Remark on a Reply

Remark on a Reply

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 11, no. 4 13
<https://www.jasss.org/11/4/13.html>

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Received: 21-Oct-2008 Accepted: 21-Oct-2008 Published: 31-Oct-2008

1.1: In their original PNAS article Macy and Sato (2002) make it clear that their main point concerns social mobility (see, for instance, the abstract and the last section). Their central claim is the non-monotonic effect of mobility: with moderate mobility, they maintain, trust can be established; with too much mobility, trust and trustworthiness are undermined — and therefore their "warning flag to the U.S." (7229). Exactly that effect turned out to be not replicable.
1.2: In their reply, only paragraph 1.38 comments on our non-replicability result: they claim to like our contradicting result even more than their own from their theory's point of view. We are happy that we could do Macy and Sato a theoretical favour. It is a pity, though, that Macy and Sato do not provide any hint why under what we think to be their own assumptions their original non-monotonic effect of mobility could not be replicated.

: MACY M and Sato Y (2002) Trust, cooperation and market formation in the US and Japan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, pp. 7214-7220.
MACY, Michael and Sato, Yoshimichi (2008). 'Reply to Will and Hegselmann'. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 11 (4) 11 https://www.jasss.org/11/4/11.html.