Kin-based institutions and economic development

Bahrami‐Rad, Duman; Beauchamp, Jonathan P.; Henrich, Joseph; Schulz, Jonathan

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4200629

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 129 publications

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“…We find that help with child care by non-relatives is associated with enhanced prosociality toward strangers, highlighting the specificity of allomaternal care by non-relatives as a crux of impersonal prosociality. Our analysis provides a new mechanism that can explain the negative relationship between the strength of family and social ties and cooperative behavior that was initially observed in an ethnography of the Italian village of Montegrano (Banfield, 1958) and whose negative consequences for economic and political development have been established by several studies Giuliano, 2011, 2014;Alesina et al, 2015;Enke, 2019;Bahrami-Rad et al, 2022;Schulz, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…We advance this literature by focusing on child care practices, an arguably central aspect of social organization. The link we establish between help with child care by non-relatives and prosociality provides a novel mechanism that can explain the negative relationship between the strength of kinship ties and impersonal prosociality documented throughout the economics literature (Banfield, 1958;Giuliano, 2010, 2011;Ermisch and Gambetta, 2010;Alesina and Giuliano, 2014;Alesina et al, 2015;Enke, 2019;Bahrami-Rad et al, 2022;Schulz, 2022). 9 10 two ways.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…More generally, reciprocity, altruism, and trust are critical to sustaining trade and markets in environments of incomplete contracts and asymmetric information (Arrow, 1972;Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981;Gambetta, 1988). Recent papers have made important contributions in providing evidence of the influence of social organizations, such as kinship structures or male initiation rituals, on individual behavior (Moscona et al, 2017(Moscona et al, , 2020Bahrami-Rad et al, 2022;Lowes, 2022;Moscona and Seck, 2021). We advance this literature by focusing on child care practices, an arguably central aspect of social organization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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It Makes a Village: Child Care and Prosociality *

Cassar,

Cristia,

Grosjean

et al. 2023

Preprint

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We examine a novel hypothesis that roots human prosociality in the need to elicit and sustain help from others for the purpose of raising children. Cross-cultural ethnographic data suggests a positive association between societal trust and allomaternal care, i.e., care coming from individuals other than the mother. In this study, we test the relationship between allomaternal care and cooperative behavior among a sample of 820 individuals in the Solomon Islands through a series of dictator games using a within-subject design that enables us to account for unobserved heterogeneity across subjects, as well as several observed and unobserved characteristics of the relationship between individuals and specific people in their network (relatives, acquaintances, and strangers). Our results show that receiving help with child care predicts heightened proso-ciality. This relationship remains strong even after accounting for other forms of mutual help. Moreover, help from non-relatives is associated with prosociality toward strangers, suggesting an important foundation for the development of impersonal prosociality. As evidence of a mechanism sustaining the prevalence of allomaternal care, we document large socio-cognitive benefits to children who receive care from non-relatives, based on stress data and daylong vocalizations of 200 children analyzed using a multilingually-trained neural network. JEL Codes: I15, O15, Z13

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 77%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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It Makes a Village: Child Care and Prosociality *

Cassar,

Cristia,

Grosjean

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…Particular kinship practices, for example, leave "marks" in the genome, allowing us to look deep into our evolutionary history using ancient DNA. Indeed, analysis of contemporary data confirms that anthropological data on kinship practices like cousin marriage correlate with "runs of homozygosity" from genetic data (Bahrami-Rad et al, 2022).…”

Section: Direction 1: Cultural Environments and The Boundary Problemmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…Particular kinship practices, for example, leave “marks” in the genome, allowing us to look deep into our evolutionary history using ancient DNA. Indeed, analysis of contemporary data confirms that anthropological data on kinship practices like cousin marriage correlate with “runs of homozygosity” from genetic data (Bahrami-Rad et al, 2022). Focusing on historical eras, new approaches to extracting psychological measures and other sorts of information from textual data offer us longitudinal data spread across space and time (Atari & Henrich, 2023; Martins & Baumard, 2022; Muthukrishna et al, 2021).…”

Section: Review and Next Stepsmentioning

confidence: 69%

Beyond Newton: Why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science, and how to finally move past them.

Kroupin,

Davis,

Henrich

2024

Psychological Review

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Kin networks and quality of government: a regional analysis

Ezcurra

2024

Ann Reg Sci

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This paper examines the relationship between kin-based institutions and quality of government in the regions of Spain, France, and Italy. The results show that the rate of cousin marriage during the twentieth century is a strong predictor of the modern-day quality of government in the regions of these three countries. Regions characterized by a higher prevalence of cousin marriage tend to have on average worse governance outcomes. This finding holds after accounting for country fixed effects and different variables that may be correlated with both consanguinity and regional quality of government, including an extensive array of geographical, historical, and contemporary factors. The observed association between cousin marriage and quality of government persists when I utilize an instrumental variable approach that exploits regional variation in the degree of historical exposure to the marriage laws of the medieval Catholic Church to address potential endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, the paper also provides evidence consistent with the idea that the effect of cousin marriage on the quality of government operates through its impact on a series of cultural traits such as impersonal trust, fairness, and conformity-obedience.

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Kin-based institutions and economic development

Cited by 6 publications

References 129 publications

It Makes a Village: Child Care and Prosociality *

It Makes a Village: Child Care and Prosociality *

Beyond Newton: Why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science, and how to finally move past them.

Kin networks and quality of government: a regional analysis

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