Social and anti-social anti-social behavior

Wall Street Journal - Study Finds Culture Influences Reaction To Reward, Rebuke

In the most sweeping global study yet of cooperation, a team of experimental economists tested university students in 15 countries to see how people contribute to joint ventures and what happens to them when they don't. The European research team discovered startling differences in how groups around the world react when punishment is handed out for antisocial behavior.
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Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders most often took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously. But in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and Russia, the freeloaders more often struck back, retaliating against those who punished them, even against those who had given most to everyone's benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the helping hand.

To explore cooperation across cultures, Dr. Herrmann and his colleagues recruited 1,120 college students in 16 cities around the globe for a public-good game. The exercise is one of several devised by economists in recent years to distill the complex variables of human behavior into transactions simple enough to be studied under controlled laboratory conditions.
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The students behaved the same way in all 16 cities until given the chance to punish those taking a free ride on the shared investment. Punishment was done anonymously, and it cost one token to discipline another player.
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Among those punished, differences emerged immediately. Students in Seoul, Istanbul, Minsk in Belarus, Samara in Russia, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Athens, and Muscat in Oman were most likely to take revenge by deducting points from other players -- and to give up a token themselves to do it.

"They didn't believe they did anything wrong," said economist Herbert Gintis at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute. And because the spiteful freeloaders had no way of knowing who had punished them, they often took out their ire on those who helped others most, suspecting they must be to blame.
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Such a readiness to retaliate, researchers said, reflected relatively lower levels of trust, civic cooperation and the rule of law as measured by social scientists in the World Values Survey, which periodically assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80 societies. In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.
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Studying peer pressure in 15 countries, economist Benedikt Herrmann at the UK's University of Nottingham reported on "Antisocial Punishment Across Societies" in Science.

The researchers also ranked the national responses against the World Values Survey, which periodically assesses values and cultural changes in societies all over the world.

Emphasis added. Thanks to The EclectEcon for the pointer.

My first-hand, though strictly anecdotal, experience in the UAE is that there is less cooperation and more free riding than in the US in team project situations. Rebukes are avoided, because they can bring about a sometimes strong reaction. And -- again, casual empiricism -- there was a lot of "they didn't believe they did anything wrong." The system is there to be gamed.

Recycling workers

UAE Minister of Labour Ali Abdulla Al Kaabi is defending the concept of a three-plus-three residency cap for unskilled foreign workers in the GCC.

ArabianBusiness.com reports

"The three-plus-three cap is only meant for unskilled workers. We want to make sure that we recycle labour, in and out. For example, we want to give as many people as possible a chance to come in and work in the country and not restrict it to the same workforce year-in, year out."
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The workers would leave the UAE with experience which will benefit them in their home country as well, he added.

"In any case we're still in the process of fine-tuning the length of the cap and we also want to get a GCC-wide approval to enable workers to travel within the region."

Other benefits of the policy: Undercutting unskilled-worker activism; meeting world standards to extend rights to immigrants based on length-of-stay.

Don't try to fool Mother Google

From

The Age:Many websites small and large receive over half of their visitors from Google search referrals. And without a sales team to sign advertising deals, most become AdSense affiliates, automatically connecting them with millions of advertisers worldwide.
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Indeed, a whole industry has spawned with the aim of helping website operators obtain the highest rankings for certain keywords in search engines, and milk the most out of their AdSense accounts.

But small changes to Google's algorithm that determines how high up in search results a site appears can foil any attempts to game the system in a heartbeat. The worst offenders who are caught trying to artificially boost their search ranking are given the "Google death penalty", whereby they're delisted from search results altogether.

So Google can delist if it wants to. Funny that it won't delist, for example, Nazi sites.

And, here's one for Markets in Everything:

Google is tight-lipped about changes to its algorithms, but bloggers have speculated it made the most recent change to crack down on the buying and selling of text links outside the Google AdSense network. Many website operators pay higher ranked sites to link to them, in order to trick Google's computers into thinking the site is more authoritative and thus securing it a higher ranking in search results.