Doctoral Dissertation Research: Expanded Group Affiliation, Trust and Prosociality

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.