Just a quick procrastination post today since I'm still working on the paper I'll submit to TRB.
I read a few days ago a great piece by Pseudoerasmus (Twitter) on 'Where Do Pro-Social Institutions Come From?'. It's a long read but it gives a nice and beautifully written overview on the recent research on the dynamics of social trust and its relation to collective action, culture, institutions and evolutionary game theory.
On a related topic, I just saw today the new project by Nicky Case. Nick is a star programmer/interactive designer that uses code to build interactive websites to explain scientific theories to the wider public. He has many interesting projects so be aware you might loose a day or two playing with his projects. In his latest project, Nick applies computational social science to game theory to explore the dynamics of social trust. It's a super well designed project that explains in simple terms such a complex topic. I think this is a great complimentary material to Pseudoerasmus' piece and in fact to any course on collective action, social trust, game theory, chaos and complexity theory.
Now go on. Take 7 minutes of your day and give it a try. It's worth it. If you don't have 7 minutes, this is the main take away.
"If there's one big takeaway from all of game theory, it's this: What the game is, defines what the players do. Our problem today isn't just that people are losing trust, it's that our environment acts against the evolution of trust. [...] In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it's us players who define the game"
