WOT R U DU-ING? Primates on Facebook (and in disarmament negotiations)

"Have opposable thumb - will Twitter."

The Economist ran an interesting article in late February concerning the British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar's hypothesis about primate neocortex size and Facebook.

Dunbar's hypothesis years ago was that

“the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”. Many institutions, from neolithic villages to the maniples of the Roman army, seem to be organised around the Dunbar number. Because everybody knows everybody else, such groups can run with a minimum of bureaucracy.”

Dunbar’s hypothesis is not without its critics, including among other anthropologists. But recently The Economist teamed up with the in-house sociologist at social networking website Facebook, with its trove of data, to crunch some numbers and see if light could be shed on the validity of Dunbar’s idea.

Their findings as detailed in The Economist’s article tend to confirm Dunbar’s hypothesis. The average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is around 120, and women tend to have somewhat more “friends” than men (although some Facebook members’ networks are far larger, of course. For the record: mine isn’t, and I seem to be somewhat under-endowed in the network size department. Ahem.).

Strikingly, “the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.”

This would seem to equate with my own experience of Facebook; phrased another way: Facebook involves a lot of superficial social contact, but isn’t a good way to improve trust with “friends” I don’t know well already – my most active interactions are with people I already know well.

For this and many other reasons, I’m a reluctant and somewhat ambivalent Facebook user, and have long suspected another point in The Economist article, that, on the whole:

“people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”

Dunbar’s hypothesis was also of interest to me because previously on the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project we’d observed that a lot of activity on the margins of negotiations seems to be as much about “social grooming” – that is, informal trust building – than about the direct exchange of information. Dunbar’s work provided a number of interesting ideas we explored in our last two volumes of work (see column at left).

For example, negotiating processes tend to involve many hundreds of people. The sheer mechanics of managing this means that exchanges in conferences often become very set piece in terms of social interaction. In our third volume of articles on ‘Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament Negotiations’ we suggested that in conference diplomacy processes of sizes beyond the “Dunbar number”, cognitive difficulties for individuals in following evolving dynamics could become overwhelming.

Therefore, an important part of evaluating what makes negotiations ‘successful’ should entail not only analysis of substantial political issues, but also some thought about the structural aspects of negotiators’ interactions since this can make things easier or harder. We described this as ‘cognitive ergonomics’, and explored it in greater detail as part of our recent publication on ‘The Value of Diversity in Multilateral Disarmament Work’. The general idea is that improving opportunities for dialogue and trust building at a face-to-face level should improve negotiators’ chances of success. And it links to arguments about perspective diversity from Scott E. Page and others that are highly relevant to group prediction and problem solving issues.

I’ve noticed that many of my disarmament diplomat colleagues are pretty active Facebookers. Well and good, but as long as nobody sees it as a substitute for the face-to-face dimension of trust building in diplomatic work.

In fact, I have my doubts whether Facebook is even a useful trust building supplement, as it doesn’t seem of much relevance beyond a broadcasting tool. But I predict that as the year unfolds and there are plenty of long disarmament-related conferences to sit through, Twitter is going to be the next thing many disarmers pick up on. I’m not a Twitterer, but I understand the idea is that you broadcast to other Twitterers on your network what you’re doing in messages of no more than 140 characters (“What are you doing?”).

Ironically, Twitter might conceivably be good for diplomatic trust building if it dawns on enough people that they could be more productively using their time interacting in person in smaller groups outside the formal conference room than passively behind the nameplate. (“What am I doing? Same as you – sitting here. What the hell are we doing?”) Whatever happens, it’s hard to see newfangled technology winning out over the lure of coffee and cigarettes anytime soon.

John Borrie

'Chimp hand' by John_X downloaded from Flickr. His caption said: "Biologically, the chimpanzee is closely related to humans, so many of their characteristics may seem familiar. The most remarkable physical similarity between chimpanzees and humans is the opposable thumb. The thumb allows chimpanzees to grab objects and use tools much like we do. Unfortunately, chimpanzees are currently on the endangered species list. Populations have decreased because of foresting, hunting, commercial exportation, and collection for scientific research." Taken at the Los Angeles Zoo on June 18, 2008.

New podcast - the physics of social behaviour

How groups of people make decisions, form opinions, and determine social norms has traditionally been the focus of sociology, anthropology and political science. But physics too has a long tradition of studying systems of many interacting components and has developed tools for understanding how such systems can generate collective social behaviours that can't be anticipated by studying their components or their interactions in isolation.

One recent book exploring this topic, and how physical understanding of the world is relevant to social problem-solving, is 'Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another'. Its author, Dr. Philip Ball, is a science writer and broadcaster, and consultant editor at the science journal Nature. Critical Mass has inspired our work on the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project, especially two chapters of our third volume of research discussing a "physics of diplomacy" and examining the mechanisms involved in demand for small arms. Quite simply, the ideas Ball writes about are relevant to multilateral decision-makers and the ways they frame issues.

On 25 September, the Disarmament Insight initiative hosted a workshop near Geneva with multilateral practitioners from diplomatic Missions, international organizations and civil society representatives to engage them on the theme of 'complexity and diplomacy: Understanding the implications for arms control'. The aim is to encourage participants to think differently about human security, and prompt new, constructive responses.

Our speakers included Philip Ball and we recorded his 45-minute talk. We have the pleasure to announce a podcast of his presentation on the physics of social behaviour is available from today. We've also included Dr. Ball's slides in the podcast to aid the listener. These are viewable in iTunes or in Quicktime Player in sync with the audio.

Enjoy!


John Borrie

Complexity and Arms Control Diplomacy

As part of its work, the Disarmament Insight initiative has hosted a sequence of workshops this year with Geneva disarmament practitioners to encourage them to think out of the box in their work. For example, previous visitors to our site may recall that on 25 May we held a workshop on 'human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiation' with speakers including the primatologist Frans de Waal, economist Paul Seabright and Robin Coupland from the International Committee of the Red Cross. (Podcasts of some of these talks are available by clicking on the podcast panel in the left column.)

Yesterday, we hosted another workshop with multilateral practitioners, this time on the theme of 'complexity and diplomacy: Understanding the implications for multilateral arms control'.

Diplomats love to talk about the complexity involved in their endeavours. But they usually do it in a rhetorical sense, without realizing that complexity is actually a domain of scientific research and that complex phenomena have particular features. But what's complicated isnt' the same as what's complex. A better understanding among arms control practitioners about what complexity is - and recognising the hallmarks of complex social phenomena - could, we think, help make their work more effective and has implications for human security thinking.

Small arms proliferation and the diffusion of new technologies, like say those in the life sciences that could be turned to hostile use, have many characteristics that indicate they're complex social phenomena. Multilateral negotiations themselves might also even be considered as complex social phenomena. We explored some of these ideas in our third volume of research, Thinking Outside the Box in Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.

Yesterday we were joined by two speakers who've been big influences on our thinking - Paul Ormerod and Philip Ball (pictured above). Philip, a consultant editor at the scientific journal Nature and science writer and broadcaster, is author of a remarkable book, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, which won the Aventis Prize in 2005 and explores the relevance of complexity and statistical physics to the social world. Paul Ormerod is an economist and author of Butterfly Economics and Why Most Things Fail, and is an innovative and creative modeller on a wide range of real-world issues ranging from violent crime in the United Kingdom to the political stability of China.

In addition to the DHA project's own resident physicist and researcher, Aurélia Merçay, Philip and Paul discussed their work, and the relevance of concepts and applications of complexity to arms control efforts. One such application is a conceptual multiple equilibrium model Aurélia developed to examine the mechanisms involved in demand for small arms, in part based on Paul Ormerod's work. And it's clear from discussion with the diplomats and others attending that there are many other potential useful applications.

In coming weeks, after the dust has settled, look out for free podcasts of presentations by Aurélia, Philip and Paul from this site, or for download from the iTunes Music Store by searching there for 'Disarmament Insight'.


John Borrie


References

Ball, Philip, “Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another.” London: Arrow

Merçay, Aurélia & Borrie, John, A physics of diplomacy? The dynamics of complex social phenomena and their implications for multilateral negotiations in Borrie, John & Martin Randin, Vanessa (eds.), “Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.” Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.

Merçay, Aurélia, Non-Linear modelling of small arms proliferation in Borrie, John & Martin Randin, Vanessa (eds.), “Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations.” Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.

Ormerod, Paul, “Butterfly Economics.” London: Fontana: 1999.

Ormerod, Paul, “Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics.” London: Faber & Faber: 2005.

Facebook versus face to face

I’ve recently jumped onto the Facebook bandwagon. Currently, my profile shows 85 friends - a dismal number compared to some others linked into this networking site. One person I know boasts an incredible 881 friends. However, Dr Will Reader, an evolutionary psychologist at Sheffield Hallam University, cautions that such huge contact lists are not an accurate indication of a person’s real social status.

According to the news reports, his research into the new types of friendships being fostered online shows that:

Social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace aren’t expanding people’s circles of close friends, but they are creating plenty of meaningless relationships.

His study showed that even though people may have hundreds or thousands of acquaintances, their core group of close friends is still unchanged at around five people. This research on social network sites could hold important insights for social organization in general.

Reader believes there are “good evolutionary reasons” explaining why core friendship groups are so small. Making friendships means investing time and even money in another person. This face-to-face contact is invaluable for people to assess if their investment is worthwhile. It’s “very easy to be deceptive” on the internet, said Reader.

His research findings imply that long distance communication technologies, while helping to broaden social networks, don’t necessarily deepen ties among people. These technologies may therefore be of limited value when trying to generate new partnerships or cooperative endeavors owing to the lack of face-to-face contact. It’s a finding that resonates with Jody William’s observations in an article she wrote in 1999 on the process leading to the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. Here she noted:

As important - and many might contend more so - as fax, phone and e-mail to link together the huge coalition, has been networking through travel and the building of personal relationships, both within the Campaign and between campaigners, and the various government and military representatives. Indeed, e-mail has been used relatively little for communications outside of the campaign, and the much remarked upon close cooperation between governments and NGOs during the Ottawa Process was more the result of face-to-face meetings than anything else.

Multilateral negotiators depend heavily on face to face dealings, and it’s unclear what the impact of new communication technologies have for their work, although Patricia Lewis has offered some examples in an earlier posting. (See Zapped! Mobile Technology in the Conference Chamber.) I echo her call for more research on this issue.


Vanessa Martin Randin


References

CBC News, It’s hard to make close friends on Facebook, study says, 10 September 2007, www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/09/10/science-websites.html.

Jody Williams, The International Campaign to Ban Landmines – A Model for Disarmament Initiatives?, 3 September 1999, www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/williams/index.html

Dr Will Reader’s biography and information about his research work can be found here.

"Cognitive Ergonomics"?

In 10 minutes of off-the-cuff concluding remarks from our 25 May Disarmament Insight symposium on ‘Human Security, Human Nature and Trust-building in Negotiations’, John Borrie talked about what he calls “cognitive ergonomics” and the relevance of the concept in thinking about the structures and procedures in multilateral negotiations.

Not to mention Jimi Hendrix, the Who and Formula One and World Rally Car racing ...

You can hear the podcast by clicking here.

Cognitive ergonomics is also discussed in his introduction to the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project's third volume of work, which you can access by clicking on the book with the pink cover at left.

Enjoy!

Fun and Games

The New York Times has just published an interesting profile of Harvard scientist, Professor Martin Nowak, director of the university's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Nowak is a gamer - that is he takes informal ideas and builds them into versatile mathematical models in fields as diverse as economics and cancer biology.

What's this got to do with human security or disarmament diplomacy? For some time, we on the DHA project have been thinking about what insights from the natural and behavioural sciences could do for work in these areas. We explored some of these in a recent book we published, entitled "Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations" (click on the pink book at left to explore its contents).

The underlying theme in Nowak's many projects is that of cooperation, "one of the most puzzling yet fundamental features of life".

It's also a particular source of fascination for me because international relations are essentially problems of cooperation played out among states with different levels of interest, power and resources - inspired in part by the work of scholars like Robert Axelrod and Thomas Schelling.

In some multilateral contexts structural or institutional factors can constrain the ways in which cooperation can develop. I discussed this in a chapter of our book called "Cooperation and Defection in the Conference on Disarmament" using some simple insights from game theory like variations of the classic Prisoners' Dilemma. I talked about the importance of "clusters of cooperators" in a population, who can change the rules of the game in real life situations as varied as the spread of viruses to the core group behind the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention.

My hunch is that behind all of the complexity of multilateral relationships lie some pretty basic rules-of-thumb, which could be summarized like this:

1. Figure out what's in your best self-interest, but take a broad view and look in the longer term if you can (call it enlightened self-interest, if you will).

2. Identify others you can work with to pursue your interest. Common interest is the best basis for sustained cooperation.

3. Cooperate. In the short term you may face opposition and obstacles from "defectors". But don't worry so much about it. You're stronger in a cluster, and over the long term you'll change the rules of the game - or pay-off structure - of interactions for everyone. Social interactions matter.

In contrast, Nowak has been working on problems like the spread of cancer cells in the body. But he realised the tools he was using might be applied to human problems, especially when applied to thinking about social networks:

"Dr. Nowak and his colleagues found that when they put players into a network, the Prisoner elsewhere in the network are not able to undermine their altruism. "Even if outside our network there are cheaters, we still help each other a lot," Dr. Nowak said. That is not to say that cooperation always emerges. Dr. Nowak identified the conditions when it can arise with a simple equation: B/C>K. That is, cooperation will emerge if the benefit-to-cost (B/C) ratio of cooperation is greater than the average number of neighbours (K). "It's the simplest possible thing you could have expected, and it's completely amazing," he said."

John Borrie


References

Carl Zimmer, "In Games, an Insight Into the Rules of Evolution", New York Times (31 July 2007), see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/science/31prof.html
?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin.

John Borrie, "Cooperation and Defection in the Conference on Disarmament", in Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations", Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.

Picture by revlimit retrieved from Flickr.

New Podcast – Warring instincts: what we can learn from behavioural economics & neuroscience?

On 25 May we held our latest Disarmament Insight symposium with disarmament practitioners including diplomats, international civil servants, representatives of civil society groups and researchers, entitled ‘Human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiations’.

We’re pleased to unveil the latest free podcast we’ve prepared from the fascinating presentations at that event. Click here to hear or download the second part of a talk by the economist and author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, Professor Paul Seabright.

Professor Seabright's talk investigated "how have human beings tamed our warring instincts?"

In the first podcast of two encapsulating his talk, Professor Seabright observed that, at a time when there's mounting concern about violence in modern society, rates of violent death are very much lower now than they were in the past, which he noted may come as a surprise to many.

In this second 30 minute podcast, "Warring Instincts: What we can learn from behavioural economics & neuroscience?", we've included Professor Seabright's slides to aid the listener. These are viewable on iTunes or in Quicktime Player in sync with the audio.


John Borrie


Reference

Photo: sketch of human skull by Leonardo da Vinci.

Cognitive Dissonance: Don’t Mention the War…

The way we perceive our world can have a significant impact on our decision-making and the way we interact with others. A recent Washington Post article reported on a psychological experiment carried out by Roy Baumeister that revealed one way our perceptions can influence how we view others.

In the experiment, Baumeister asked participants to describe a situation in which they hurt someone else and a situation when they were personally hurt. They were also asked to describe how much pain these incidents caused another (or caused them) and whether their unkindness (or the unkindness directed at them) was justified.

Come time to find out, when participants were on the receiving end of an unkind act (like a betrayal or a lie), they felt the act was “inexplicable, senseless and immoral” and that the pain caused by the act lasted a long time. (Surprise, surprise.) When these same participants were asked about the time they hurt someone else, however, they viewed their actions as “justified” and that they caused only brief pain.

This phenomenon, known to psychologists as cognitive dissonance, plays a major role in our professional and personal lives. It means that when we inflict pain on another person (or group of people) we recognize this is not the right thing to do. We also believe that we’re a good person deep-down, which is in direct conflict with our behavior. Thus our brains downplay the harm we’ve caused.

Alternatively, when we’re on the receiving end of a wrongdoing, we often can’t imagine seeing the situation from the perspective of the person that caused us harm. Who empathizes with a “wrongdoer”? In this case, it’s much easier to focus on the immoral and nasty nature of the acts against us.

An interesting aspect of these dissonant feelings, and how we subsequently behave, is that the process happens in our subconscious. Shankar Vedantum, a Washington Post columnist, observed that a perfect example of cognitive dissonance at work is the way Republicans and Democrats who supported the war in Iraq are now justifying it. Many Republicans refuse to believe there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (someone must have run off with them) and some Democrats seem to simply forget they supported the invasion at all.

According to one researcher, “[This] is the way memory works and the way the brain works. We ignore, forget or dismiss information that suggests we might be wrong. We rewrite our memories to confirm what we believe.” In this case, subconscious, dissonant feelings are influencing policymakers’ behavior and the decisions they’re making (or not making) in the present.

Like everyone else, disarmament diplomats also experience cognitive dissonance in their work. Awareness of this phenomenon is important because valuable time can be wasted while playing the “blame game” and trying to best justify our mistakes.


Ashley Thornton


References

Shankar Vedantam, “Bush: Naturally, Never Wrong”, Washington Post (9 July 2007), available online here.

Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, May 2007: Harcourt, 304 pages.

Zapped! Mobile technology in the conference chamber

In the past, in a negotiating conference room, one could always tell when something was afoot. Delegates would be moving around the room – often with unseemly speed - clutching sheaves of draft text. Conclaves of ambassadors would huddle in a corner to sweat out the immediate joint response to a smart proposal from another delegation or group. Junior members would be sprinting to the photocopiers and nicotine addicts would be pacing around outside together conjuring up fixes – I even know of diplomats who took up smoking so as to be part of the smoke-filled rooms that always seemed to be where the creative ambassadors and others produced the ground-breaking work.

Now mobile technology is changing all that. Calls and text messages via phones or Blackberries rebound around the conference room. Vibrating handsets have given a whole new meaning to the “buzz” in a room. Jokes are zapped through – although how these work in an intercultural environment makes me wonder about the wisdom of that – we can only hope that smiley faces are sprinkled liberally throughout: “International incident caused by text message” is undoubtedly a newspaper headline of the near future.

One of the phenomena that I’ve become increasingly aware of is that when a delegate takes the floor, his or her phone seems to start to ring immediately – the microphones pick up the signal even when the phone is set to silent.

It could be my imagination, but it this phenomenon seems to occur with more frequency when the speaker is making a statement on behalf of a group of states. In a recent meeting I attended, a regional group convenor took the floor to respond to a critical point made by the chairman, and, immediately, his phone gave a message signal and he looked at it. Again maybe my imagination, but this normally astute, to-the-point diplomat, said nothing of significance at all and his statement seemed to be cut short. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. But in the pre-mobile communication era, nobody could have signalled to him that they were in disagreement without running up to stop him from speaking and exposing themselves and the disagreement within the group to all. Now they can, so maybe they do.

Another consequence of the use of mobile communicators in the conference chamber is the now well-known “reporting back by factions” strategy. Within large delegations, in a politically-sensitive negotiation, there are often deep divisions. These divisions can be political, institutional or personal – often all three. In some of these delegations, those with opposing views, who wish to see differing outcomes, are reporting back to capital in situ using wireless internet communication or hand-held email communicators, such as Blackberries.

In the past, this was done after a speaker had made her point to the floor: one of the opposing factions would be seen running out after the speech to report back by phone to capital on what she had said and how this had served to subtly undermine the government’s agreed position. Fights would then break out back at the embassy later that evening and a set of new instructions and shifted positions would emerge overnight or over a period of a few days.

Now, when she is speaking, one of the opposing factions sits behind her - email communicator in hand - reporting back as she speaks. Even while she is speaking, her phone will be buzzing with text messages, sometimes of support and sometimes to attempt to intervene and influence her trajectory. The pressure must be terrible.

As with most technologies, there are good, bad and downright dangerous applications of mobile communicators. In the world of arms control negotiations, they can be used both as enablers and as controllers, as John Borrie has described:

“They enable a negotiator to gain access to distant resources and sources of information more easily. Conversely, they lose their value if these links became a straitjacket restricting object-oriented responses flexible enough to capitalize on opportunities emerging from negotiating dynamics (of “being in the room”)”.

They can promote social bonding through jokes, expressions of concern and support, or they can convey terrifying messages of accusation and threats whilst one is speaking. The impact of these technologies on the way delegations are doing business in the negotiating room is hard to measure and is something we’ll return to in the future in this blog – in the meantime I strongly encourage someone to take it up as the subject for their PhD thesis.


This is a guest blog from Dr Patricia Lewis. Patricia, Director of UNIDIR, is the owner of a mobile phone, a laptop, but not yet a Blackberry.


Reference and further reading:

John Borrie, “Rethinking multilateral negotiations: disarmament as humanitarian action” in John Borrie & Vanessa Martin Randin (eds.), Alternative Approaches in Multilateral Decision Making, Geneva: UNIDIR: 2005, pp. 7-37 (to download a free PDF version, click here or on the brown book cover at left on this page).

Image retrieved from Flickr.

And now for something completely different

Regular visitors to this site will have noted that over the last month or so our blogging has focused on two important multilateral meetings - the preparatory meeting of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in Vienna and, more recently, a meeting of the Oslo Process in Lima, Peru, which is working to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions.

I would have been in Peru blogging to you personally, dear reader, but for a meeting of our own near Geneva, hosted as part of the work of the Disarmament Insight initiative to help multilateral disarmament practitioners think out of the box.

On Friday 25 May, around 25 invited disarmament diplomats at both ambassador and working level, experts from United Nations agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), researchers, civil society representatives and the Disarmament Insight team met for a one-day symposium on the themes of "Human security, 'human nature' and trust building in negotiations".

To help us, our speakers included:

- Frans de Waal, Director of the Living Links Center and C.H. Candler Professor of Primate Behaviour at Emory University, who explored what multilateral practitioners can learn from our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, including the chimpanzee and the bonobo, about negotiating and the nature of aggression and reconciliation. Frans was recently named by Time magazine as one of its 100 people shaping the world in 2007.

- Paul Seabright, Professor of Economics at the University of Toulouse and author of "The Company of Strangers: a Natural History of Economic Life", who analysed the interactions between our minds and our institutions in modern life, which may help us to understand better why in some contexts conflict seems so intractable.

- Dr. Robin Coupland, the ICRC's adviser on armed violence and the effects of weapons and a former war surgeon, who discussed how de Waal's and Seabright's views tie into understanding armed violence.

- Yours truly. I talked briefly about the notion of 'cognitive ergonomics' - of looking at multilateral negotiating processes and how we could better design them to leverage our cognitive and social skills as human beings.

The emphasis of the symposium was on informal discussion and it followed the Chatham House rule. While respecting that rule, we'll be posting more information about the symposium here, including pod casts of some of the presentations, over the coming weeks.

So check back regularly for some fresh ways of "thinking differently about human security" from what was a productive gathering of big-brained social apes.


John Borrie


Reference

Info about the ICRC's work on weapons and humanitarian law is available here.

How do you teach a Canadian to be rational?

Actually, this blog posting's title isn’t the first line of a joke (apologies to any Canadians out there already reaching for their poison pens). Rather, it’s a reference to an interesting lecture delivered by Thomas C. Schelling, a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and transmitted on Ontario TV (OTV)’s “Big Ideas” program.

Schelling is less a man than an institution in the domain of rational choice theory. And, unlike a lot of theorists, he’s had extensive experience over his long life in many fields including government, industry and in making government policy. He’s also written many books, but the one that’s perhaps influenced me the most is “Micromotives and Macrobehavior”, which I’d recommend as background to anyone interested in understanding obstacles to making individual and collective decisions.

“Micromotives and Macrobehaviour” can be involved in places, so an easier way to become familiar with rational choice theory is to listen to Schelling's TVO audio talk (see reference below).

In his talk, Schelling pointed out that while people act rationally much of the time (or at least think they do) it’s worth looking at situations in which they’re not rational, and to explore why. To illustrate the value of this, Schelling used the analogy of the magnetic compass: in most contexts it’s an excellent navigational tool because it always points to magnetic north. But if you’re close to the North Pole it’ll point southeast, which is something that’s important to know. If you don’t it could lead to mishap.

Schelling also observed that social arrangements are sometimes good for helping to “do the right thing” – that is, benefiting us in the long run. Years before, as a new analyst at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Schelling said he was puzzled by the fact that lunchtime joggers there always ran in packs of several people. It turned out that people quit after a while if they jog alone. Undertaking something in cooperation with other people, then, can sometimes help us be rational utility maximizers.

Schelling’s talk was about lots of other things besides, outlining several different ways in which apparently rational people can make irrational decisions. But his jogging story got me wondering about what happens when the group of joggers grows too big. When going running at lunchtime with some friends there’s usually a bit of positive peer pressure to turn up, and some healthy competition to keep running even when stitch or apathy set in.

Make the group too large, though, and one would expect to see increasing free rider behaviour. Who’s really going to notice whether you turn up if you’re only going to be one runner in 30, or one in 100? Why encourage and pace others if you think you’ll look better by racing ahead? Indeed, why run those hard yards at all if you don’t feel under much pressure among a group of near-strangers? Far from being good for “doing the right thing”, large-scale social arrangements might even encourage the opposite.

These sorts of concerns emerge in international relations too (something about which Schelling is, of course, well aware). Arrangements like political institutions, treaties and coalitions are sometimes good at enabling actors to maximize their rational interests, assuming that they have identified those interests. But they aren’t always if they grow too large – a dilemma that emerges in the context of NATO, for instance, or the European Union or Conference on Disarmament.

Care needs to be taken that multilateral arrangements help rather than hinder the identification and pursuit of interests collectively that might just be too hard to do alone. Smaller-scale arrangements in which those involved can spur each other on may sometimes achieve better results than the anonymous crowd of the marathon. It’s both an opportunity and a risk that others will notice and want to join the group: a large coalition isn’t always best, even if in the long run you'd like everyone to be a runner.


John Borrie


References

Thomas Schelling’s 45 minute audio lecture can be found by visiting the TVO website (http://www.tvo.org), selecting “Big Ideas” from programs A-Z, and then selecting the past episodes page. It’s also possible to subscribe to “Big Ideas” pod casts for free through the iTunes Music Store pod cast directory.

I discussed Schelling and inefficient equilibriums in my chapter entitled “Cooperation and Defection in the Conference on Disarmament”, which can be downloaded by clicking on the pink book ("Thinking Outside the Box...") at the left of this column.

See also Thomas C. Schelling, “Micromotives and Macrobehaviour”, (New York/London, Norton, 1978).

What we could learn from the Man of the Woods

Today, the British Sunday Times reported that the chimpanzee has just been knocked off the top of the "IQ tree". What that tree is, and whether that includes another primate species likely to lay claim to that title - homo sapiens - is unclear (I assume it doesn't). The article said:

"ORANG-UTANS have been named as the world’s most intelligent animal in a study that places them above chimpanzees and gorillas, the species traditionally considered closest to humans.

The study found that out of 25 species of primate, orang-utans had developed the greatest power to learn and to solve problems.

The controversial findings challenge the widespread belief that chimpanzees are the closest to humans in brainpower. They also suggest that the ancestry of orang-utans and humans may be more closely entwined than had been thought."

James Lee, a Harvard psychologist quoted by the article as an author of the study making these claims apparently said, “It is even possible that an orang-utan-like forager occupied a pivotal link in the chain of descent leading to man.”

Well, good on the orang-utan, of which I'm very fond. And it's great that some prominence is being given to them when orang-utans are endangered as never before due to encroachment onto their home habitats in the swampy jungles of Sumatra and Borneo. One of the tragic ironies about growing interest in renewable alternatives to fossil fuels is increased demand for palm oil, which is accelerating the destruction of the homes of these amazing human relatives to make way for palm oil plantations. (Orang-utan means "man of the forest" or "man of the woods" in Malay and Indonesian.)

By way of background, most people are aware that we share most of our DNA with the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). Less well known is that there is another species of chimpanzee that's just as closely related to us, one that vaguely resembles Pan troglodytes, but which socially is completely different from both. I'm talking about the bonobo, or Pan paniscus. In fact, until the late 1920s, scientists didn't even have an inkling that bonobos were a different species from common chimps given their resemblance, and referred to the few museum specimens as pygmy chimpanzees.

Chimps and bonobos form a common genus: Pan. Our human lineage diverged from Pan only about 5.5 million years ago according to DNA comparisons. (In fact, some scientists argue that we're closely enough related in genes and time to chimps and bonobos that we should be regarded as a single genus: Homo.) Gorillas split around 7.5 million years ago and orang-utans an estimated 14 million years ago, much longer than our other relatives among the great apes - even if not that long in overall evolutionary terms.

In view of that, Lee's study would seem to indicate that the remarkable growth in mental faculties that are a hallmark of the higher primates must have started a very long time ago - perhaps much longer than conventionally thought.

Nevertheless, in reporting on Lee's study, one part of the Sunday Times article read as follows:

"He also found that the single most important factor in deciding a species’ intelligence was simply the size of its brain: “The correlation of brain size with mental ability found in humans appears to extend throughout the primate order.”"

Really? Well, if brain size translated into brain power, what about elephants and whales, which each have brains very large in total weight and size? I suspect Lee has been misrepresented here, and that he's referring to part of the brain called the neocortex. This is the bit that handles complex social relationships and is a recent addition in evolutionary terms, developing on the outer surface of the brain over time in response to the pressures of social living as these increased among our ancestors over millions of years.

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar and others at Liverpool University have compared relative neocortex size among the higher primates. The results are unambiguous: we have the biggest neocortex area by far, which figures as humans have the most complex social relationships and the largest social group sizes (although even we tend to max out at around 150 in terms of the sustained social relationships we can handle. Aurélia Merçay and I wrote a little about this and its implications for negotiating in chapter 7 of DHA's third volume, "Thinking Outside the Box" at left).

It's slightly surprising that orang-utans have come out on top among non-human primates in their abilities to carry out mental tasks because they're generally considered less sociable than chimps and bonobos. But then there's a lot we didn't realize about the way they lived until very recently, thanks to pioneering field work by the Dutch primatologist Carel van Schaik and his colleagues. Their definitive reports of tool use and, crucially, proto-cultural transmission of tool use among wild orang-utan populations astounded the scientific world in late 2005.

The ways primate species live socially is significant. Although chimps and bonobos are superficially similar in appearance and are species of the same genus, for instance, they live completely differently in social terms and also manage problems of conflict and achieve reconciliation in very different ways. (If chimps are from Mars, bonobos are from 'Boogie Nights'.)

Common chimps and bonobos live in larger and more complex social groups than orang-utans. If orang-utans are turning out to be much more mentally capable than previously imagined, there might also be things about their social life we've missed, given the difficulty of studying them in their dense and remote jungle habitats.

So what? Well, as another Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal explained in books such as "Chimpanzee Politics" and "Our Inner Ape", bonobos and common chimps have a lot to teach us about understanding the roots of human aggression and practical conflict resolution.

Not least about coalition politics, at which both species could show more than a thing or two to many an experienced human diplomat or politician. For example, de Waal documented machinations for power among competing males in a captive chimpanzee colony in the Netherlands in the 1970s that resulted in the death of one and which would have given Machiavelli a run for his money in terms of subtlety and complexity. (In the early 1990s, Newt Gingrich, U.S. House Speaker, was reportedly so impressed with "Chimpanzee Politics" that he made it required reading for his junior colleagues in Congress.)

As in humans, xenophobia, rape and murder have been documented in common chimps, which, by inference, has fuelled pessimism about 'Man, the warlike ape'. Yet good news is that our other equally close cousin, the bonobo, seems much more effective in resolving conflict and dealing with and preventing violence, which contradicts this gloomy view. It also seems to be no coincidence that coalitions of females hold the reins of power in bonobo society.

I wouldn't be surprised if orang-utans also have something useful to teach us about conflict and reconciliation, just as chimpanzee and bonobo studies are already doing. A lot is being learned about the role of emotions and gender, the origins of human morality and the influence of social hierarchies to fuel or restrain violence by placing our species within the context of our cousins, the other great apes.

Which is good news for us if we don't drive them to extinction first.


John Borrie


References

"Chimps Knocked Off Top of the IQ Tree", Sunday Times (15 April 2007): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1654998.ece

R.I.M. Dunbar, "Co-evolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans", Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1993: 16, pp. 681-735.

Frans de Waal, "Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes" (rev. edn) (Baltimore: the John Hopkins University Press: 2000), "Our Inner Ape: the Best and Worst of Human Nature" (London: Granta: 2005)

International Herald Tribune/New York Times, "In Search of the Smart Orangutan" (16 November 2005), available here.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Trying to account for mass participation in the Rwandan genocide

In a period of about 100 days, from 6 April to mid-July 1994, experts have estimated that civilian militias and members of the national army dominated by the Hutu ethnic group killed some 500’000 to 800’000 Tutsi (another group) and moderate Hutu in the African country of Rwanda. While these figures are striking indicators of the most rapidly occurring genocide of the 20th century, also deeply disturbing was the high level of participation in the killing, estimated at between 200’000 and 500’000 people.

While the Rwandan genocide will forever remain morally unfathomable, how can we begin to account for such a large-scale level of participation in the killing, in the hope that unambiguous danger signs might be identified to prevent it happening again?

In a book published in 2006 (see reference below), Ravi Bhavnani posed the question: did killing Tutsi become the norm in the Hutu ethnic group? Bhavnani argued that the level of participation in the Rwandan genocide can be explained by the “emergence of a violence-promoting norm among the Hutu community”.

In his chapter, Bhavnani noted that studies pointing to explanations such as structural factors or to Rwanda’s culture – described as one “of fear” or “of deep conformity” – fail to explain the emergence of such large-scale violent behaviour. Likewise, the significance of the death of Rwandan President Habyarimana in a plane crash near Kigali airport on 6 April as the major catalyst for the genocide is problematic.

Starting from the idea that norms are emergent properties of social systems, Bhavnani used complexity theory and simulation by agent-based modeling (ABM) to try to develop an explanation for the emergence of a violence-promoting norm among Hutu people.

The existence of a norm depends upon complex patterns of interactions between the individuals forming a society. At the time of the genocide, Rwanda, Bhavnani argued, was a “densely populated, heterogeneous society” with frequent connections and intermarriage between the two major ethnic groups – Hutu and Tutsi – leading to a complex pattern of interactions. Bhavnani added:

“When a population mixes randomly, extremists eventually have the opportunity to interact with moderates, and observe and punish their behaviour.”

In other words, in Rwanda it was about killing or being killed.

By focusing on microlevel dynamics, Bhavnani hoped this ABM could show how local interactions could bring about massive Hutu participation in the killing. Of course, however intriguing, Bhavani’s work on its own is unlikely to settle the debate over what really caused the genocide. But it serves to underline the worth of studying collective violence by using bottom-up approaches and of appreciating the complex nature of many human social interactions or, as Bhavnani put it, that:

“The causes of conflict constitute partial explanations at best, and are inextricably linked to the process by which conflict unfolds.”

Aurélia Merçay


Reference

See chapter 6: Agent-Based Models in the Study of Ethnic Norms and violence, by R. Bhavnani in Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm, N.E. Harrison & J.N. Rosenau, 2006, SUNY series in Global Politic, State University of New York Press.

Can network theory help track terrorists – or small arms?

Al Qaeda is often referred to as an atypical organization without central authority that operates like a swarm. In a 2005 interview, Spanish counterterrorism judge Baltasar Garzón said that, following the loss of key leaders during the first year of the U.S.-led global war on terrorism, Al Qaeda convened a strategic summit in northern Iran in November 2002, at which the group’s consultative council decided that it could no longer operate as a hierarchy, but instead would have to become a decentralized network.

Can network theory help us destabilize or even neutralize terrorist groups?

Well, it seems to be possible. In a recent article in The Boston Globe (see reference below), I read that the Pentagon asked a team of scientists from Boston to look at the potential of “social network analysis” to study the web of relationships among terrorist organizations, arms scientists, and suppliers in order to help prevent terrorists from acquiring or developing weapons of mass destruction.

By reconstructing the web of the cultural, political, and financial connections among terrorists, it’s possible to identify the individuals who are most highly socially connected. These key players – also known as “hubs” – are not necessarily the leaders of the organization: they are the nodes that hold the network together. By knocking down a critical hub, you may disable the whole network.

This method has been used retroactively by Valdis Krebs, a Cleveland consultant, to determine the key role of Mohamed Atta among the 19 hijackers involved in 9/11 terrorist attacks. Network theory was also at the center of the U.S. military programme called “Mongo Link”, whose aim was to chart Saddam Hussein’s relationships and which eventually led to his capture near his hometown of Tikrit.

Determining hubs and relationships in terrorist networks is a major challenge. Although some networks are obvious in hindsight, the real difficulty is to disable them before they act.

Network theory also may have wider applicability to other security issues, in which relationships are important to understanding what’s going on. (John Borrie and I discussed this in our chapter in the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project’s third volume of research, see reference below.) In particular, a potential use for this tool could be to identify the significant nodes and critical connections of illicit small arms proliferation networks.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Bryan Bender, “Antiterrorism agency taps Boston-area brains: Analysts plumb arms networks”, The Boston Globe, March 27, 2007.

Aurélia Merçay and John Borrie , “A Physics of diplomacy? The Dynamics of Complex Social Phenomena and Their Implications for Multilateral Negotiations”, Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations, UNIDIR, 2006, pp. 129-164, available online here.