Doctoral Dissertation Research: DRMS: Social Signaling and Health Risk Mitigation

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

Communities can mitigate the impact of environmental disasters by sharing resources. This becomes critical in low-income settings where formal insurance and state capacity are limited. How to encourage and sustain resource sharing within communities after they have faced a natural disaster becomes an important question for mitigating the disaster’s impact. Using a community-level approach to the problem, this study evaluates whether socially rewarding the households -- who have shared their resources with other community members -- can motivate other households to share resources as well. This approach highlights the idea of engineering social relationships to achieve a cost-effective solution to the critical environmental problem. The researchers study this question in the context of naturally occurring arsenic contamination in groundwater. Arsenic's adverse impact on adults' and children's health is well established. Yet a significant population across the world, including in the USA, is drinking from wells with high arsenic. About a third of more than 10 million private wells have high arsenic in the country. The top-down solution – usually deeper public wells or piped-water supply – is far from universally available. The level of contamination often varies from household to household. This idiosyncratic feature suggests that even in the most severely contaminated regions, there are a decent number of safe wells that can be potentially shared. Indeed, several studies have shown that some but not all households who own safe wells share their wells with their neighbors. The project studies ways to extend the sharing further by making the positive social images of the existing sharers more salient. Specifically, this project investigates whether social-image compensation can sustain the private provision of safe drinking water. The treatment effect of the social reward is identified through a cluster-randomized controlled experiment. The study explores the question of the extent social incentives can extend cooperation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.