IBSS: The Evolution of Culture and Institutions

IBSS：文化和制度的演变

• 批准号: 1416885
• 负责人: Nathan Nunn
• 金额: $ 84.17万
• 依托单位: National Bureau of Economic Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2018-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1416885&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: IBSS; Evolution; Culture; Institutions

This interdisciplinary research project will provide new insights regarding the long-term impacts that formal institutions have on cultural traits. The project will consist of a series of behavioral experiments designed to examine the tendencies of individuals to follow vs. deviate from established rules within the historical context of societal institutional structure. The project will help address a fundamental question about individual human behavior and the evolution of societies by providing evidence about the impact of formal laws and institutions on the values and beliefs of individuals. Project findings will enhance knowledge of how internal norms respond to external incentives that are shaped by laws and institutions. Whether formal laws and institutions crowd out or reinforce the internal norms of individuals will have significant importance for ascertaining how human beings respond to policies, laws, and institutions. The project therefore will generate insights relevant to policy makers and others seeking to enhance collective societal effectiveness while recognizing the highly variable nature of individual action.The investigators will conduct a set of behavioral experiments involving different sets of individuals, some of whom reside in a region that historically was part of a political entity that included executive councils, a bureaucracy, an elaborate court system that featured trial by jury, a police force, a military, a system of taxation, and extensive public goods provision. Comparable tests will be conducted on individuals from nearby areas whose villages lacked these institutional frameworks. The behavioral experiments will measure the proclivity to participants to cheat rather than follow established rules. In the experiments, participants will face a trade-off between following the rules of the game and receiving less money vs. cheating and receiving more money. The games will be created so that cheating by a single individual can neither be discovered nor sanctioned (and this fact will be known by participants), but by analyzing the actions of larger groups of individuals, it will be possible statistically to detect cheating. The experiments will be conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some of the participants in the experiments reside in an area once known as the Kuba Kingdom, which was formed in the early 17th century and persisted to some degree until European contact early in the 20th century. Other participants come from nearby areas that were not subject to state-related institutional structures over the time period when the Kuba Kingdom functioned. Preliminary research identified a tendency for individuals whose ancestors resided in more formally structured institution environment to cheat rather than follow rules, actions consistent with the notion that formal institutions can crowd out internal norms. This project will build on the earlier pilot study by significantly increasing the sample size, addressing issues of recent migration to larger cities by sampling individuals from other villages and cities, adding detailed historical data into the analysis, and expanding the scope of cultural traits being examined. Although focusing on an African case that provides a solid natural experiment-style research design, the project will provide new insights that can be used to examine the relationships between societal structures and the cultural traits and behaviors of individuals across a broad range of settings, including many locales in the United States. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.

这个跨学科研究项目将为正式机构对文化特征的长期影响提供新的见解。 该项目将包括一系列行为实验，旨在检查个人在社会制度结构的历史背景下遵循或偏离既定规则的倾向。 该项目将通过提供有关正式法律和制度对个人价值观和信仰影响的证据，帮助解决有关人类个人行为和社会演变的基本问题。 项目研究结果将增强人们对内部规范如何响应法律和机构制定的外部激励措施的了解。 正式的法律和制度是排挤还是强化个人的内部规范，对于确定人类如何应对政策、法律和制度具有重要意义。 因此，该项目将为政策制定者和其他寻求提高集体社会有效性的人提供相关见解，同时认识到个人行为的高度可变性。研究人员将进行一系列涉及不同群体的行为实验，其中一些人居住在一个地区它在历史上是一个政治实体的一部分，包括执行委员会、官僚机构、以陪审团审判为特色的复杂法院系统、警察部队、军队、税收制度和广泛的公共产品供应。 将对来自附近地区缺乏这些制度框架的村庄的个人进行类似的测试。 行为实验将测量参与者作弊而不是遵守既定​​规则的倾向。 在实验中，参与者将面临在遵循游戏规则并获得更少金钱与作弊并获得更多金钱之间的权衡。游戏的设计将使得单个人的作弊行为既不会被发现也不会受到制裁（参与者将知道这一事实），但通过分析更大群体的行为，可以从统计上发现作弊行为。 实验将在刚果民主共和国进行，实验的一些参与者居住在曾经被称为库巴王国的地区，该王国成立于 17 世纪初，并在一定程度上一直存在，直到 20 世纪早期欧洲接触为止。 20世纪。 其他参与者来自库巴王国运作期间不受国家相关体制结构约束的附近地区。 初步研究发现，祖先居住在结构更为正式的制度环境中的个人倾向于作弊而不是遵守规则，这些行为与正式制度可以排挤内部规范的观念是一致的。 该项目将在早期试点研究的基础上，大幅增加样本量，通过对其他村庄和城市的个体进行抽样来解决近期向大城市迁移的问题，在分析中添加详细的历史数据，并扩大所研究的文化特征的范围。 尽管该项目的重点是提供可靠的自然实验式研究设计的非洲案例，但该项目将提供新的见解，可用于检查社会结构与各种环境中个人的文化特征和行为之间的关系，包括美国的许多地方。 该项目得到 NSF 跨学科行为和社会科学研究 (IBSS) 竞赛的支持。