Doctoral Dissertation Research: Expanded Group Affiliation, Trust and Prosociality

加州大学圣巴巴拉分校博士生Anne Pisor将在Michael Gurven博士的指导下进行研究，研究随着个人战略性地转移他们的小组成员身份，合作意图和对小组外成员的信任如何变化。跨群体的信任和合作对于跨人口协作至关重要，而跨人口协作是道路和大坝等国际资助的发展项目取得成功所必需的，但以前的研究表明，在文化、种族和语言多样化的社会背景下，很难实现这种情绪。此外，一些调查人员发现，随着融入国家社会和经济，对集团外成员的信任和合作增加，而另一些调查人员发现信任和合作下降。在社会科学研究的推动下，这个项目将调查群体成员的战略转变是否是将合作和信任与社会经济一体化联系起来的工作中缺失的变量。研究人员预测，改变这些情绪的不是对外部群体的接触，而是个人对这些群体及其成员的估值。该项目将使用民族志知情访谈、经济实验和参与者观察来探索这一预测，来自玻利维亚低地的三个园艺家群体。之所以选择这些人口，是因为他们在不同家庭和不同社区的社会经济融合程度不同。玻利维亚是进行这项研究的理想地点，因为它既有种族语言的多样性，又正在经历快速的社会经济变化。但是，所使用的方法是这样设计的，即可以针对其他上下文修改它们。由于这一项目的系统性和综合性，其成果将引起社会科学和学术界以外的广泛关注。衡量团体隶属的范围及其与合作和信任的关系可能会提高国际组织将发展项目与可能发生集体行动的社区相匹配的能力。

UC Santa Barbara doctoral candidate Anne Pisor, supervised by Dr. Michael Gurven, will undertake research on how cooperative intent and trust toward out-group members change as individuals strategically shift their group memberships. Trust and cooperation across groups are critical to cross-population collaboration, required for the success of internationally funded development projects such as roads and dams, yet previous research has demonstrated that such sentiment is difficult to achieve in culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse social contexts. Further, some investigators have found that trust of and cooperation towards out-group members increases with integration to national society and economies, while others have found that it declines. Motivated by research from across the social sciences, this project will investigate whether strategic shifts in group membership are the missing variable in work connecting cooperation and trust to socioeconomic integration. The researchers predict that it is not exposure to out-groups, but an individual's valuation of these groups and their members, that changes these sentiments.This project will employ ethnographically-informed interviews, economic experiments, and participant observation to explore this prediction with three populations of horticulturalists from the Bolivian lowlands. These populations were selected because they differ both across households and across communities in their degree of socioeconomic integration. Bolivia is an ideal place to conduct this research as it is both ethno-linguistically diverse and undergoing rapid socioeconomic change. However, the methods used are designed such that they can be modified for other contexts. Because of the systematic approach of this project and its integrative nature, results will be of broad interest both across the social sciences and outside of academia. Measuring the scope of group affiliation and its relationship to cooperation and trust may improve the ability of international organizations to match development projects to communities where collective action is likely to take place.