Selfish Gain Research Articles

Mendel's First Law: partisan interests and the parliament of genes

Mendel’s First Law requires explanation because of the possibility of ‘meiotic drivers’, genes that distort fair segregation for selfish gain. The suppression of drive, and the restoration of fair segregation, is often attributed to genes at loci unlinked to the drive locus—such genes cannot benefit from drive but do suffer its associated fitness costs. However, selection can also favour suppressors at loci linked to the drive locus, raising the question of whether suppression of drive usually comes from linked or unlinked loci. Here, I study linked and unlinked suppression in a two-locus model with initial stable polymorphism at the drive locus. I find that the invasion rate of suppressors is a decreasing function of the recombination fraction between the drive and suppressor loci. Surprisingly, the relative likelihood of unlinked vs. linked suppression increases with the strength of drive and is insensitive to the fitness costs of the driver allele. I find that the chromosomal position of the driver influences how rapidly it is suppressed, with a driver in the middle of a chromosome suppressed more rapidly than a driver near the tip. When drive is strong, only a small number of chromosomes are required for suppression usually to derive from unlinked loci. In contrast, when drive is weak, and especially when suppressor alleles are associated with fitness costs, suppression will usually come from linked loci unless the genome comprises many chromosomes.

Sex differences in malevolent creativity among Sudanese students

Malevolent creativity refers to employing creative processes for one's own selfish gain, often combined with detrimental effects on others. Sex differences in malevolent or negative creativity are to be expected due to the established finding that males are higher in the Dark Triad traits. However, the only previous study of this issue, using a sample of Indian students, did not find a sex difference. Here, we administered the Malevolent Creativity Behaviour Scale (MCBS) to a sample of 1619 Sudanese students, and found a small sex difference in that females rated themselves higher. Reasons for the finding are explored, including possible problems with the MCBS instrument.

Strategies to Minimize Illegal Digital Lending Practices During The Pandemic Through Islamic Financial Literacy

AbstractPurpose – Financial technology lending or digital lending services arguably has the potentials to play an important role in the economic recovery during the pandemic time. However, a number of irresponsible people have illegally exploited the service for their selfish gain. This has resulted in many people whose rights have been jeopardized by the services. This study seeks to find out which of the three aspects, namely literacy, regulation, and implementation, serves as the root of the problem of the widespread practices of illegal digital lending among Indonesians. In addition, the study investigated whether Islamic financial literacy as a solution aspect can serve as the right strategy to minimize the practices of illegal digital lending.Methodology - The Analytical Hierarchy Proces (AHP) was used to explore the expert judgment of regulators, practitioners, and academicians on illegal digital lending. Moreover, experts’ agreement were calculated using Kendall’s Coeficient of Concordance.Findings - The study found that the most significant aspect of problem was the literacy dimension, reaching a perfect agreement. Moreover, the aspect of regulation was found to be the most significant aspect of solution, reaching a moderate agreement. Based on the respondents’ agreement, the Islamic finance literacy indicator of the literacy dimension was more recommended than the regulation dimension as an effective strategy to minimize the practices of illegal digital lending amids the pandemic. Still,the OJK as the authoritative financial service regulator needs to closely and strictly monitor the pratices of financial technology. Keywords: : Financial technology, Digital lending, Sharia financial literacy

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

Self-centered or other-directed: Neural correlates of performance monitoring are dependent on psychopathic traits and social context

Performing in a social context can result in negative feelings when our actions harm another person, but it can also lead to positive feelings when observing an opponent fail. The extent to which individuals scoring high on psychopathic traits, often characterized as self-centered with reduced concern for others' welfare, are sensitive to own and others' success and failure is yet unknown. However, knowledge about these processes is crucial for comprehending how these traits are involved in understanding ourselves and others during social interactions. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, healthy females scoring low or high on psychopathic traits performed a cannon-shooting game in non-social, cooperative, and competitive contexts. We hypothesized group differences regarding: (1) monitoring of own actions in a non-social context (errors that only negatively affect oneself) versus cooperative context (errors that also harm others), (2) successfully performing with either positive (shared gain) or negative consequences (selfish gain) for the co-player, and (3) observing other's performance leading to shared or selfish gain for oneself. Decreased performance-monitoring-related activations were found in posterior medial frontal cortex for females scoring high on psychopathic traits in the social versus non-social context. When observing others, striatal activations were stronger for selfish gains for high scorers and for shared gains for low scorers. The current outcomes demonstrate that performance-monitoring and reward-related brain activations importantly depend on the interplay between psychopathic traits and social context. We propose that these neural mechanisms may underlie the more self-centered behavior of individuals scoring high on psychopathic traits. As such, the current findings may open up new research avenues, which could advance our understanding of how personality traits impact performance monitoring in a wide variety of social contexts and could possibly lead to the development of interventions aimed at normalizing reduced concern for others.

Changing sex for selfish gain: B chromosomes of Lake Malawi cichlid fish

B chromosomes are extra, non-essential chromosomes present in addition to the normal complement of A chromosomes. Many species of cichlid fish in Lake Malawi carry a haploid, female-restricted B chromosome. Here we show that this B chromosome exhibits drive, with an average transmission rate of 70%. The offspring of B-transmitting females exhibit a strongly female-biased sex ratio. Genotyping of these offspring reveals the B chromosome carries a female sex determiner that is epistatically dominant to an XY system on linkage group 7. We suggest that this sex determiner evolved to enhance the meiotic drive of the B chromosome. This is some of the first evidence that female meiotic drive can lead to the invasion of new sex chromosomes solely to benefit the driver, and not to compensate for skewed sex ratios.

An Improved Discrete Cosine Transformation Block Based Scheme for Copy-move Image Forgery Detection

Copy-moved forgery is a common method to manipulate images. Several attempts of image forgery have been discovered and involves a region been duplicated and copied and pasted on another region of the same image in other to achieve selfish gain. Generally, there are two classification of copy-move forgery detection technique such as the block-based and key point-based. The block-based division is mostly used and divides image into blocks during the stage of image pre-processing before features are extracted, whereas key-point based technique skips the division of image into blocks and directly extracts different local feature from the image. In this paper, we review various block based and key point approach which has been proposed by various researchers. There is a problem of achieving a balance between improving the detection accuracy and having minimal computational complexity. The proposed technique is based on an improved DCT based copy-move image forgery detection (IDB-CFD), which involves using an octagonal block to reduce the number of features for matching, thereby improving detection accuracy while having minimal complexity. The analysis of this work as compared to previous proposed works which is based on a robust detection algorithm for copy-move image forgery (RDA-CF) and involves using circle block to reduce the number of features, results show that previous work represents about 79% of the quantized DCT coefficients on each image block and this proposed work represents about 85% of quantized DCT coefficients, therefore, recovery of about 6% more features using the IDB-CFD technique was observed as the improvement over the previously proposed RDA-CF.

An Improved DCT Block Based Technique for Copy-Move Forgery Detection in Medical Images

Copy-Moved forgery is a common method to manipulate images. Several attempts of image forgery have been discovered and involves a region been duplicated and copied and pasted on another region of the same image in other to achieve selfish gain. Generally, there are two classification of copy-move forgery detection technique such as the block-based and key point-based. The most commonly used technique is the block based which divides image into blocks during the stage of image pre-processing before features are extracted whereas key point based technique skips the division of image into blocks and directly extracts different local feature from the image. In this paper, we review various block based and key point approach which has been proposed by various researchers. The proposed technique is based on DCT and an improvement on DCT technique is achieved in terms of dimensionality reduction using an octagonal block to reduce the number of features for matching, thereby improving detection accuracy. Based on the analysis of this work as compared to previous proposed works, since previous work represents about 79% of the quantized DCT coefficients on each image block and this proposed work represents about 85% of quantized DCT coefficients, therefore, recovery of about 6% more features using the octagonal block was observed as the improvement over the previously proposed dimensionality reduction using the circle block.

Resistance to extreme strategies, rather than prosocial preferences, can explain human cooperation in public goods games

The results of numerous economic games suggest that humans behave more cooperatively than would be expected if they were maximizing selfish interests. It has been argued that this is because individuals gain satisfaction from the success of others, and that such prosocial preferences require a novel evolutionary explanation. However, in previous games, imperfect behavior would automatically lead to an increase in cooperation, making it impossible to decouple any form of mistake or error from prosocial cooperative decisions. Here we empirically test between these alternatives by decoupling imperfect behavior from prosocial preferences in modified versions of the public goods game, in which individuals would maximize their selfish gain by completely (100%) cooperating. We found that, although this led to higher levels of cooperation, it did not lead to full cooperation, and individuals still perceived their group mates as competitors. This is inconsistent with either selfish or prosocial preferences, suggesting that the most parsimonious explanation is imperfect behavior triggered by psychological drives that can prevent both complete defection and complete cooperation. More generally, our results illustrate the caution that must be exercised when interpreting the evolutionary implications of economic experiments, especially the absolute level of cooperation in a particular treatment.

Too tired to tell the truth: Self-control resource depletion and dishonesty

The opportunity to profit from dishonesty evokes a motivational conflict between the temptation to cheat for selfish gain and the desire to act in a socially appropriate manner. Honesty may depend on self-control given that self-control is the capacity that enables people to override antisocial selfish responses in favor of socially desirable responses. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that dishonesty would increase when people’s self-control resources were depleted by an initial act of self-control. Depleted participants misrepresented their performance for monetary gain to a greater extent than did non-depleted participants (Experiment 1). Perhaps more troubling, depleted participants were more likely than non-depleted participants to expose themselves to the temptation to cheat, thereby aggravating the effects of depletion on cheating (Experiment 2). Results indicate that dishonesty increases when people’s capacity to exert self-control is impaired, and that people may be particularly vulnerable to this effect because they do not predict it.

The role of employee‐generated externalities in explaining relative earnings for health‐service workers

Asymmetric information between producer and consumer of health care gives rise to a principal‐agent relationship between these two parties. If the consumer of care can credibly assume that producers are motivated by factors other than selfish gain obvious benefits in terms of process utility will accrue and the delivery of care will be facilitated. Examination of earnings equations using a UK data set, where monetary and non‐monetary employer‐provided benefits have been controlled for reveals that in the UK health‐service workers earn less than employees with comparable skills generally. Employee‐generated externalities associated with pursuance of personal goals, it is contended, explain these differences. When such factors are controlled for, returns to health‐service workers are seen to be comparable with those of workers generally. It is concluded that health‐service workers are “different” from workers generally – though not uniquely – in as much as they make reference to arguments in their objective functions to a greater extent than do workers generally. These arguments could, with justification, be termed philanthropic motives. This, we contend, questions the validity of standard neoclassical theory as it relates to this group of workers and demands more thoughtful policy responses in devising incentives in this sector.

A Philosophic Defense of Advertising

Abstract This paper presents a non-traditional defense of advertising against its so-called social criticisms. It is non-traditional because the defense does not rest on the premise that advertising contributes to the welfare of society, but rather on the premise that it is morally right and good to pursue one's own selfish interests. That is, it is right and good for egoistic producers to use persuasive advertising to appeal to the self-interest of consumers for their own (the producers') selfish gain. Further, the author argues that the charges against advertising of manipulative deception, persuasive coercion, and tasteless offensiveness result from a hostility toward capitalism and egoism and that these charges rest on the untenable philosophic doctrines of elitism, intrinsicism and determinism.

Cheating, intention, and punishment from an equity theory perspective

Male college students were given the opportunity to deliver aversive noise to a partner (confederate) contingent on the partner's “mistakes” in a learning task. Subjects were either not informed about a reward or told that they, their partner, or a charity would receive a monetary reward for speedy learning. Half of the subjects observed the confederate cheat, while half did not observe any deceptive behavior. The intensity of punitive behavior seemed to vary in accordance with predictions derived from equity theory. That is, cheating for a charity, a “good cause” resulted in less intense punishment than did cheating for selfish gain. On the other hand, mistakes, uncomplicated by cheating, which deprived a charity were punished more intensely than were mistakes whose only result accrued to the confederate himself.

The cheating and intention of a partner as determinants of evaluative decisions among juvenile offenders.

Male juvenile offenders were asked to evaluate the work of an experimental partner (confederate) who completed a work task four times. The work partner cheated on two trials and did not cheat on two trials while working for a charity (one cheat and one noncheat trial) or for selfish gain (one cheat and one noncheat trial). It was found that subjects rated the work done on cheating trials lower than work done on noncheating trials. In addition, subjects shared less reward money on cheating trials relative to noncheating trials. However, the intentions of the conferate, defined as the reward recipient, failed to affect subjects' judgments. These results were described as supporting previous studies which have indicated that delinquent fail to account of others' intentions when making moral judgments.