From an interesting paper by Maria Bigoni, Stefania Bortolotti, Marco Casari, Diego Gambetta and Francesca Panocha. 2013.
Socio-economic performance differs not only across countries but within countries too and can persist
even after religion, language, and formal institutions are long shared. One interpretation of these
disparities is that successful regions are characterized by higher levels of trust, and, more generally,
of cooperation. Here we study a classic case of within-country disparities, the Italian North-South
divide, to find out whether people exhibit geographically distinct abilities to cooperate independently
of many other factors and whence these differences emerge. Through an experiment in four Italian
cities, we study the behavior of a sample of the general population toward trust and contributions to
the common good. We find that trust and contributions vary in unison, and diminish moving from
North to South.
From the conclusions
We collected a millennium-long time span dataset, which suggests that
the most plausible conjecture in terms of historical experiences is related to the frequency of
violent conflicts against external enemies Bowles (2009); Tilly (1992). The need to react to
external threats may positively select norms of conditional cooperation in a society, and lay
the bases for a more cooperative future.
The title of the paper is "Cooperation Hidden Frontiers: The Behavioral Foundations of the Italian North-South Divide." EUI Working Paper ECO 2013/04. European University Press.
The graphs and tables are very interesting.
HT: Matthew Baker
Form a paper by Rucha Ghate, Suresh Ghate, & Elinor Ostrom.
Extensive experimental research has been devoted to the study of behaviour in laboratory settings related to public goods, common-pool resources, and other social dilemmas. When subjects are anonymous and not allowed to communicate, they tend not to cooperate. To the surprise of game theorists, however, simply allowing subjects to communicate in a laboratory setting enables them to achieve far more cooperative outcomes. This finding has now been replicated in many laboratory experiments in multiple countries and in some initial field experiments. Carefully conducted laboratory experiments do have strong internal validity. External validity, however, requires further research beyond the initial field experiments that have already been conducted. In this paper, we report on a series of common-pool resource field experiments conducted in eight indigenous communities in India that have very long traditions of shared norms and mutual trust. Two experimental designs were used in all eight villages: a “no-communication” game that was repeated in ten rounds where no one was allowed verbal or written communication and a “communication game” in which the same five participants were allowed to communicate with each other at the beginning of each round before making their decisions. The findings from these field experiments are substantially different from the findings of similar experiments conducted in experimental laboratories. Subjects tended to cooperate in the first design even in the absence of communication. The shared norms in these indigenous communities are so deeply embedded that communication is not needed to adopt cooperative decisions. Communication does, however, tend to homogenize group and individual outcomes so that communities that are overly cooperative tend to reduce cooperation slightly and those with small deviations in the other direction tend to move toward the optimal solution.
