Current and forthcoming papers from the Cooperation project:

An Overview of the Political Blogosphere (forthcoming)
The Internet's effect on democracy has been hotly debated for over a decade. Throughout these debates, a core assumption has been that "the internet" is a set of technical affordances that apply to all potential participants in the public sphere equally.  Some studies in the past few years have uncovered small,  but significant, differences between the left and right of the U.S. blogosphere (Adamic and Glance 2005; Hargittai et al. 2008), particularly in the degree and form in which they link to other stories both within each part of the political logosphere and across the left-right divide.  In this study we undertake a detailed comparison, aimed squarely at exploring whether there are differences between the left, right, and center of the political blogosphere in terms of technology, organizational structure, and perhaps most importantly, patterns of discursive participation.
Contact: Aaron Shaw

Dynamic remodeling of in-group bias during the 2008 presidential election
People often favor members of their own group, while discriminating against members of other groups. Such in-group favoritism has been shown to play an important role in human cooperation. However, in the face of changing conflicts and shifting alliances, it is essential for group identities to be flexible. Using the dictator game from behavioral economics, we demonstrate the remodeling of group identities among supporters of Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. After Clinton’s concession in June 2008, Democrats were more generous toward supporters of their own preferred candidate than to supporters of the other Democratic candidate. The bias observed in June persisted into August, and disappeared only in early September after the Democratic National Convention. We also observe a strong gender effect, with bias both appearing and subsiding among men only. This experimental study illustrates a dynamic change in bias, tracking the realignment of real world conflict lines and public efforts to reconstitute group identity. The change in salient group identity we describe here likely contributed to the victory of Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.
Contact: David G. Rand, Program for Evolutionary Dynamics