The second day of the World Congress of the International Society for Human Ethology (ISHE) 2018 was focused on several presentations throughout the day. During the afternoon, it was the turn of the Director of the Research Center for Social Complexity (CICS, as its Spanish acronym), Carlos Rodríguez-Sickert, with his paper “Reciprocal exchange and friendship: lessons from the implementation of an onymous dyadic experiment in chilean public schools”.

The researcher made reference to the Fondef project “Digital Games Platform for measuring the willingness to cooperate for school coexistence”, whose results were presented in a seminar last week at the Universidad del Desarrollo.

Thus, Rodríguez-Sickert explained that one of the main challenges which they were exposed to after the definition of the subject of study, was the “creation of a participatory and creative interface that would attract children”. It was determined that using tablets would serve this purpose, adding that the vulnerability of the children of the participating schools was 85.4 percent.

The Director of the CICS continued his presentation by pointing out that the fundamental thing was to “get to know the nature of cooperation” within the classroom. So, three possible scenarios were determined after the completion of two interactive games: a) student A and student B keep their cards; b) student A and student B send all their tokens; and c) student A sends all his/her tokens and student B, none. The best scenario is to give and to receive all the tokens, according to Rodríguez-Sickert.

Finally, the CICS researcher showed a heatmap related to the reciprocity and derived from the results that the virtual platform used in the investigation showed, and he indicated that it was possible to visualize a “network of conflict” or “potential conflict” in it.

Director of CICS, Carlos Rodríguez-Sickert. His oral presentation “Reciprocal exchange and friendship: lessons from the implementation of an onymous dyadic experiment in chilean public schools”. Plaza San Francisco Hotel.

Carlos Rodríguez-Sickert and DCCS students.

Theory Games and Cooperation were the topics addressed by the Director of CICS in the 2° session of ISHE 2018

Carlos Rodríguez-Sickert, Director of CICS.