1,720,975 research outputs found
From niches to norms: the promise of social tipping interventions to scale climate action
Full text linkAbstract The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with technology and markets alone. It requires complementary behavioral and social change on the demand side. Abandoning entrenched detrimental norms, including those that perpetuate the fossil-fueled lock-in, is notoriously difficult, preventing change and limiting policy efficacy. A nascent literature tackles social tipping interventions—STI, aiming at cost-effective disproportionate change by pushing behaviors past an adoption threshold beyond which further uptake is self-reinforcing. Intervening on target groups can greatly reduce the societal cost of a policy and thus holds promise for precipitating change. This article takes stock of the potential of STI to scale climate action by first reviewing the theoretical insights arising from behavioral public policy based on applications of threshold models from sociology and economics; then, it assesses the initial evidence on the effectiveness of STI, in light of the outcomes of laboratory and online experiments that were designed to study coordination on an emergent alternative to the initial status quo. Lastly, the article identifies potential conceptual limitations and proposes fruitful avenues for increasing the robustness of STI assessments beyond theory and small-scale experimentation
Il gioco come motore di prosocialità
No full textNew Frontiers in Gaming è una raccolta di contributi sul tema del gioco e di come il gioco e il gaming cambieranno (e già stanno cambiando) la nostra vita. L’obiettivo di questo volume è quello di affrontare il tema delle prospettive future del mondo del gaming affrontando il presente e il passato del mondo del gioco, per dare gli strumenti necessari a capire la rivoluzione culturale in atto, per poi arrivare alle prospettive, possibilità e conseguenze future.New Frontiers in Gaming è promosso dal Neuroscience Lab di Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center e del partner scientifico, la Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca.Tutti gli autori e le autrici vengono dal mondo universitario (da vari settori: Economia, Neuroscienze, Tecnologia, Design della Comunicazione, Pedagogia ecc), all’interno della collaborazione con il Game Science Research Center
Norms and Efficiency in a Multi‐Group Society: An Online Experiment
No full textIn this study, we measure personal normative beliefs, empirical expectations, and normative expectations in a multilevel public goods game, where two local public goods are nested in a global one. We use these measures as indexes of subjective personal and social norms to pursue a twofold objective. On the one hand, we aim to understand whether and to what extent contribution decisions are driven by personal or social norms. On the other hand, we aim to investigate whether changes in the relative efficiency of the two public goods affect norms and norm compliance. In our online experiment, personal norms emerge as the main driver of contribution decisions especially when the efficiency of the related public good increases. However, compliance to empirical expectations signals that social norms still play a role in both positively affecting the contribution to the relative public good and negatively the contribution to the other one
Language-based game theory in the age of artificial intelligence
Full text linkUnderstanding human behaviour in decision problems and strategic interactions has wide-ranging applications in economics, psychology and artificial intelligence. Game theory offers a robust foundation for this understanding, based on the idea that individuals aim to maximize a utility function. However, the exact factors influencing strategy choices remain elusive. While traditional models try to explain human behaviour as a function of the outcomes of available actions, recent experimental research reveals that linguistic content significantly impacts decision-making, thus prompting a paradigm shift from outcome-based to language-based utility functions. This shift is more urgent than ever, given the advancement of generative AI, which has the potential to support humans in making critical decisions through language-based interactions. We propose sentiment analysis as a fundamental tool for this shift and take an initial step by analysing 61 experimental instructions from the dictator game, an economic game capturing the balance between self-interest and the interest of others, which is at the core of many social interactions. Our meta-analysis shows that sentiment analysis can explain human behaviour beyond economic outcomes. We discuss future research directions. We hope this work sets the stage for a novel game-theoretical approach that emphasizes the importance of language in human decisions
Gamification and Sustainable Water Use: The Case of the BLUTUBE Educational Program
No full textIn a world increasingly stressed by climate change and scarcity of natural resources, the prosocial behaviors of new generations become increasingly essential, especially when aimed at sustainability. This study aims to investigate the gamified system applied to the game-based educational program BLUTUBE, designed to promote better practices regarding virtuous water usage in the primary schools of the Municipality of Lucca
Measuring the attitude towards a European public budget: A cross-country experiment
Full text linkWe use a multilevel public goods game to investigate attitudes towards national public budgets and a European public budget in six Member States of the European Union: Italy, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal. We test to what extent propensities to contribute to public goods differ across countries. Using two efficiency treatments, we also test whether each country group adjusts its contribution when the relative efficiency of the public goods changes. We find no differences across countries in the propensity to contribute to either public budget. Moreover, all country groups level up their contribution to the European public good following an increase in its relative efficiency. We also devise a questionnaire to assess the impact of a sense of identity on contribution decisions and to control for the impact of COVID-19 and the current war in Ukraine on country and EU perceptions
Games-based learning for social change
Full text linkEditorial on the Research Topic Games-based learning for social chang
Digital Escape Games in Educational Programs for Financial Literacy
No full textEscape from the Castle is a digital escape game created with the collaboration of the Museum of Saving in Turin (Italy), Neuroscience Lab Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center, and the GAME Science Research Center of IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. In the escape game, players must help Mica, the mascot of the Museum, to run away from the Ghost of the Baroness, from its Castle. To do that, every player has to solve four puzzles in four different rooms. Each room is correlated to a financial issue, such as saving strategies and planning. The game aims to increase the awareness that money represents a means for achieving a purpose (i.e., use value of money) and not an end, from a behavioural and neuroscientific point of view. So we built a study about the behaviour of teenagers. According to the literature, the cooperative approach proposes emotional and cognitive involvement as a tool to strengthen learning, increases awareness of self-efficacy and, when applied to money management, increases the self-perception of being able to make consumption choices. To better understand the mechanisms of cooperation, we built an experiment with 118 students from eleven to fourteen years old, that played the game during a visit to the Museum. We divided students into two groups: one in which students could collaborate with each other in solving the puzzles (treatment) and one in which they had to play individually (control), and we collected score and time of play (behavioural data). In each group, two students wore eye-trackers to record pupil dilation to collect neurophysiological data. Here we present mainly the behavioural results that show that the students who were allowed to collaborate obtained, on average, double the score compared to those who played individually. Furthermore, those who collaborated finished the game in less time than those who have not played as a group. Moreover, combining behavioural data with neurophysiological data, there are indications that high pupil dilation is correlated with high engagement in play, and this is often true in collaborating groups
Prosocial behavior in emergencies: Evidence from blood donors recruitment and retention during the COVID-19 pandemic
Full text linkThe impact of COVID-19 represents a specific challenge for voluntary transfusional systems sustained by the intrinsic motivations of blood donors. In general, health emergencies can stimulate altruistic behaviors. However, in this context, the same prosocial motivations, besides the personal health risks, could foster the adherence to social distancing rules to preserve collective health and, therefore, discourage blood donation activities. In this work, we investigate the consequences of the pandemic shock on the dynamics of new donors exploiting the individual-level longitudinal information contained in administrative data on the Italian region of Tuscany. We compare the change in new donors' recruitment and retention during 2020 with respect to the 2017–2019 period (we observe 9511 individuals), considering donors’ and their municipalities of residence characteristics. Our results show an increment of new donors, with higher proportional growth for older donors. Moreover, we demonstrate that the quality of new donors, as proxied by the frequency of subsequent donations, increased with respect to previous years. Finally, we show that changes in extrinsic motivations, such as the possibility of obtaining a free antibody test or overcoming movement restrictions, cannot explain the documented increase in the number of new donors and in their performance. Therefore, our analyses indicate that the Tuscan voluntary blood donation system was effective in dealing with the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic
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