Doctoral Dissertation Research: The impact of shifts in social network structure on cooperative behavior

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Social scientists have long been interested in how a person's social relationships impact their behavior, but they have typically only analyzed single social networks, like a friendship network. This project proposes, however, that looking at a single social network instead of the entirety of someone's social interactions limits our understanding of cooperative behavior, and may even give us the wrong answer. This project, which trains a graduate student in conducting rigorous, empirically grounded scientific fieldwork, explores social network data from multiple domains. The project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating findings to organizations, officials, and scientists engaged in identifying effective models for international development. Through outreach activities that develop modules focused on the drivers of human change, the project would also integrate the research findings into the teaching of science at the K-12 and university level. Curtis Atkisson, under the supervision of Dr. Monique Borgerhoff Mulder will investigate how an individual's cooperative behavior is impacted by all of their social interactions as well as the community they are in. The project proposes that the amount of overlap between an individual's different social networks will predict their cooperative behavior - both towards people they know and strangers. The project further proposes that the integration of social networks across a community will also account for cooperative behavior. This will help explain the often reported result that an individual's community is a primary determinant of their cooperative behavior. These results have great potential to help us understand changes in cooperative behaviors as societies change, and better foster cooperation in our own communities. The researcher will investigate these ideas in a set of communities that are expected to differ in the overlap of their social networks in an indigenous area of Guyana. Anthropological studies of cooperation and decision-making are typically situated in such small-scale societies, which because of their relatively homogeneity and historic insularity, tend to more effectively control for the variables being queried. U surveys, economic games, and detailed interviews, the scientists will bring the methodological holism of anthropology to bear on the analysis of multiple social networks, their overlap, and cooperation. One of the compelling aspects of this project is that it brings together multiple distinct areas of anthropology, serving as an example for the deep integration of the rigor of scientific inquiry and social theory.