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Details
about the Thematic Area

Prosociality
and trust have been characterized across the disciplines as essential
elements in the constitution of human society and culture. On its
part, social anthropology has documented extensively the many forms
prosocial practices—practices that are beneficial to others and
costly to the self—take across cultures and the social conditions
in which people trust others to act prosocially. In turn, cognitive
psychology and behavioral economics have developed theories about the
stable preferences, the desires and motivations that lead people to
make prosocial choices and to trust others. While studies about
prosociality and trust are thriving, they remain to a large extent
constrained within the bounds of academic disciplines.

We
seek candidates who are willing to undertake interdisciplinary
research at the crossroads of the anthropology of morality and
psychology of prosociality. Social anthropology has shown that
prosocial practices can take very different forms, from gift exchange
to alms giving, and from ritual to everyday life. These practices are
integrated in a web of cultural beliefs (moral, religious, economic,
political) and shaped by their relation to other social phenomena.
Anthropologists studying the socio-cultural factors that foster or
sanction prosocial behavior and determine people’s moral judgments
would further benefit from understanding the underlying psychological
processes. By contrast, psychologists have studied prosocial
preferences such as ‘inequity aversion’, ‘preference for
fairness’, ‘aversion to disappointing’, ‘sense of
commitment’, ‘norm abidance’ as psychological factors that
motivate prosocial choices. These preferences have been studied in
controlled, experimental settings where choices are supposedly
disconnected from the cultural environments in which they normally
take place. However, understanding prosocial behavior as it
occurs in social context involves specifying how social institutions
and cultural environment influence the formation of the underlying
preferences and trigger or inhibit prosocial choices.

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