results

Abstract: Conflicts between individual and collective interests are usually discussed in a prisoner’s dilemma context. Panic situations, the armaments race of the superpowers, exploitation of resources (“tragedy of the commons”), Hobbe’s problem of cooperation in anarchic societies and the evolution of cooperation (Axelrod, 1984), as well as numerous other examples of “social traps” (Platt, 1973) were described in the game theoretical language of prisoner’s dilemma. Increasing interest in N-person-prisoner’s dilemma (N-PD) stems also from the fact that there is a structural equality between Olson’s (1965) “Logic of Collective Action” and N-PD as was shown by Hardin (1971). The generalized PD-game seems to serve as a paradigm for social dilemmas, where interdependent individual actions cause paradoxical results. Dawes (1975) defines social dilemmas by two characteristics: the existence of a dominant strategy and the Pareto-inferior intersection of dominant strategies. Both characteristics in a broad sense also define generalized PD-games.

Managerial Courage: Revitalizing Your Company Without Sacrificing Your Job

Abstract: Managerial Courage and Organization Regeneration A Personal Mission An Organizational Dilemma Ideacide The Major Culprits Organizational Crisis and Ideacide: Eight Years of Famine The Japanese Paradox Guidelines for Individual Survival Guidelines for Corporate Survival Index.

Subjective Probability and the Prisoner's Dilemma

Abstract: The paradox involved in sequences of Prisoner's Dilemma games is due to the fact that game theoretic definitions of optimality rarely coincide with any natural meaning of the word. Decision makers should incorporate their beliefs and experience into any mathematical analysis of the games. Once this has been done, via subjective probabilities, use of the cooperative move in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma games can often be justified. The paper provides a simple algorithm for determining an optimal strategy, once the decision maker's subjective probabilities have been specified.

Joint Custody, Feminism and the Dependency Dilemma

Abstract: Dependency is a dilemma for women. Women's dependency, which arises largely from their status as caregivers, can be both a strength and a source of vulnerability and exploitation. The dependent relationships which women form are often coercive and degrading, but at the same time they may satisfy the needs of women for affirmation and influence. Efforts to overcome the oppressive aspects of dependency, while successful in some respects and for some women, may exacerbate the problem in other ways. The issue of joint custody illustrates the contradictory nature of women's dependency. Joint custody has the potential both to help women develop more independence and to aggravate the problematic aspects of dependency in women's lives. Although joint custody was expected to help women, it has had mixed effects, benefiting some women, hurting others, and for still others, helping and hurting at the same time. This Article examines joint custody as an example of the complicated nature of women's dependency. In Section I, we set the movement toward joint custody in the context of the egalitarian goals of women's rights groups in the 1970s. We then describe the emergence of the feminist critique of this movement in the 1980s.

Moral judgment in middle and late adulthood: the effects of age-appropriate moral dilemmas and spontaneous role taking.

Abstract: This was a cross-sectional study of the effects of age, sex, and moral dilemma content on adult moral reasoning. Hypothetical dilemmas were presented to sixty men and women, thirty of whom were elderly and thirty in early middle age. With education controlled there were no age or sex differences in moral maturity. Dilemma content had a significant effect on moral judgment, with a tendency for each age group to use a higher level of judgment when the situation described was age-appropriate, i.e., relevant to that group's stage of life. There was a significant age difference on a measure of spontaneous role taking: old persons made more definitive moral judgments than the younger adults, who attempted to reconcile the various points of view represented in a dilemma.