Descripción del proyecto
Un enfoque innovador hacia la variación entre sociedades de la cooperación
La cooperación desempeña un papel fundamental en las sociedades, pues les permite resolver problemas como garantizar el orden público y conservar recursos. No obstante, muchas sociedades carecen de la cooperación necesaria para resolver estas cuestiones. Comprender el origen de la variación entre sociedades de la cooperación supone un gran desafío. Según algunos, las condiciones ecológicas determinan la interdependencia de las personas, y esa interdependencia podría ser el mecanismo que facilita la formación de la cultura de la cooperación. El proyecto PUBLICGOOD, financiado con fondos europeos, se centra en el papel que desempeña la ecología en la conformación de diferentes expresiones de interdependencia y en cómo da como resultado variaciones culturales y de cooperación. El proyecto utilizará un enfoque basado en múltiples métodos y disciplinas para establecer la interdependencia como un mecanismo ordinario a través del cual las diversas características de la ecología forman la diversidad entre sociedades de cultura y cooperación.
Objetivo
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
Ámbito científico
Not validated
Not validated
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitución de acogida
1081 HV Amsterdam
Países Bajos