Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Cooperation, Altruism, and Human Warfare

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University of California in Los Angeles graduate student, Sarah Mathew, with the guidance of Dr. Robert T. Boyd, will undertake research on the important question: Why do humans cooperate in war when this means putting their individual lives at risk for the benefit of their social group? This is called the "collective action problem" by social scientists. Four explanations for such cooperation are prominent in the literature: people cooperate to avoid punishment, people fight to enhance their reputations as cooperators, people fight to signal personal qualities to potential mates, and people fight in order to benefit relatives. The researcher will test these competing hypotheses with data to be gathered in 13 months of field work among the Turkana, a nomadic pastoralist people of northwest Kenya. The Turkana practice large-scale cattle raiding, which makes them appropriate for this research. Data will be collected in the Turkana region by recruiting herders who visit the town of Lokichoggio from nomadic settlements in the north Turkana territory. The researcher will employ a mix of methods including, 1) in-depth semi-structured interviews with warriors for behavioral data relating to the predictions, and for an ethnographic understanding of raiding; 2) vignette studies to explore how people respond to specific scenarios where individuals fail to contribute in a raid; and 3) behavioral economic experiments for insight into how raiding affects preferences for cooperation within one's own group. The results of this study will elucidate how the collective action problem is dealt with in pre-state warfare, and will thereby contribute towards understanding the basis of large-scale cooperation in humans, more generally. The research also will shed new light on the causes of human warfare.