IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2014 - 28

control like the army, clergy, and foreign office. Nowadays the U.K. no longer has an empire but it still has the
old education system, and produces year after year people who are zealously devoted to the abstract notion of
an institution but have zero empathy with its members.
This lack of empathy is manifested by a preference
for behavioral economic solutions (popularly characterized by "nudge" [3]). For example, it is proposed to
address public health problems like obesity by behavioral economics, rather than tackling the real source
of the problem through regulation of the fast food and
fizzy drink industries, supply chains that offer healthy
food at competitive prices to junk food, and providing sufficient information for well-informed decisionmaking as citizens [4]. It is almost as though the ruling
elite want the rest to eat poorly (it is, after all, extremely
lucrative), but is irritated by the need to provide medical treatment when people subsequently develop health
problems. It is redolent of the old Brecht quotation: "die
Wahl eines anderen Volkes zu empfehlen" - they would
like to recommend the election of another people. Furthermore, it is not just in the U.K. to which this analysis
applies: it is a recurring theme in many countries.
The corollary of processes, such as creeping managerialism, commodification of social concepts, and nudgestyle top-down behavioral conditioning, is to undermine
trust, which in turn diminishes, to the point of obsolescence, all the various forms of social capital identified by
Ostrom and Ahn [1]. For example, managerialism undermines the trustworthiness of a professional by implicitly
suggesting that these individuals cannot be trusted to do
their job well, or even at all, unless they are monitored,
measured, and assessed (although science has been
doing a pretty good job of self-assessment ever since the
Enlightenment: the processes even have names - the scientific method, peer review, etc.). The commodification
of social relationships creates networks emphasizing the
number and not the nature of the links, instead of balanced networks with strong and weak ties [5]. Behavioral economics assumes that "the people" are unable to
innovate solutions to collective action problems by themselves, i.e., by forming institutions of their own devising
tailored to local contexts.
Moreover, the obsolescence of social capital
diminishes the prospects for successful collective
action. Without strategies and prospects for successful collective action, communities cannot properly
address local or global issues, like climate change,
youth unemployment, and sustainability.
In this article, we argue that emerging ICT should
be used to fundamentally rethink - reinvent or rediscover - forms of social capital, as a precursor to restoring (and going beyond) trust and empowering people
for collective action. With SmartGrids as a particular
exemplar, we first review some illustrative systems
that have represented (more or less explicitly), and
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reasoned with, social capital in computational form.
We then propose a program of research intended to
reinvent social capital in the context of online social
networks, as the foundation for ICT-enabled sociotechnical systems for collective action.

Social Capital in Computational Form
Four examples of systems that represent and reason
with social capital in computational form are forgiveness in e-commerce, legitimate claims for "fair"
resource allocation in open networks, demand-side
self-organization in SmartGrids, and affective conditioning for self-regulation in open plan offices.
Forgiveness in e-Commerce
Trust is a concept that has been extensively studied with
numerous formal representations as a basis for decisionmaking in open environments. Motivated by the basic
definition of "trust" as the willingness to expose oneself to risk [6], the reasoning underlying such decisions
has (at least) three dimensions: an economic dimension
(reasoning based on utilities), a socio-cognitive dimension (reasoning based on social/cognitive indicators like
recommendations, reputation and direct experience), and
a normative dimension [7]. In the normative dimension,
reasoning is informed by a belief component, in the form
of a belief that there is a rule of some sort (norm, convention, law, etc.), and an expectation component, in the
form of an expectation that someone else's behavior will
conform to, or comply with, that rule.
Most of the formal (symbolic or numeric) representations of trust concentrate on narrowing the margin of error in the trust decision. However, eliminating
the error altogether would not be a "trust" decision, so
since there is a possibility of error, some attention has
to paid to addressing the question implicitly posed by
the normative dimension: what do you do when you
get the trust decision wrong, in particular because of
behavior that was "contrary to expectation," i.e., that
did not conform to the rule? A common approach is to
tarnish the reputation of the trustee, but reputation is
part of the trust decision (in the socio-cognitive dimension) and not a complement to the trust decision. In
other words, it is a punishment mechanism that might
have an influence on future trust decisions, but it is not
a reparation mechanism that helps to resolve the situation with the current trust decision.
In human society, there is a psychological mechanism used in such situations - forgiveness. This can
be defined as the complement of trust, being the willingness to restore a system to a homeostatic equilibrium. Furthermore, it can reinforce trust: being able
to repair a trust decision that goes wrong gives greater
confidence for subsequent interactions. From the psychological literature, four positive motivations were
identified [8], comprising twelve constituent signals
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