Understanding the Roots of a Healthy Society
Why do some communities thrive and others succumb to dysfunction? There are deep roots to a healthy society, and, by implementing novel experimental approaches, we are able to understand how social connections in groups affect the ability of individuals to work together.
Groups can have properties that transcend the individuals within them. While there are examples of healthy, vibrant communities all around us, many communities are plagued by dysfunction and are unable to meet the collective challenges they face. An analogy can help explain this: just as connecting the same carbon atoms differently has drastically different results – creating graphite or diamond – so too can putting the same people together in different ways result in functional or dysfunctional groups. In a stream of papers involving online experiments (published in PNAS in 2011, 2014, and 2019), we have shown this to be the case.
Now, we would like to assess, using a sample of 176 villages and 30,000 people in Honduras (where we have been working for four years), whether we can measure such properties in real-world settings and whether such measurements might account for the differential ability of some villages to enact change or take care of collective assets, like wells or forests. We will set up ‘labs in the field’ in this isolated rural area and measure the cooperativity of whole villages, and then we will merge this new data with existing data we have on the detailed network structure of these villages. We expect to be able to show that particular forms of social interactions, in actual field settings, are associated with more cooperation at the collective level, leading to more functional communities with better outcomes for their inhabitants.