IBSS: The Evolution of Culture and Institutions

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This interdisciplinary research project will provide new insights regarding the long-term impacts that formal institutions have on cultural traits. The project will consist of a series of behavioral experiments designed to examine the tendencies of individuals to follow vs. deviate from established rules within the historical context of societal institutional structure. The project will help address a fundamental question about individual human behavior and the evolution of societies by providing evidence about the impact of formal laws and institutions on the values and beliefs of individuals. Project findings will enhance knowledge of how internal norms respond to external incentives that are shaped by laws and institutions. Whether formal laws and institutions crowd out or reinforce the internal norms of individuals will have significant importance for ascertaining how human beings respond to policies, laws, and institutions. The project therefore will generate insights relevant to policy makers and others seeking to enhance collective societal effectiveness while recognizing the highly variable nature of individual action.The investigators will conduct a set of behavioral experiments involving different sets of individuals, some of whom reside in a region that historically was part of a political entity that included executive councils, a bureaucracy, an elaborate court system that featured trial by jury, a police force, a military, a system of taxation, and extensive public goods provision. Comparable tests will be conducted on individuals from nearby areas whose villages lacked these institutional frameworks. The behavioral experiments will measure the proclivity to participants to cheat rather than follow established rules. In the experiments, participants will face a trade-off between following the rules of the game and receiving less money vs. cheating and receiving more money. The games will be created so that cheating by a single individual can neither be discovered nor sanctioned (and this fact will be known by participants), but by analyzing the actions of larger groups of individuals, it will be possible statistically to detect cheating. The experiments will be conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some of the participants in the experiments reside in an area once known as the Kuba Kingdom, which was formed in the early 17th century and persisted to some degree until European contact early in the 20th century. Other participants come from nearby areas that were not subject to state-related institutional structures over the time period when the Kuba Kingdom functioned. Preliminary research identified a tendency for individuals whose ancestors resided in more formally structured institution environment to cheat rather than follow rules, actions consistent with the notion that formal institutions can crowd out internal norms. This project will build on the earlier pilot study by significantly increasing the sample size, addressing issues of recent migration to larger cities by sampling individuals from other villages and cities, adding detailed historical data into the analysis, and expanding the scope of cultural traits being examined. Although focusing on an African case that provides a solid natural experiment-style research design, the project will provide new insights that can be used to examine the relationships between societal structures and the cultural traits and behaviors of individuals across a broad range of settings, including many locales in the United States. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.