Though game theory is a highly technical subject with no special attention to sports, an example of a social procedure designed to help make a sporting system more fair is the Major League Baseball Draft whereby the teams which performed the worst in the last season get the first choice of players for the new season. There is a project called A Formal Analysis of Social Procedures underway at the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS) under the direction of E. Pacuit.TiLPS Project: A Formal Analysis of Social Procedures, Dr. E. Pacuit, project leader. This interdisciplinary project looks at social procedures undertaken by rational and not-so-rational people, and the complex phenomena arising when the people involved in such procedures interact.
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The term social procedure is sometimes applied to any of the procedures carried out by people in various areas of society, such as legislative assemblies, judicial systems, and resource arbiters, such as banks or other lending organizations. It has been described as social software and indeed does resemble software. Social procedures include as a subset procedures which are at the foundation of our society, such as procedural law. Similarly many social procedures are explicitly designed to ensure fair treatment to individuals or corporations, as official records of parliamentary debates show.
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Multiple social procedures can serve to achieve the same end. Justice, as an example, in the U.S. achieved through the use of 2 adversarial lawyers, a neutral judge, and a jury of peers. In Canada, the judge is less neutral. This subtle difference in programming has an effect on the justice outcome.
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Current research in the area of social software include the analysis of social procedures and examination of them for fairness, appropriateness, correctness and efficiency. For example, an election procedure could be a simple majority vote, Borda count, a Single Transferable vote (STV), or Approval voting. All of these procedures can be examined for various properties like monotonicity. Monotonicity has the property that voting for a candidate should not harm that candidate.
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In philosophy and the social sciences, social software is an interdisciplinary research program that borrows mathematical tools and techniques from game theory and computer science in order to analyze and design social procedures. The goals of research in this field are modeling social situations, developing theories of correctness, and designing social procedures.Pacuit (2005), p.10 Work under the term social software has been going on since about 1996, and conferences in Copenhagen, London, Utrecht and New York, have been partly or wholly devoted to it.
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What is new in social software compared to older fields is the use of tools from computer science like program logic, analysis of algorithms and epistemic logic. Like programs, social procedures dovetail into each other. For instance an airport provides runways for planes to land, but it also provides security checks, and it must provide for ways in which buses and taxis can take arriving passengers to their local destinations. The entire mechanism can be analyzed in the way in which a complex computer program can be analyzed.
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Jim has a crush on Judy and Judy's boyfriend Buzz is a popular jock. After a police raid on a rave, Jim makes friends with Neechee (a fey kid who has nicknamed himself after Nietzsche) while Judy befriends punkish riot grrrl Kimberly. As Jim and Judy pursue each other through the unpleasant social procedures of high school, abandoning their rebellious nature in favor of comfortable conformity, Neechee and Kimberly fall unhappily in love with them—Neechee with Jim, Kimberly with Judy. Ultimately, their experience alienates them even further from the mainstream, and from the objects of their affection.
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Social technology contributes to a networked society. Social technology is a way of using human, intellectual and digital resources in order to influence social processes. For example, one might use social technology to ease social procedures via social software and social hardware, which might include the use of computers and information technology for governmental procedures or business practices. It has historically referred to two meanings: as a term related to social engineering, a meaning that began in the 19th century, and as a description of social software, a meaning that began in the early 21st century.
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