Social norms can help solve pressing societal challenges, from mitigating climate change to reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Despite their relevance, how norms shape cooperation among strangers remains insufficiently understood. Influential theories also suggest that the level of threat faced by different societies plays a key role in the strength of the norms that cultures evolve. Still little causal evidence has been collected. Here we deal with this dual challenge using a 30-day collective-risk social dilemma experiment to measure norm change in a controlled setting. We ask whether a looming risk of collective loss increases the strength of cooperative social norms that may avert it. We find that social norms predict cooperation, causally affect behavior, and that higher risk leads to stronger social norms that are more resistant to erosion when the risk changes. Taken together, our results demonstrate the causal effect of social norms in promoting cooperation and their role in making behavior resilient in the face of exogenous change.

The psychology of sustainability and sustainable development aims to study the personal characteristics that promote effective and sustainable well-being for individuals and environments from a psychological research perspective. According to the self-determination theory, the psychological need for relatedness is positively associated with happiness and flourishing. In turn, emotional intelligence, i.e., understanding and managing one’s own emotions and recognizing others’ emotions, may play a key role in this association. Therefore, the present study investigates the mediating role of emotional intelligence in the relationship between need for relatedness and both happiness and flourishing. Basic Psychological Needs scales (BPNs), Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS), Flourishing Scale, and Happiness Scale were administered to 216 Italian participants (age range 15–66 years old). A mediation model via a structural equation model for path analysis was tested. The results showed that the psychological need for relatedness positively associated with both happiness and flourishing and that emotional intelligence mediated these associations. These results suggest that important interventions may be performed to promote flourishing and happiness, enhancing emotional intelligence through specific training differently from need for relatedness that, instead, can be considered substantially stable.

We argue that building agent-based and equation-based versions of the same theoretical model is a fruitful way of gaining insights into real-world phenomena. We use the epistemological concept of "models as isolations and surrogate systems" as the philosophical underpinning of this argument. In particular, we show that agent-based and equation-based approaches align well when used simultaneously and, contrary to some common misconceptions, should be considered complements rather than substitutes. We illustrate the usefulness of the approach by examining a model of the long-run relationship between economic development and inequality (i.e., the Kuznets hypothesis).

Individuals have a strong tendency to coordinate with all their neighbors on social and economics networks. Coordination is often influenced by intrinsic preferences among the available options, which drive people to associate with similar peers, i.e., homophily. Many studies reported that behind coordination game equilibria there is the individuals' heterogeneity of preferences and that such heterogeneity is given a priori. We introduce a new mechanism which allows us to analyze the issue of heterogeneity from a cultural evolutionary point of view. Our framework considers agents interacting on a multiplex network who deal with coordination issues using social learning and payoff-driven dynamics. Agents form their heterogeneous preference through learning on one layer and they play a pure coordination game on the other layer. People learn from their peers that coordination is good and they also learn how to reach it either by conformism behavior or sorting strategy. We find that the presence of the social learning mechanism explains the rising and the endurance of a segregated society when members are diverse. Knowing how culture affects the ability to coordinate is useful for understanding how to reach social welfare in a diverse society.

Unveiling the main drivers of economic growth is of paramount importance. Previous research recognizes the critical role played by the factors of production: capital and labor. However, the exact mechanisms that underpin Total Factor Productivity (TFP) are not fully understood. An increasing number of studies suggests that the creation and transmission of knowledge, factor supply and economic integration are indeed crucial. Yet, the need for a systematic and unifying framework still exists. Nowadays capital and labor are embedded into a complex network structure through global supply chains and international migration. Recent research has established a link between network centralities and different types of social capital. In this work we employ the OECD’s Multi-Regional Input-Output and International Migration datasets to build the network representation for capital and labor of 63 economies during 10 years. We then examine the role of social capital measures as drivers of the TFP adopting an extended Cobb-Douglass production function and addressing potential issues such as multicollinearity, reverse causality and non-linear effects. Our results indicate that social capital in the factors of production networks can significantly drive economic outputs through TFP.