IBSS: The Evolution of Culture and Institutions

IBSS：文化和制度的演变

• 批准号: 1416885
• 负责人: Nathan Nunn
• 金额: $ 84.17万
• 依托单位: National Bureau of Economic Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2018-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1416885&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: IBSS; Evolution; Culture; Institutions

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.

这一跨学科研究项目将为正规机构对文化特征产生的长期影响提供新的见解。该项目将由一系列行为实验组成，旨在考察在社会体制结构的历史背景下，个人遵循与背离既定规则的倾向。该项目将通过提供关于正式法律和制度对个人价值观和信仰的影响的证据，帮助解决关于个人人类行为和社会演变的根本问题。项目调查结果将加强对内部规范如何应对由法律和机构形成的外部激励的了解。正式的法律和制度是否排挤或强化个人的内部规范，对于确定人类如何应对政策、法律和制度具有重要意义。因此，该项目将产生与政策制定者和其他寻求提高集体社会有效性的人相关的见解，同时认识到个人行动的高度可变性质。调查人员将对不同群体的个人进行一系列行为实验，其中一些人居住在一个历史上属于一个政治实体的地区，该政治实体包括行政委员会、官僚机构、以陪审团审判为特色的复杂法院系统、警察部队、军队、税收制度和广泛的公共产品供应。将对缺乏这些制度框架的附近地区的个人进行类似的测试。这些行为实验将衡量参与者作弊的倾向，而不是遵循既定的规则。在实验中，参与者将面临在遵守游戏规则和获得更少金钱与作弊和获得更多金钱之间的权衡。游戏的创建将使单个人的作弊既不能被发现也不能被制裁(这一事实将被参与者知道)，但通过分析更大的个人群体的行为，从统计学上检测作弊是可能的。实验将在刚果民主共和国进行，实验中的一些参与者居住在一个曾被称为库巴王国的地区，库巴王国成立于17世纪初，在一定程度上一直持续到20世纪初欧洲人的接触。其他参与者来自附近地区，这些地区在库巴王国运作期间不受与国家有关的体制结构的制约。初步研究发现，其祖先居住在更正式的制度环境中的个人有作弊的倾向，而不是遵循规则，这一行为与正式制度可以排挤内部规范的概念一致。该项目将在早期试点研究的基础上大幅增加样本量，通过对其他村庄和城市的个人进行抽样来解决最近向大城市迁移的问题，在分析中加入详细的历史数据，并扩大被检查的文化特征的范围。虽然该项目的重点是一个非洲案例，提供了坚实的自然实验式研究设计，但它将提供新的见解，可用于研究广泛环境下的社会结构与个人的文化特征和行为之间的关系，包括美国的许多地区。该项目通过NSF跨学科行为和社会科学研究(IBSS)竞赛得到支持。