The Role for Simulations in Theory Construction for the Social Sciences: Case Studies Concerning Divergent Modes of Religiosity
Harvey Whitehouse, Ken Kahn, Michael E. Hochberg, and Joanna J. Bryson, Religion, Brain & Behaviour, 2(3):182-224 (including commentaries and response), 2012.
I’m particularly pleased about this paper because it shows clearly how models can advance even well-established social-scientific theories provided that we work directly with domain experts who really understand the theory and data. There are some very pithy, quotable text about this in our response to commentaries, From the Imaginary to the Real: The Back and Forth Between Reality and Simulation. Open access pre-proof version of the target article, and of the response to commentaries. Associated software is available from the AmonI software page, and also in the electronic appendix. Oxford Anthropology have made a web page about our simulation of religion work.
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Punishment Can Promote Defection in Group-Structured Populations
Simon T. Powers, Daniel J. Taylor and Joanna J. Bryson, The Journal of Theoretical Biology, 311:107-116, 2012.
Penultimate version on arXiv. This paper shows that punishment alone can’t explain altruism, the papers that thought it could didn’t take into account the well-documented behaviour of anti-social punishment. Basically, some people punish those that contribute to the public good. This is the first article of at least five we expect to publish explaining this phenomenon, and why it varies by culture. See our Cultural Variation in Costly Punishment project page.
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A Role for Consciousness in Action Selection
The role is not so much for immediate selection, but for updating models for future selection. In case you don’t have access, here’s the submitted draft from July 2012.
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Patiency Is Not a Virtue: Suggestions for Co-Constructing an Ethical Framework Including Intelligent Artefacts
Joanna Bryson, appeared in The Machine Question: AI, Ethics and Moral Responsibility, (Gunkel, Bryson and Torrance, eds, see above), pp. 73-75, 2012, but there’s a nice new version now, see 2016.
Argues that both ethical systems and robots are artefacts of our society, so we have a good deal of control over whether we choose to make our agents moral subjects. Doing so would be a displacement of responsibility that currently rests in us, and that displacement probably isn’t justified or advisable. There are newer, better versions of this paper in 2018.
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Structuring Intelligence: The Role of Hierarchy, Modularity and Learning in Generating Intelligent Behaviour (pdf)
Joanna J. Bryson, from McFarland, D., Stenning, K. and McGonigle-Chalmers, M. (eds.) The Complex Mind, on Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.
An invited chapter for a book written in honour of the late Brendan McGonigle. The chapter mostly takes a neuro and psychological approach, but last section is Eco Evo Devo, with some ideas I’ve been working on lately on the origins of cognition. This is the draft sent to the publisher in March 2010.
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