The term Computer Simulation subsumes different simulation paradigms, languages and implementation technologies as well as many different application areas each with its own scientific communities. So, there is clearly a lot of conceptual, methodological, technological and application diversity in the area of Computer Simulation. From its start in 1967, the Winter Simulation Conference managed to get four scientific communities involved: computer scientists, electrical engineers, industrial engineers and mathematicians (operations researchers). Only later, in 2011 and 2012, an attempt was made to get environmental and social scientists involved who have been adopting the idea of "individual-based" or "agent-based" simulation. Today, two American, a European and an Asian social simulation conference have been established. How much unity exists between the scientific areas and communities represented by the Winter Simulation Conference? How much unity exists between the scientific areas and communities represented by the newer social science simulation conferences? And how much unity exists between Discrete Event Simulation and the newer forms of social science simulation? These and other questions about the unity and diversity of Computer Simulation have been discussed via email from April 17 to May 17, 2018, by five leading experts: Alexis Drogoul, Paul Fishwick, Nigel Gilbert, Dennis Pegden and Levent Yilmaz, moderated by Gerd Wagner.
Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
(2023)
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.