Project description
Early origins of social cohesion
Social cohesion in diverse societies is threatened by in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination. However, the causes and consequences of in-group and out-group biases are not yet understood. The EU-funded KIDSNGROUPS project will focus on the early life cycle, childhood to be precise, performing research on the causal origins of in-group and out-group inclinations. The project will study the role of vertical socialisation (e.g. the family’s role) and horizontal socialisation (e.g. imitation and learning). KIDSNGROUPS will propose an innovative combination of experimental methods, administrative records, and advanced econometric techniques to deliver a comprehensive picture of the origins and the impact of social cohesion and elucidate its economic relevance, generating essential knowledge for the EU’s public policy.
Objective
In-group favouritism and out-group discrimination are ubiquitous phenomena, threatening social cohesion in diverse societies. Notwithstanding growing urgency, we lack a systematic understanding of the causes and consequences of in-group out-group biases, or to put it more broadly, of social cohesion.
KIDSNGROUPS will open frontiers to advance our knowledge on social cohesion by focusing on the early life cycle, and thus the most formative years in people’s life. Its main objective is to break ground regarding the causal origins of in-group out-group preferences. For this purpose, it will study the role of the family (vertical socialization) and other socialization processes like imitation and learning (horizontal socialization) in shaping children’s in-group out-group preferences. Moreover, it will shed novel light on the economic relevance of social cohesion. To the extent that in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination prevent children from helping each other, they may hamper children’s welfare, and thus the future of diverse societies.
Striving to provide a comprehensive picture of the origins and the impact of social cohesion, KIDSNGROUPS will draw upon methods from the frontier of various research fields. In particular, it will propose an innovative combination of i) experimental methods to study in- and out-group phenomena, ii) administrative records to get access to large-scale, non-selected samples and hands on high quality measures of children’s human capital, and iii) state-of-the-art econometric techniques to infer causality. In so doing, KIDSNGROUPS will open up new avenues for any science interested in people’s behaviour.
In summary, KIDSNGROUPS will not only advance in a creative and significant manner an active research area, it will also impact public policy by generating essential insights on one of the most urgent topics on Europe’s political agenda.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
78464 Konstanz
Germany