What I Do

Tim Waring, assistant professorSchool of Economics, Sustainability Solutions Initiative, University of Maine

Interests

I am a evolutionary ecologist who studies human cooperation in environmental contexts.  I focus specifically on empirical and theoretical approaches to the relationship between human cooperation regimes and social and environmental sustainability.  I use experimental economics and agent based modeling to in studying these connections.

I study the evolution of culture to better understand how norms, traditions, and societies evolve, and how they are influenced by ecological forces in order to learn how to better build durable, sustainable and just institutions.  Ultimately, cultural forces create the identities and patterns of meaning which control trust and cooperation between people and groups, culture lies at the heart of hard economic and ecological outcomes.  I hypothesize, contra traditional competitive economic theory, that cooperation is a central feature of sustainable resource management.

Teaching

ECO 381 – Sustainable Development Principles and Policy

ECO 581 – Agent Based Modeling

ECO 5XX – Evolutionary Game Theory and Social Behavior

Graduate Students

Sandra Goff

Julia McGuire

Abigail Sullivan

PhD Research

If cooperation is a key component of sustainable resource management, we need to understand the forces that guide human cooperation.  My dissertation research in Human Ecology at U.C. Davis, examines the influence of ethnic/caste diversity and hierarchy on a traditional cooperative irrigation system in southern India.  A sizable literature demonstrates that ethnic diversity negatively affects public goods provision in realms such as public schooling, policing, and environmental management.  This literature might overlook the importance of inter-ethnic relationships in determining cooperative regimes within societies.  I use a range of methods, from  traditional ethnography, to surveys, to quantitative experimental games to measure cooperative behavior, and the economic, institutional and cultural factors that control it.

Presentation Online

• A presentation I gave to the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture on a part of my dissertation research is available online.
• Video and Slides [pdf]

Other Research

Social Learning

• As part of a larger cross-cultural study, I have examined the social norms of fairness and sharing in rural Tamil day laborers.  Specifically, I examined three distinct but tightly related social preferences: self-interest, equality, and social efficiency.  The results suggest that people have preferences for how to distribute wealth that go beyond classical economic utility maximization, and include concern for how others are treated.  My current  research builds on these findings to measure cooperation between social groups as a component of successful sustainable environmental management.  This work contributes to the growing empirical evidence on the nature of human social preferences.

Artistic Evolution

• I also study the form, meaning and evolution of a Tamil art form called the Kolam.  The Kolam, specifically the ner pulli, nelevu kolam, is a beautiful pattern of curving lines drawn around a matrix of dots.  The traditional Tamil art form is most commonly created by women in the early morning on the threshold of the house and drawn with kola pudi or chalk powder.  These Kolam patterns are extremely variable, and women display considerable skill in reviewing, recapitulating, and innovating new Kolam patterns.  I am currently studying the variation and diversity of Kolam designs drawn by women in the Kodaikanal area to try to gain some understanding about the routes through which these designs flow from woman to woman.  This research merges traditional ethnography with quantitative methods (such as social network analyses) in hopes of building more deeply predictive anthropological theory.

Family Site

Previous Research

• Water use and water quality in Bardiya National Park – Nepal
• Spatially explicit ecological simulation of the Everglades – SFWMD
• Social learning and environmental fluctuation – UC Davis
• Social norms of sharing in day laborer population – Kodaikanal, India

Contact

For human consumption only:

timothy zap waring zing maine zap edu

where zap = ‘.’ and zing= ‘@’