Intergroup Cooperation in Common Pool Resource Dilemmas.

Fundamental problems of environmental sustainability, including climate change and fisheries management, require collective action on a scale that transcends the political and cultural boundaries of the nation-state. Rational, self-interested neoclassical economic theories of human behavior predict tragedy in the absence of third party enforcement of agreements and practical difficulties that prevent privatization. Evolutionary biology offers a theory of cooperation, but more often than not in a context of discrimination against other groups. That is, in-group boundaries are necessarily defined by those excluded as members of out-groups. However, in some settings human's exhibit behavior that is inconsistent with both rational economic and group driven cooperation of evolutionary biological theory. This paper reports the results of a non-cooperative game-theoretic exercise that models a tragedy of the commons problem in which groups of players may advance their own positions only at the expense of other groups. Students enrolled from multiple universities and assigned to different multi-university identity groups participated in experiments that repeatedly resulted in cooperative outcomes despite intergroup conflicts and expressions of group identity. We offer three possible explanations: (1) students were cooperative because they were in an academic setting; (2) students may have viewed their instructors as the out-group; or (3) the emergence of a small number of influential, ethical leaders is sufficient to ensure cooperation amongst the larger groups. From our data and analysis, we draw out lessons that may help to inform approaches for institutional design and policy negotiations, particularly in climate change management.

Illustrating anticipatory life cycle assessment for emerging photovoltaic technologies.

Current research policy and strategy documents recommend applying life cycle assessment (LCA) early in research and development (R&D) to guide emerging technologies toward decreased environmental burden. However, existing LCA practices are ill-suited to support these recommendations. Barriers related to data availability, rapid technology change, and isolation of environmental from technical research inhibit application of LCA to developing technologies. Overcoming these challenges requires methodological advances that help identify environmental opportunities prior to large R&D investments. Such an anticipatory approach to LCA requires synthesis of social, environmental, and technical knowledge beyond the capabilities of current practices. This paper introduces a novel framework for anticipatory LCA that incorporates technology forecasting, risk research, social engagement, and comparative impact assessment, then applies this framework to photovoltaic (PV) technologies. These examples illustrate the potential for anticipatory LCA to prioritize research questions and help guide environmentally responsible innovation of emerging technologies.

Total life insurance: Logics of anticipatory control and actuarial governance in insurance technology.

Calling attention to the growing intersection between the insurance and technology sectors-or 'insurtech'-this article is intended as a bat signal for the interdisciplinary fields that have spent recent decades studying the explosion of digitization, datafication, smartification, automation, and so on. Many of the dynamics that attract people to researching technology are exemplified, often in exaggerated ways, by emerging applications in insurance, an industry that has broad material effects. Based on in-depth mixed-methods research into insurance technology, I have identified a set of interlocking logics that underly this regime of actuarial governance in society: ubiquitous intermediation, continuous interaction, total integration, hyper-personalization, actuarial discrimination, and dynamic reaction. Together these logics describe how enduring ambitions and existing capabilities are motivating the future of how insurers engage with customers, data, time, and value. This article surveys each logic, laying out a techno-political framework for how to orient critical analysis of developments in insurtech and where to direct future research on this growing industry. Ultimately, my goal is to advance our understanding how insurance-a powerful institution that is fundamental to the operations of modern society-continues to change, and what dynamics and imperatives, whose desires and interests are steering that change. The stuff of insurance is far too important to be left to the insurance industry.

An experiential, game-theoretic pedagogy for sustainability ethics.

The wicked problems that constitute sustainability require students to learn a different set of ethical skills than is ordinarily required by professional ethics. The focus for sustainability ethics must be redirected towards: (1) reasoning rather than rules, and (2) groups rather than individuals. This need for a different skill set presents several pedagogical challenges to traditional programs of ethics education that emphasize abstraction and reflection at the expense of experimentation and experience. This paper describes a novel pedagogy of sustainability ethics that is based on noncooperative, game-theoretic problems that cause students to confront two salient questions: "What are my obligations to others?" and "What am I willing to risk in my own well-being to meet those obligations?" In comparison to traditional professional ethics education, the game-based pedagogy moves the learning experience from: passive to active, apathetic to emotionally invested, narratively closed to experimentally open, and from predictable to surprising. In the context of game play, where players must make decisions that can adversely impact classmates, students typically discover a significant gap between their moral aspirations and their moral actions. When the games are delivered sequentially as part of a full course in Sustainability Ethics, students may experience a moral identity crisis as they reflect upon the incongruity of their self-understanding and their behavior. Repeated play allows students to reconcile this discrepancy through group deliberation that coordinates individual decisions to achieve collective outcomes. It is our experience that students gradually progress through increased levels of group tacit knowledge as they encounter increasingly complex game situations.

Nudge, nudge or shove, shove-the right way for nudges to increase the supply of donated cadaver organs.

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) contend that mandated choice is the most practical nudge for increasing organ donation. We argue that they are wrong, and their mistake results from failing to appreciate how perceptions of meaning can influence people's responses to nudges. We favor a policy of default to donation that is subject to immediate family veto power, includes options for people to opt out (and be educated on how to do so), and emphasizes the role of organ procurement organizations and in-house transplant donation coordinators creating better environments for increasing the supply of organs and tissues obtained from cadavers. This policy will provide better opportunities for offering nudges in contexts where in-house coordinators work with families. We conclude by arguing that nudges can be introduced ethically and effectively into these contexts only if nudge designers collaborate with in-house coordinators and stakeholders.

Experiments in engagement: Designing public engagement with science and technology for capacity building.

Public engagement with science and technology is now widely used in science policy and communication. Touted as a means of enhancing democratic discussion of science and technology, analysis of public engagement with science and technology has shown that it is often weakly tied to scientific governance. In this article, we suggest that the notion of capacity building might be a way of reframing the democratic potential of public engagement with science and technology activities. Drawing on literatures from public policy and administration, we outline how public engagement with science and technology might build citizen capacity, before using the notion of capacity building to develop five principles for the design of public engagement with science and technology. We demonstrate the use of these principles through a discussion of the development and realization of the pilot for a large-scale public engagement with science and technology activity, the Futurescape City Tours, which was carried out in Arizona in 2012.