If you were told that you could enter a contest, but that if you lost the prize would go to a total stranger, you might just say “that’s nice, but I’m really busy right now.”<\/p>\n
On the other hand, if losing the prize meant that it would go to one of your professional peers, you might be more motivated. In this case, your status among your peers might be affected by the outcome (this is quite dependent, of course, on the nature of the contest).<\/p>\n
But suppose we move even closer to home. Suppose your rival for the prize was your brother, or your spouse, or one of your own children. In this case you might have a disincentive<\/i> to win. You could very well be happier to see your child win the prize, rather than yourself.<\/p>\n
These scenarios seem to point to an odd non-monotonic relationship between competition and kinship. When people are very distant from us, their effect on our competitive drive is essentially neutral. As they get closer, competition starts to increase, until at some point — when they are extremely close to us — it can suddenly flip and go negative.<\/p>\n
I have a sense that this kind of relation (more or less an (x-σ)\/(x+1)2<\/sup><\/i> shaped curve) might show up a lot in quite a few contexts, from sociology to economics to biochemistry to astrophysics and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you were told that you could enter a contest, but that if you lost the prize would go to a total stranger, you might just say “that’s nice, but I’m really busy right now.” On the other hand, if losing the prize meant that it would go to one of your professional peers, you … Continue reading “Competition and kinship”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8394"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8398,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8394\/revisions\/8398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}