I read in a recent science paper by Yamagishi, that game theories and analysis can be used to assess individuals that are engaged in daily group activity, in that they can be said to be belonging to a “self-sustaining” institution where they operate according to a shared set of incentives.

In these types of environments it has been shown that individual strategy and behaviour can be based on considering specific outcomes, or the “payout”, not exactly rocket science of course, but let’s dig deeper.

The specific example used two groups of different cultures; Americans and Japanese. Each group were given a set of coloured pens and asked to choose a single colour pen as a reward for completing a survey. The experiment showed that the Japanese were less likely than the Americans to take a coloured pen IF that were the only pen of that colour in the set, indicating that they were not comfortable in reducing the number of options in the set for the remaining group members, therefore not creating a negative impression of themselves.

This is said to reflect that the Japanese are more conforming and less individualistic than their American counterparts. However, there was no discernible difference between the two groups when each group were informed that they were the first or last to receive, therefore instruction plays a part in institutional behaviour here.

You may not find this as fascinating as me, though I am wondering what you may be thinking, do you see parallels here in social network behaviours, can we assume a social network IS a “self-sustaining” institute? And can we predict different behaviours in each, both conforming in nature or the more individualistic approach, and more to the point how can we change that behaviour by instruction… ?