Featured Student Voices is a new monthly feature at harvardhumanist.org. In March we featured the Harvard Divinity School’s Mary Ellen Giess. This month we proudly highlight the work of Harvard Humanist graduate student David Rand of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.
Winners Don’t Punish
“Put simply, winners don’t punish,” says co-author David G. Rand of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and Department of Systems Biology. “Punishment can lead to a downward spiral of retaliation, with destructive outcomes for everybody involved. The people with the highest total payoffs do not use costly punishment.”
David G. Rand is a Ph.D. student in Harvard’s Department of Systems Biology. He is a member of the Program of Evolutionary Dynamics, where he studies human cooperation and altruism. His research combines mathematical and computational methods with behavior experiments to give a robust understand of the evolution of cooperation. It’s a happy fact of life that in most situations, it pays to be nice!
David is an active member of the Harvard Humanist Graduate Community, as well as the Secular Student’s Alliance Speakers Bureau. Outside of academics, David also likes to write folk-punk and electro songs. Most winter and summer breaks you can find him riding in a van, playing shows up and
down the East coast under the name Robot Goes Here. You can hear audio and see a music video at www.robotgoeshere.com. Impressive acheivements in science and rock music– does anyone sense a theme for this month?
Read more about David’s article, “Winners Don’t Punish,” in the Harvard Gazette. And listen to David discuss the piece on NPR’s “All Things Considered“.