This paper is a summary of an Aspen Institute sponsored in-depth roundtable session, written from the perspective of one informed conference observer (Bollier). The participants are leading thinkers in the many complex areas this paper covers (economics, systems theory, human behavior, human futures, information technology evolution, etc) and are listed on page 57. A selection of their key insights shared in the paper are listed below:

A "push" economy is geared towards mass production, anticipating consumer demand, and routing resources to the right place at the right time, to create standardized and mass produced products. By contrast, a "pull" economy is based on open, flexible production platforms that are used to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products, "pull" model companies are demand-driven, and assemble products in customized ways that serve specialized or local needs, usually using "rapid" or "on the fly" processes.

Several global corporations are moving towards "pull" methods, and away from "push" models; ie., Toyota, Dell, Cisco, Li & Fung. These companies employ different variations of Value Network models, that share information about overall network performance and best practices for serving specialized needs, among hundreds or even thousands of partner companies that make up the network. This creates an intra-network knowledge commons. Some companies also work closely with Open Source Software projects, thereby expanding their "pull" network, and expanding their knowledge commons into a broader Open Commons via Open Source Software project contributions. Thus, "pull" business models also tend to be Network Value-Increasing, and Commons-based business models as well.

"Pull" models can also be platforms for creating "increasing returns dynamics." This is due to "pull" models being based around loose and flexible networks that are already configured to scale as growth occurs. So, growth does not incur the huge overhead costs in administration that "push" models must contend with. Pull platform key characteristics include modular and loosely-coupled networks, open channels that better harness the passion and commitment of innovation communities. "Pull" platforms also will tend to influence public policy with regards to education and innovation, as more companies tend to gravitate towards the "pull" models.

The areas where "push" models tend to succeed in business are in areas where people do not know what they want, and prefer to shop from pre-made selections (Ikea, Home Depot). However, there are even "pull" models to found here, in the form of user-driven innovation, such as mountain biking, extreme skiing, hot rodding, etc. In these pro-amateur niches, customers don't necessarily know what they want, but do want to be a participant in the "pull" network that creates the product.

How do you tax a product that is made in 23 different countries? "Pull" models are going to change the way that governments create policy as more companies gravitate toward them. This will influence laws about intellectual property, education, taxation and more.

"Pull" economies are not just centered around finding creative ways to "outsource/offshore jobs" away from one place and to the places where "labor" is "cheaper". Successful "pull" models have encouraged and aided "insourcing", where more jobs are created, for instance in the United States by "foreign sources (a total of 7 million cited by this paper), than are out sourced (a total of 600,000+ cited by this paper). This is because pull models seek out, not just the "cheapest" labor, but the best ways to add value to the production networks. So, they can scale to many participants around the world, regardless of local labor costs, to find the best participants needed for specific specialized productions.

The social dynamics of "pull" models are highly centered around creating relationships of trust, sharing knowledge, and close cooperation among network participants. In "pull" models, non-market value creation (tacit knowledge, intangible value) is generally steered towards a commons-based model. A commons is used as a "collective governance regime for managing shared resources sustainably and equitably." Many of these commons are made possible by networked information technologies (the internet).

Bollier suggests that "if online commons are going to be useful to business, companies will need to do more work to develop protocols for identity and reputation management". This is because the use of the commons is based around trust. It also due to the need for ways to measure qualitative value in intangible assets beyond money, like knowledge, individual performance and value multiplication, and network wide performance/value multiplication.

Roundtable participants also noted that "pull" models will pose challenges to current education regimes that are centered around training people to participate in "push" economies. One of the participants mentions that " Computers, software tools, and Internet resources make possible some radically new styles of learning. By using pull-based systems, students can function much like businesses in the pull environment: They can access resources they don't control and put themselves into flows of activity, rather than just building inventories of static, objectified "knowledge."

The commonsense view of social evolution as the product of choices made in the marketplace of cultural possibilities resulting in the continuous betterment of the human condition is flawed.

The rise of civilization, paradoxically, reduced the natural limits separating societies. In such a situation, Schmookler's Parable of the Tribes describes how, in a situation in which two or more actors desire to exploit a limited resource, power becomes important and a contaminant of the possibility of peaceful co-existence:

All of a group of tribes living within reach of each other choose peace. However, if all but one choose peace, there are four possibilities for the threatened neighbors:

• Destruction.
• Absorption and enslavement.
• Withdrawal to a less desirable place.
• Imitation of the aggressive behavior.

Technological innovation and “improvement,” far from making things inevitably better, can extend the reach of aggressors throughout the world.

Cultural homogenization and the diminishment of diversity happens both through benign, commonsense choice (i.e., innovations as improvements) as well as through compulsion by dominant aggressors.

Chapter 1, The Problem of Cooperation. Why do people (or other actors) cooperate? "The objective of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge." It uses the Prisoner's Dilemma as a framework for testing theories about balancing self-interest and competition.

"In the Prisoners' Dilemma, the strategy that works best depends directly on what strategy the other player is using and, in particular, on whether this strategy leaves room for the development of mutual cooperation."

Chapter 2, TIT FOR TAT. "The iterated Prisoners' Dilemma has become the E. Coli of social psychology," yet people have not paid much attention to how to play the game well. Axelrod organized a computer tournament to which people familiar with PD submitted programs encoding different strategies. The winner was one of the simplest, TIT FOR TAT.

Axelrod then constructed an environment in which different programs competed, and the losing programs were eliminated: this was an ecology that rewarded high scoring programs, and punished others. "This process simulates survival of the fittest. A rule that is successful on average with the current distribution of rules in the population will become an even larger proportion of the environment of the other rules in the next generation. At first, a rule that is successful with all sorts of rules will proliferate, but later as the unsuccessful rules disappear, success requires good performance with other successful rules." In other words, the competition gets tougher.

"The analysis of the tournament results indicate that there is a lot to be learned about coping in an environment of mutual power. Even expert strategists from political science, sociology, economics, psychology, and mathematics made the systematic errors of being too competitive for their own good, not being forgiving enough, and being too pessimistic about the responsiveness of the other side."

The tournaments reveal that "there is a single property which distinguishes the relatively high-scoring entries from the relatively low-scoring entries. This is the property of being nice, which is to say never being the first to defect."

TIT FOR TAT's rules for success:

• Be nice. Don't be the first to go on the attack. This demonstrates good will, and avoids provoking others.
• Retaliate. If others attack, retaliate. Not doing so encourages bad behavior and gives niceness a bad reputation.
• Be forgiving. If others defect but then go back to cooperating, accept the opportunity to move back to a cooperative mode.
• Be clear. Others can predict what you'll do, be certain that their moves will have definite outcomes. "There is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated PD. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterate PD, you benefit from the other player's cooperation."

Chapter 4, Trench Warfare. During World War I, "live and let live" arrangements emerged spontaneously between opposing units on the Western Front. Cooperation could take hold because "the same small units faced each other in immobile sectors for extended periods of time." Consequently, they had a more sustained relationship than in mobile warfare, and could develop commonly-understood rules, reciprocity and restraint in attacks, displays of strength (e.g., snipers shooting at hard targets)as well as ethics (recognition that there was an arrangement and violating it was immoral) and rituals (e.g., regular artillery firing).

"Cooperation first emerged spontaneously in a variety of contexts, such as restraint in attacking the distribution of enemy rations, a pause during the first Christmas in the trenches, and a slow resumption of fighting after bad weather made sustained combat almost impossible. These restraints quickly evolved into clear patterns of mutually understood behavior, such as two-for-one or three-for-one retaliation for actions that were taken to be unacceptable."

Chapter 6, How to Choose Effectively. Four suggestions about how to do well in PD:

• Don't be envious. In a PD, "envy is self-destructive. Asking how well you are doing compared to how well the other player is doing is not a good standard unless your goal is to destroy the other player." However, in an iterated prisoner's dilemma, you can't do better than the other player, unless they're always suckers. "In a non-zero-sum world you do not have to do better than the other player to do well for yourself. The other's success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself."
• Don't be the first to defect (be nice). "It pays to cooperate as long as the other player is cooperating." In a short game, defection can make sense; but in a relationship, taking advantage of the other person is self-defeating.
• Reciprocate both cooperation and defection. TIT FOR TAT "does not destroy the basis of its own success. On the contrary, it thrives on interactions with other successful rules." However, the right level of forgiveness depends on the context, and the other players' strategies.
• Don't be too clever. "In a zero-sum game, such as chess it pays for us to be as sophisticated and as complex in our analysis as we can. Non-zero-sum games are not like this. The other player can respond to your own choices. And unlike the chess opponent, the other player in a PD should not be regarded as someone who is out to defeat you." "There is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated PD. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterate PD, you benefit from the other player's cooperation."

Chapter 7, How to Promote Cooperation. Promoting cooperation can be thought of as an exercise in tinkering with the variables in a PD. "As long as the interaction is not iterated, cooperation is very difficult. That is why an important way to promote cooperation is to arrange that the same two individuals will meet each other again, be able to recognize each other from the past, and to recall how the other has behaved until now."

• Enlarge the shadow of the future. For cooperation to emerge, players must be in a continuing relationship, with the expectation that it will continue in the future. "Mutual cooperation can be stable if the future is sufficiently important relative to the past." "There are two basic ways of doing this: by making the interactions more durable, and by making them more frequent. [P]rolonged interaction allows patterns of cooperation which are based on reciprocity to be worth trying and allows them to become established," Making interactions more frequent makes "the next interaction occur sooner, and hence the next move looms larger than it otherwise would." You might do this by enforcing isolation, or constructing hierarchies or organizations, which are "especially effective at concentrating the interactions between specific individuals."
• Change the payoffs. Make defection less attractive, by enforcing laws, or growing the value of long-term incentives.
• Teach people to care about each other.
• Teach reciprocity. Reciprocity "actually helps not only oneself, but others as well. It helps others by making it hard for exploitative strategies to survive."
• Improve recognition abilities. "The ability to recognize the other player from past interactions, and to remember the relevant features of those interactions, is necessary to sustain cooperation. Without these abilities, a player could not use any form of reciprocity and hence could not encourage the other to cooperate."

Chapter 8, The Social Structure of Cooperation.
The social structure of cooperation involves labels, reputation, regulation, and territoriality.

• Labels are fixed characteristics of an agent that are observable by other agents. Labels affect reciprocity and retaliation via assumptions of group similarity and stereotypes.
• Reputation is others' belief about the strategies an agent will employ. Reputation may be based on past behavior or on rumours, i.e. reputation can be accurate or merely believed. Reputation affects whether or not other agents will cooperate or defect with you.
• Regulation involves setting the stringency of a standard of behavior "high enough to get most of the social benefits of regulation, and not so high as to prevent the evolution of a stable pattern of voluntary compliance from almost all of the companies" (or regulated agents).
• Territoriality refers to both physical and conceptual spaces that can be 'invaded' by agents of differing strategies. Territoriality establishes boundaries within which behaviors will be reinforced or retaliated against depending on prevailing norms. Also, the boundary provides an 'inside' for agents that comply with the norms, and an 'outside' to which they can be expelled if they do not comply.

Chapter 9, The Robustness of Reciprocity.

• Cooperation can get started by even a small cluster of individuals who are willing to reciprocate cooperation, even in a world where no one else will cooperate.
• Once cooperation is establish, it protects itself from invasion by non-cooperative strategies.
• The foundation of cooperation is the durability of the relationship, which allows agents to learn about each other in order to cooperate.

“The study of social dilemmas is the study of the tension between individual and collective rationality. In a social dilemma, individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off. The first part of this review is a discussion of categories of social dilemmas and how they are modeled.” The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the problem of providing public goods, and Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons are three powerful metaphors that facilitated and structured research but also served as blinders since their limitations are often not recognized.

Models:

Kollock’s analysis divides dilemmas into two-person and N-person dilemmas. The key two-person dilemmas are the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Assurance Game, and the Chicken Game. Each of these models is defined by the ordering of four possible outcomes: mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and either first or second person’s unilateral defection. Each of these outcomes generates an individual benefit for each person and is ordered by the benefit for the first person.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma models unsecured transactions, e.g. buying and selling over the Internet. The best outcome of a Prisoner’s Dilemma is unilateral defection of the first person, followed by mutual cooperation, mutual defection, and the worst outcome is the first person’s unilateral cooperation. Since defection has the highest potential benefit and cooperation the highest potential risk, the equilibrium of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is mutual defection. This equilibrium is deficient because the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.

The Assurance Game is similar to the Prisoner’s Dilemma except it models situations where mutual cooperation is more benefical for each player than unilateral defection, e.g. a project that requires collaboration. This extra motivation to mutually cooperate creates two equilibria, one optimal, which is mutual cooperation, and one deficient, which is mutual defection. The optimal equilibrium requires trust between the two persons sufficient to assure each other that the other will cooperate. Insufficient trust leads to the deficient equilibrium.

The Chicken Game is again similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma except mutual defection is the worst outcome, worse than unilateral cooperation. This replaces the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s mutual defection equilibrium by two equilibria, unilateral defection and unilateral cooperation because of the strong motivation to not mutually defect. The Chicken Game is a model for situations that require volunteer effort to avoid the worst outcome but where duplicate effort is less desirable.

Kollock divides N-person dilemmas into two types based on cost and benefit for each individual. The first type is known as the social fence,s where an individual is presented with an immediate cost that generates a benefit shared by all. The individual wants to avoid the cost but if all do, everyone is worse off. A common metaphor of the social fence is the provisioning of public goods, which are (to a varying degree) non-excludable and nonrival. The key characteristic of a public good dilemma is the production function which defines the relationship between the level of resources contributed and the level of public good provided. Production functions are classified into decelarating, linear, accelerating, and step functions. Various production functions can produce N-person versions of any of the 2-person dilemmas.

The second type is know as social trap where the “individual is tempted by an immediate benefit that produces a cost to all. If all succumb to the temptation, the outcome is a collective disaster.” The usual metaphor of the social trap is the tragedy of the commons. A key feature of commons dilemmas is that the benefits are non-excludable (or difficult to make excludable) and subtractable. The key characteristic of commons dilemmas is the carrying capacity of the commons which depends on the replenishment rate of the subtractable joint resource.

Important (but not inevitable) features that affect N-person dilemma dynamics and contrast them to two-person dilemmas are anonymity, diffusion of defection cost, and little or no direct control on others. Some of these features are also found in two-person dilemmas, e.g. blaming defection on out-of-control circumstances is a form of anonymity in two-person games.

Solutions:

“The second part of [Kollock’s paper] is an extended treatment of possible solutions for social dilemmas. These solutions are organized into three broad categories based on whether the solutions assume egoistic actors and whether the structure of the situation can be changed: Motivational solutions assume actors are not completely egoistic and so give some weight to the outcomes of their partners. Strategic solutions assume egoistic actors, and neither of these categories of solutions involve changing the fundamental structure of the situation. Solutions that do involve changing the rules of the game are [called] structural solutions.”

The motivation of not completely egoistic actors to cooperate is influenced by social value orientation, communication, and group identity. The social value orientation of a person seems to be acquired from the person’s social environment and is some linear combination of a cooperator who tries to maximize joint outcome, a competitor who tries to maximize own outcome relative to partner, and an individualist who tries to maximize own outcome. Kollock does not find any conclusive results in how to influence social value orientation but does find evidence that it varies between different countries.

The presence of communication positively affects cooperation rates. Communication enables a person to find out about others’ choices, to make explicit commitments, to appeal to what is the moral thing to do, and most importantly, to create or reinforce a sense of group identity. The effect of group identity is in fact so strong that it can affect cooperation rates even in the absence of communication. In-group behavior of individuals frequently includes personal restraint and treating Prisoner’s Dilemma situations as Assurance Games. However, in-group behavior implies out-group behavior with the potential to cause severe social costs due to intergroup conflicts.

“[Strategic solutions] rely on the ability of [egoistic] actors to shape to shape the outcomes and hence behavior of other actors. For this reason, many of these strategic solutions are limited to repeated two-person dilemmas.” Axelrod (see The Evolution of Cooperation) identifies three requirements for strategic solutions: ongoing relationships between actors (i.e. all expect shared dilemmas in their future), ability to identify each other, and ability to keep track of the other’s past behavior.

The most successful strategy in iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments (everyone against everyone) that meet these requirements is Tit-for-Tat which starts out with cooperation and then matches the partner’s previous behavior. This strategy transforms a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma into a repeated Assurance Game since the only long-term outcome of this strategy is either mutual cooperation or mutual defection (the two equilibria of the Assurance Game). Key aspects of successful strategies in repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments are (1) to realize that it is not a zero-sum game hence does not benefit from a competitive social orientation (“don’t be envious”), (2) to not defect first, (3) to reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and (4) to be predictable so that the partner clearly understands one's strategy. One important caveat is that repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments assume perfect communication. In real life where communication is often imperfect more generous or forgiving strategies can avoid accidental cycles of recrimination.

Recent evidence suggests that the strategy of choosing partners is more important than the strategy used within a dilemma. In a modified version of iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament actors can exit current relationships and choose alternative partners. A very successful strategy in this environment is Out-for-Tat which exits a relationship as soon as the partner defects. A more forgiving version that gives a defecting partner a second chance is even more successful.

Strategies for N-person dilemmas involve grim triggers, social learning, and group reciprocity. In a “grim trigger” strategy an individual only cooperates if all other group members cooperate and defects as soon as one other group member defects. Social learning is the basis of a cognitively less taxing class of strategies that involves imitating other group members and look for thresholds in public good provisioning instead of calculating marginal rates of return or figuring out dominating strategies. Group identity increases cooperation rates because group members follow strategies that assume that all members share a strong expectation of group reciprocity (reciprocity within the group).

Structural solutions change the rules of the dilemma thereby changing or eliminating it. One approach is to reinforce prerequisites for strategic solutions by introducing long-term accountability (shadow of the future) that influences individual reputations. However, accountability and reputation are not sufficient to escape the Prisoner’s Dilemma’s equilibrium of mutual defection (in two- or N-person version) if the means to encourage cooperation are too weak (e.g. production function for public good too flat or too much effort required to reach provisioning point).

Many people seem to positively weigh others’ outcomes since cooperation increases significantly as the benefits to others from one’s cooperation increase. Cooperation levels are also higher if group members are asked to contribute to a non-divisible public good that only benefits the whole group, probably due to an increased sense of group identity (see group reciprocity).

Cooperation in N-person dilemmas increases if individual contributions have (or are perceived to have) a discernable effect, i.e. make an efficacious contribution. For public goods with step-level production function one can create a minimal subgroup that requires every member to contribute in order to reach the provisioning point or let two groups compete for contributions, turning an N-person Prisoner’s Dilemma into an N-person Chicken Game. Another example are "matching grants" or "adopting" an individual from a large group of benefactors.

Increasing group size makes defection more anonymous and increases the cost of organizing. However, research results on cooperation depending on group size alone are inconclusive. In the case of highly non-rival goods with a threshold production function a larger group is more likely to contain a "critical mass" of cooperating individuals. Diversity of group members' interests and resources encourages formation of critical mass.

A common structural strategy for N-person dilemmas is the creation of boundaries in an attempt to make public goods or commons more excludable. There are three main approaches: The first one is to institute an external authority or trusted leader to govern access to commons. This approach appears to be less preferable if other structural changes are possible. Establishing an external authority can raise severe problems of justice, enforcement, corruption, and scalability. The second approach is to break up commons into private parcels assuming that individuals will take better care of own property than common property. However, privatization does not work for non-divisible goods, raises the social question of who gets to own commons, does not prevent owners to routinely destroy their own property (“tragedy of enclosure”), and requires institutional support to enforce private property rights. A third approach is to locally regulate “access to and use of common property by those who actually use and have local knowledge of the resource.” One key characteristic of successful and long-lasting local regulations is clearly defined boundaries.

Sanctions are a structural method to encourage cooperation where the outcomes themselves of N-person dilemmas are too weak of a motivator. However, the implementation of sanctions can be very expensive. Local monitoring and sanctioning systems are more practical and less costly. Another way to reduce cost is to use a graduated system of sanctions with low-cost conflict resolution. A sanctioning system is itself a public good and therefore poses a second-order dilemma. Communities with a high level of trust readily cooperate in a first-order dilemma but cooperate less in a second-order dilemma hence are less willing to support a sanctioning system. The opposite is true for communities with a high level of distrust.

There are basic facts related to decision making and the idea of "free choice" that everybody should know. Experiments have proven that we are victims of ourselves, and therefore we can fall victims of others. This book presents the mechanisms that guide our behaviors and the techniques that can help influence it, so that the reader can be aware of the traps that awaits him in his day-to-day life.

How the brain works - resilience of decisions

Our choices are influenced by prior decisions, whether they were conscious or unconscious decisions. And these individual behaviors impact group decisions as well, and points to the fact that in a group, the analysis of the impact of a decision should always be done by people other than the ones involved in the decision.

Examples of such self manipulation can be seen in 3 types of behaviors:

• Escalating Commitment
• Sunk Cost
• Escalating Conflict

Escalating Commitment

When people agree to a small request, they feel committed, and will make sure that they do the right thing even if it costs them more than they originally expected or intended. For example if someone is asked to look after a bag, chances are that he/she will run after a robber trying to get away with this bag. Under the same circumstances but without a prior request from the owner of the bag, the same person may not have done it. An example of such a mechanism can be found in a study by Staw published in 1976 "knee deep in the big muddy: a study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action".

Sunk cost

When people make a choice, they tend to choose based on what did cost them more instead of what would be the best for them. For example if people make a reservation (and pay) for two events that turn out to be on the same day, they will tend to choose to go to the one that did cost more rather than the one they would most interested in, even though the money was spent and the overall cost is the same regardless of the choice made. An example of such a mechanism can be found in a study by Arkes and Blumer published in 1985 "the psychology of sunk cost"

Escalating Conflict

When a person has to take a additional decision to get out of a situation in which he is trapped, it is very hard to make such decision. If the opportunity to re-evaluate the original choice is not given, people will tend to stick to their original choice way beyond the point when this choice starts costing them more than they would ever have committed. An example of such a mechanism can be found in a study by Brockner, Shaw, and Rubin published in 1979 "factors affecting withdrawals from an escalating conflict: quitting before it's too late"

How manipulation works: from Self-manipulation to Manipulation

Preparatory steps

All the behaviors presented earlier are the result of self manipulation, but they open the door for actual manipulation by others. Somebody can easily exploits these type of behaviors, and introduce preliminary steps in an interaction so as to condition a person to fall later into one of the response mechanism described earlier. The initial preparatory decision should be the result of free choice, which can be induced:

• through a plain lie, for example offering a product that is not available or promising a deal that does not exist
• by controlling how the information is released, for example ask the subject to make a decision first, then provide him with more details that include changes to the original deal (low ball technique)
• by using a teaser, for example offering a sale on a pair of shoes with only large sizes left

It has been shown that in addition to decision being resilient, people also tend to stick to this original decision even after they have been informed of a change to the original deal. An example of this mechanism can be found in a study by Cialdini published in 1978 "low ball procedure for producing complaince: commitment then cost"

Engagement

What makes all these processes work is the effect of "engagement", which precedes the "resilience of decision", as demonstrated in a study by Kiesler published in 1971 "The psychology of commitment - Experiments linking behavior to belief"

Engagement can be reinforced, and there can be several levels of engagement:

• signing a petition is a low entry level, and providing name/address/profession is another level
• how public is the engagement or how often the engagement is requested also impacts the level of engagement.

As a result of this engagement process the reality is that "free choice" is actually "free will submission". The perception from the decision maker is that he is making a free choice, but the reality is that he can be influenced by a simple request.

The consequences of engagement

It has been shown that the preparatory steps work better when engagement is reinforced by action. More specifically, experimentation has shown the following:

• When there is engagement into an action that is in tune with what the person thinks, it reinforces the conviction of this person.
• When there is engagement into an action that conflicts with what the person thinks, it results in an adaptation of the convictions

Engagement into a non-conflictual decision, followed by an action makes the choice more resilient. This can go as far as creating boomerang reactions to opinions that go against the original choice. For example it has been shown that people asked to sign a petition for a cause that they are supporting will become stronger supporters of that cause after they have signed than they were before.

The interesting part is that the effect of engagement being reinforced by actions applies someone regardless of the original point of view of the person. This can regarded as a good thing or as a bad thing depending on how one wants to look at it:

• when engagement is for a good cause, it is usually considered to be leadership - the person engages in an action
• when engagement is for a "bad" cause, it is usually called being brain washed, or manipulated - the person has been engaged into an action

But the mechanism behind remains the same.

Techniques of manipulation

Several techniques can help prepare the context for a better compliance to a later request:

• The "Foot-in-the-door" technique
• The "Door-in-the-face" technique
• Touch
• The "Foot-in-the-mouth" technique
• The "Fear-then-relief" technique
• The "But you are free of" technique
• The "A little is better than nothing" technique

The "Foot-in-the-door" technique

In this technique, the preparatory step consist in getting the person engaged into a low cost action as a way to prepare for a much more costly one. For example asking for the time of the day before asking for some money to pay for a phone call - such examples can be found in a study by Freedman and Frazer published in 1966 "compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique", and by Pliner Host Kohl and Saari published in 1974 "compliance without pressure: some further data on the foot-in-the-door technique".

This technique works even better if you follow up with an "attribution", by commenting on the person's action and by making them feel good about such action (Attribution technique - see below)

The "Door-in-the-face" technique

This technique consist in asking for something totally unrealistic as a way prepare for a much more resonable request. For example asking for a large sum beyond the means of a person before asking for $100. Such examples can be found in studies by Cialdini, Vincent, Lewis, Catalan, Wheeler and Darby published in 1975 "a reciprocal concessions procedure for inducing complaince: the door-in-the-face technique"

Touch

This technique consist in touching the person for a few second as a preparatory step for a later request. As strange as it may seem it does make real difference. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Kleinke published in 1973 "compliance to requests made by gazing and touching experimentaters in field settings"

The "Foot-in-the-mouth" technique

This technique consist in inquiring about the person and showing interest in the answer as a preparatory step for a later request. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Howard published in 1990 "the influence of verbal responses to common greetings on compliance behavior: the foot-in-the-mouth effect"

The "Fear-then-relief" technique

This technique consist in creating stress before providing relief as a preparatory step for a later request. However unpopular it might be, examples of this technique can be found in police questioning procedures.

The Attribution technique

This technique consist in commenting on the person's action to give them a good image of themselves. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Millet, Brickman and Bolen published in 1975 "attribution versus persuasion as a means for modifying behavior"

The "But you are free of" technique

This technique consist in clarifying after a request that the person should feel free to not comply to this request. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Guegen and Pascual published in 2002 "evocation of freedom and compliance: the but ou are free of... technique".
This technique also works on the web (for example by changing the wording of a button to "feel free to click here" instead of just "click here"). In one experiment from Guegen, LeGouvello, Pascual and Morineau published in 2002 "request solicitation and semantic evocation of freedom: an evaluation in a computer mediated communication context", it was shown to move the success rate from 65% to 82%.

The "A little is better than nothing" technique

This technique consist in adding to the request that a little will be better than nothing, thus removing the excuse of cost from the possible answers. Example of results from such a technique can be found in a study from Cialdini and Shroeder published in 1976 "increasing compliance by legitimazing paltry contributions"

"This is not all" technique

This technique consist in offering additional items that were not requested originally to justify the high cost of the request. This is a classic, and we are exposed to in our everyday shopping.

The "Foot-in-the-memory" technique

This technique consist in asking the person to remember when they did not comply in the past with something that they approve of in general, or try to ask them to visualise situations that would not be conform with a given policy. An example of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Dickerson, Thibodeau, Aronson and Miller published in 1992 "using cognitive dissonance to encourage water conservation"

Once all these techniques have been identified, it is then possible to mix and match to try to optimise results. An example of such mix and match and the results that it yielded can be found in a study by Joule published in 1989 "Tobacco deprivation: the foot in the door technique versus the low ball technique". In this experiment, the goal was to have students agree to stop smoking for 18 hours. In the control group, 12% of the students selected agreed to the request, and only 4% actually complied. But after two "foot-in-the-door" steps followed by 2 engagements 95% of the students selected agreed to the request, and 90% complied.

Possible Applications

An obvious application of all these techniques is Marketing.
Management and Child Education are the other areas where they can be useful.

Management

Organizations of all kinds all require that a group of individuals work towards a common goal. And even when the culture inside the organization is very open (what the authors call industrial democracy), we are still in a configuration were people are being asked to do, or maybe they are being influenced into doing, something that makes sense for the organization as the best way to reach the goal.

Research by Kurt Lewin (1947 "group decision and social change") gave birth after the war to the practice of group decision making in industrial organizations. But what remains today from this orginal theory has been dilluted into two main versions that were further advertised, one with a "management" bias, and the other one with a "democratic" bias.

To understand how these versions differ (or not), one has to look at two important parameters within the entreprise:

• the internal social weight - impact on employees
• the organizational efficiency weight - impact on production

The "management" version of the original theory has been presented by Norman Maier who was studying group decision for better management. According to him:

• If a change has no internal social weight and no organizational efficiency weight (for example the color of the paint on the walls), then who makes the decision does not matter, and coin tossing is a good method
• If a change has no internal social weight but has organizational efficiency weight, then the decision should be taken by experts
• If a change has internal social weight but no organizational efficiency weight, then the decision should be taken as a group decision
• If a change has internal social weight and organizational efficiency weight, then there is potential conflict, and the situation requires a "moderator" to drive the group towards the decision that makes most sense for the organization, while it is taken with buy-in from the group. This means using techniques to guide the free choice, to gain engagement, and therefore through manipulation.

The "democracy" version of the original theory favors "listening to the group", by analysing the organization constraints and the personal conflicts within the group. And from this analysis it is expected that a solution will emerge at some point in time.

But while it seem to be a friendlier approach, this also can be seen as another form of manipulation: even if the intent is sincere, the fact that the indivudual agrees to get into the process means he has been "engaged". And from that point, he can be guided as well (and the organization needs it if we do not want the process to take forever), which is again manipulation, but using a psychologist instead of a moderator.

Education

In Education, well intended parents want their child to have choice. But it should not be choice betwen many options, but rather the choice to do or not to do: when somebody makes a choice, they internalize this choice and then rationalize it. This mechanism makes them more apt at making similar choices in the future. So in the case of a child, asking him/her to do the right thing (rather than giving them a real choice or trying to impose an action) and then doing an Attribution, will condition them to make similar decision in the future. During the internalization process, they will associate the behavior to the fact that they were doing the right thing because this is who they are rather than because they were doing what they are told.

Conclusion

Manipulation and propaganda are everywhere, and people usually feel unconfortable with the concept of manipulation. But Marketing propaganda is forcing commercials into a consumer brain without regard for his/her own interest while well intended manipulation can be seen as just another act of selling. Architecting behaviors should not be consider as bad as manipulating people by lying on the virtues of a product or trying to brain wash them through force fed commercials. In fine, and despite the unpopularity of the word "manipulation", using technologies of comportment is probably a more ethical choice, as long as the preliminary steps to engage the person are not based on lies or abuse.

Regardless of what one would like to think, it is clear that we are subject in our everyday life to manipulation. So people making decisions should always keep in mind of the following:

• be aware of the mechanism behind various behaviors
• do not hesitate to re-consider a decision
• learn to consider each decision individually (and not take into account previous decision)
• do not overestimate your freedom of choice

Freedom does not prevent us from doing things that are costly to us personnally and that are the result of somebody else expectation. From a political point of view, it means that one should not confuse living in a liberal society and living in a true democracy.

When the Italian government created regional governments in 1970, a multi-decade study of levels of citizen satisfaction with these new institutions revealed that regions with norms of trust and reciprocity derived from centuries of horizontal voluntary association were both economically and politically more successful than regions that lacked dense networks of civic association and relied on patron-client relationships rather than horizontal citizen associations: "Some regions of Italy, we discover, are blessed with vibrant networks and norms of civic engagement, while others are cursed with vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and isolation, and a culture of distrust. These differences in civic life turn out to play a key role in explaining institutional success."

Machiavelli, writing in 16th century Florence, concluded that the success of free institutions depends on the "civic virtue" of citizens. This republican school of civic humanists was countered successfully by the liberal emphasis of Hobbes and Locke on individualism and individual rights. The U.S. constitution was designed to make democracy work with a factionalized, unvirtuous citizenry. More recently, American political philosophy has rediscovered civic humanism, harking back to John Winthrop's "city set upon a hill" sermon.

Civic communities are bound by horizontal relationships of reciprocity among citizens, not vertical relations of authority and dependency. "Fabrics of trust enable the civic community more easily to surmount what economists call 'opportunism,' in which shared interests are unrealized because each individual, acting in wary isolation, has an incentive to defect from collective action." Participation in civic organizations trains people in cooperation skills and strengthens a sense of shared responsibility. Citizens who belong to many different groups tend to moderate their attitudes as a result of their exposure to group interactions. These groups don't have to be political: choral societies and soccer clubs knit people together socially and culturally, but the bonds of trust and social networks serve as effective vectors for economic and political activity.

In regions that lack networks of civic engagement and widespread norms of trust and reciprocity, citizens have to resort to hierarchy and force to resolve conflict, but even hierarchical law enforcement organizations prove less effective with a mistrustful citizenry. "Light-touch" government in more civic regions works better because it is aided by willing cooperation and self-enforcement among citizens.

The Northern Italian cities – Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and later Florence – took off in the 11th and 12th centrues in part because the contract and extension of credit were new legal strategies for creating partnerships and raising capital: "In the new practices and organization of business activity, risks were minimized, whereas opportunities for cooperation and profit were enhanced."

As Europe emerged from feudalism, the bonds of personal dependence (lord-vassal) grew weaker in the northern regions, but in the south of Italy they became stronger. Northern populations learned to be citizens, southern populations remained subjects. "In the cities, a horizontal arrangement emerged, characterized by cooperation among equals." The guild, confraternity, university, and the commune – a guild of guilds – reflected the new ideals in new institutions.

Mutual aid societies flourished in pre-unification Italy (circa 1850),-- pragmatic institutions in which cooperation conveyed benefits upon contributing individuals in a changing society. Italian cooperatives grew out of the mutual aid societies.

"Networks facilitate flows of information about technological developments, about the creditworthiness of would-be entrepreneurs…. Innovation depends on 'continual informal interaction in cafes and bars and on the street.'"

Social networks allow trust to spread transitively. Trust increases through use and becomes depleted if not used. Social capital, unlike conventional capital, is a public good, not the property of any of the individuals who benefit from it, and must often be produced as a by-product of other social activities.

"Norms are inculcated by modeling and socialization (including civic education) and by sanctions." Norms that support social trust evolve because they lower transaction costs and facilitate cooperation, conferring benefits upon cooperators. Reciprocity is the most important norm, and can be balanced (or specific – the quid-pro-quo) or generalized (diffuse). Communities in which the norm of diffuse reciprocity is high can more efficiently restrain free-riding and more easily resolve collective action problems. Networks of civic engagement increase the potential cost to defectors who risk benefits from future transaction. The same networks foster norms of reciprocity that are reinforced by the networks of relationships in which reputation is both valued and discussed. The same social networks facilitate the flow of reputational information.

"The civic traditions of Northern Italy provide a historical repertoire of forms of collaboration that, having proved their worth in the past, are available to citizens for addressing new problems of collective acdtion. Mutual aid societies were built on the razed foundations of the old guilds, and cooperatives and mass political parties then drew on the experience of the mutual aid societies."

"Stocks of social capital (trust, norms, networks), tend to be self-reinforcing and cumulative. Virtuous circles result in social equilibria with high levels of cooperation, trust, reciprocity, civic engagement, and collective well being. These traits define the civic community. Conversely, the absence of these traits in the uncivic community is also self-reinforcing. Defection, distrust, shirking, exploitation, isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another in a suffocating miasma of vicious circles. This argument suggests that there may be at least two broad equilibria toward which all societies that face problems of collective action (that is, all societies) tend to evolve and which, once attained, tend to be self-reinforcing."

The self-regarding and outcome oriented picture of human behavior presented in traditional economics does not explain why humans care so much about each other and about how social interaction is carried out, not just the end goals. The Ultimatum Game, designed by Werner Guth, is just one illustration of how real people will not always follow the dictates of self-interested rationality. Two subjects are given a sum of money, one is given the power to divide the sum, and the other can either accept or reject (in which case neither get any money). Research from conducting hundreds of trials of the game with thousands of students in Europe, Japan and the USA has shown that the responders frequently reject low offers and proposers frequently propose near equal divisions, even though it is to their monetary disadvantage. While early experiments on undergraduates seemed to suggest that there was a universal sense of fairness, extended research in different cultures (hunter-gatherers, slash-and-burn agriculturists, nomadic pastoralists) has exposed much cultural variation in responses, indicating that local cultural conditions play an important role in how people approach cooperation.

While mean proposals for university students from all over the world was usually between 42 and 48 percent, mean proposals from this cross-cultural study varied from 25 to 57 percent. Rejection rates, the action of the responders, also varied considerable between groups. Individual-level economic and demographic variables did not explain behavior as well as group-level behavior, and game play often could be connected to the people's common patterns of interaction. For example, the Orma recognized that one of the experiment's games was similar to the harambee, a local institution of giving to public goods like roads and schools. They began calling it 'the harambee game' and displayed highly prosocial behavior. In other groups, like the Au and Gnau, frequent rejection of generous offers can be explained by a cultural association with gift-giving: accumulating gifts, even if unsolicited, can imply a lowered status and force the receiver into future obligations or political alliance. The cross-cultural study showed that, in the case of groups at the extremes of behavior, "contrasting behaviors seem to reflect their differing patterns of everyday life, not any underlying logic of hunter-gatherer life ways."

The effect of market integration on cooperation to obtain a monetary reward can be explained easily: individuals from market-oriented societies when put in the context of one of the games are able to seek analogues in their daily activities of using and trading money with strangers. "Those who do not customarily deal with strangers in mutually advantageous ways may be more likely to treat anonymous interactions as hostile or threatening, or as occasions for the opportunistic pursuit of self-interest."

Social psychological research has a long tradition of interest in cooperative behavior and commons dilemmas, beginning with Von Neumann and Morgenstern's 1944 book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. It is convenient to summarize the way psychological studies have attacked the commons problem through nine variables (social motives, gender, payoff structure, uncertainty, power, status, group size, communication, causes, frames) divided into three groups (individual differences, situational factors of the task structure, and the perceived effects of situational factors.) Although behavior elicited in a controlled lab environment is never the same as that observed in field research, lab research is an indispensable tool for teasing out causal relations from the larger number of interacting influences. Attention to the findings of psychological research relevant to the specific instance of a commons dilemma can make the difference in generating positive collective action.

Studies on social motives have found correlations between motives and choice behavior and interpretation of others' behavior. Liebrand et al. (1986) demonstrated that "people with individualist social motives tend to interpret behavior along the might dimension (what works), whereas cooperators tend to view cooperation and competition as varying on the moral dimension (what is good or bad)." Less intuitive findings have come out of research into social rewards for cooperative behavior. Gachter and Fehr (1999) conducted a study around public goods dilemmas with an anonymous group, a group that met beforehand to establish a group identity, a group that had a chance to interact after playing, and a group that met before and after. They found that neither the second nor the third groups had significant improvements in cooperation, but that the fourth option resulted in "significantly higher levels of contribution."

Uncertainty of resource size may play a detrimental role in commons dilemmas for multiple reasons. Any factor which threatens to bring an end to the resource will decrease interest in one's reputation and therefore with the relations that support the resource's maintenance. Uncertainty also helps diffuse personal responsibility, since overusers can try to justify their actions through their ignorance of the current resource size.

Experimenters have also uncovered interesting effects from varying groups size on self-efficacy, an individual's sense of their own competence in taking effective action. Smaller groups were found by Kerr (1989) to have higher averages when testing "collective" efficacy, the sense that the group could carry out effective actions to achieve a desired outcome. In groups with a relatively low provision point, the percentage of cooperating members necessary to support the public good, small group size was associated with a sense of "collective" efficacy.

Voting can significantly improve efficiencies in commons dilemmas by acting as a form of communication. Collective learning of general information "extends to subsequent situations and enables people to coordinate their activities even in rounds when no proposals are made."