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Ecological Origins of Cross-Societal Variation in Cooperation

Project description

An innovative approach to cross-societal variation in cooperation

Cooperation plays a key role in societies, allowing them to resolve problems such as public good provision and resource conservation. However, many societies lack the necessary cooperation to resolve these issues. Understanding the origin of cross-societal variation in cooperation poses a critical challenge. According to some, ecological conditions determine people’s interdependence, and that interdependence may be the mechanism that facilitates the formation of the culture of cooperation. The EU-funded PUBLICGOOD project is focussing on the role ecologies play in shaping different expressions of interdependence and on how this results in cultural and cooperation variation. The project will use a multi-discipline and multi-method approach to establish interdependence as an ordinary mechanism through which various characteristics of ecology form cross-societal diversity in culture and cooperation.

Objective

Societies that contain widespread cooperation can solve problems of public good provision and resource conservation, yet many societies fail to display the cooperation necessary to solve these problems. A puzzle facing the social sciences is understanding the origin of cross-societal variation in cooperation. Strikingly, multiple disciplines propose the same, not yet established, explanation: ecological conditions, such as subsistence, environmental hazards, and relational mobility, determine how people are interdependent (i.e. how actions affect own and others’ outcomes), and interdependence can be the mechanism through which diverse ecologies shape a culture of cooperation. For example, rice versus wheat production plausibly has led to more versus less dependence on others, which then led to different cultures (e.g. values, beliefs, and norms) that affect strategies of when and how people cooperate. I use a multi-discipline, multi-method approach to answer three questions about whether ecologies indeed create different interdependence, and how this leads to variation in culture and cooperation. Do ecologies create different kinds of interdependence? I measure the interdependence and cooperation people experience across different ecologies in 10 contemporary small-scale societies, among rice and wheat farmers in China, and in over 200 societies documented in the ethnographic record. Can interdependence cause differences in culture and cooperation? I use agent-based models and experiments to study how variation in interdependence can cause different norms of cooperation. Does variation in interdependence relate to culture and cooperation? I apply experience sampling to measure interdependence and cooperation in daily life across 35 societies that vary in culture. The ground-breaking innovation of this project is establishing interdependence as a common mechanism through which diverse features of the ecology shape cross-societal differences in culture and cooperation

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.

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Host institution

STICHTING VU
Net EU contribution
€ 2 000 000,00
Address
DE BOELELAAN 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam
Netherlands

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Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 2 000 000,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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