HMIA 2025

HMIA 2025

"Readings"

Outline

1. Discuss cooperation and coordination (as alignment)
2. Class activity reproducing game/data in Fehr+Gintis
3. Extract alignment failure issues.

HMIA 2025

HMIA 2025

HMIA 2025

HMIA 2025

HMIA 2025

HMIA 2025

Fehr & Gintis Public Goods Game with Optional Punishment

CLASSROOM INSTRUCTIONS

Title: Cooperation and Punishment in the Public Goods Game
Duration: ~40–50 minutes
Materials:

• Each student receives a copy of the “Public Goods Game Tally Sheet”

• Calculator or spreadsheet for the instructor

• Whiteboard or projector for live tracking of group averages

🎯 OBJECTIVE

To explore the emergence and breakdown of cooperation in social groups and the role punishment can play in restoring social order.

👥 GROUP SETUP

• Divide students into groups of 4 to 8 players (must be consistent for accurate payoff structure).

• Assign each student a Player Number and have them fill in their name, number, N (number of players), and M (multiplier, e.g. M = 1.6) on the score sheet.

HMIA 2025

Fehr & Gintis Public Goods Game with Optional Punishment

🔁 ROUND STRUCTURE

🔹 Phase 1: 10 Rounds Without Punishment

Each player starts with 20 tokens per round.

1. Step 1: Secret Contribution

   • Each player secretly decides how much (0–20 tokens) to contribute to the public account.

   • All contributions are collected and summed.

2. Step 2: Calculate Group Payoff

   • Total contributions × M = Group Gain.

   • Group Gain is split equally among all players:
     Payoff per citizen = M × (Total Give) ÷ N.

3. Step 3: Individual Payoff

   • Player Net = Endowment – My Give + Payoff per Citizen

   • Everyone records their payoff and running total.

4. Step 4: Share Public Info

   • Announce total contributions and average.

   • Optionally, also announce % who gave nothing.

Repeat for 10 rounds.

HMIA 2025

Fehr & Gintis Public Goods Game with Optional Punishment

🔹 Phase 2: 10 Rounds With Punishment

Follow same steps as above, but after payoff is calculated, allow players to punish others:

1. Step 5: Punishment (Zap!)

   • Each player may assign punishment points to other players.

   • Cost: 1 token per punishment point

   • Effect: Target loses 3 tokens per point

   • This is recorded on the score sheet.

2. Step 6: Update Scores

   • Deduct costs for punishment given.

   • Deduct fines for punishment received.

   • Net = Previous Net – Fees I Pay – Fines I Pay

   • Update running totals.

Repeat for 10 rounds.

HMIA 2025

Fehr & Gintis Public Goods Game with Optional Punishment

DEBRIEF & DISCUSSION (STOP+THINK)

After all 20 rounds, guide students through questions like:

• What changed when punishment became possible?

• Did cooperation increase, decrease, or stabilize? Why?

• Who punished most? Was it effective?

• Were you surprised by how you or others behaved?

• What does this suggest about rules, norms, and social order?

HMIA 2025

Fehr+Gintis2007HumanNatureandSocialCooperation.pdf

Link

HMIA 2025

Fehr+Gintis2007HumanNatureandSocialCooperation.pdf

What did you actually do in the game? Describe your choices and reasoning in the simulation. Did you ever punish someone? Did you cooperate? Defect? Why?

Anchors abstract theory in lived behavior and helps surface the tension between self-interest and group-benefit central to both readings.

What made cooperation easier or harder?  What features of the game encouraged or discouraged cooperation? Were there tipping points? Did norms emerge?

Cf. Hechter & Horne: The problem of cooperation and mechanisms that support it; Fehr & Gintis: Conditional cooperation and costly punishment.

Who maintained social order, and how?  Was order imposed through authority? Through peer pressure? Through internalized norms? Through punishment? Who played what role?

Hechter & Horne’s typology: individuals, hierarchies, markets, groups, networks; Fehr & Gintis’s findings on altruistic punishment as a mechanism for order.

Did you act differently than you expected? Did the experience make you revise your assumptions about human nature—your own or others’?

Ties to both readings’ discussion of models of human nature (self-interested vs. altruistic) and whether order is natural or needs enforcement.

Is it possible to have too much social order? Would you have preferred a world with more rules and enforcement? Or less? Did it ever feel oppressive?

Hechter & Horne warn that high order can come at a cost to individual freedom (cf. ants vs. humans). Encourages critical reflection on tradeoffs in social design, useful later in the course for thinking about AI alignment and governance.

STOP+THINK

STOP+THINK

STOP+THINK

STOP+THINK

STOP+THINK

HMIA 2025

Fehr+Gintis2007HumanNatureandSocialCooperation.pdf

Alignment Across Intelligences.  In this game, some individuals were willing to pay a personal cost to enforce group norms—even when it didn’t benefit them directly.

Now imagine you're designing:

    o a company trying to align employee behavior with its mission,

    o a profession (like medicine or law) trying to uphold ethical standards, or

    o an AI system that interacts with humans in the wild.

Question: What punishment mechanisms or alignment tools do these systems use—and what happens when they're missing?

STOP+THINK

HMIA 2025

Resources

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