Corsi di Studio del Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società

Cooperation and collective action are core human social behaviours. Although cooperation imposes costs on individuals, people and communities across the world consistently work together to manage their public resources, engage in trade, and organise politically. Why do people cooperate and how do they overcome the hurdles to achieve beneficial collective outcomes? In this course, we will seek to answer these and other related questions by drawing on a rich theoretical and empirical literature from across the social sciences.

In particulate, we will consider the social mechanisms and factors that are involved in cooperation and the relationship between these mechanisms and the context in which they operate. Among others, we will consider role of social norms, honesty, trust, social preferences, signalling, and social structure and draw on empirical literature from across the globe. While the issues of cooperation and collective action, and its variants, have a long history in the social sciences, going back to at least Thomas Hobbes, here we will focus on the contemporary literature.

Students are expected to leave the course with an enriched knowledge of cooperation and collective action, including when and how they flourish and fail, and how this varies across different contexts in the world. They will also increase their knowledge about (i) core social mechanisms and concepts that are used in a wide range of social sciences and the (ii) empirical approaches to studying cooperation and collective action and related topics. Finally, they should finish with an appreciation of how to relate the knowledge that they learn to their own research or (future) work

As a consequence of COVID-19, the course has been moved online and will be taught online using Zoom. The classes combine lectures with student participation. A general principle throughout the course is engagement and students are encouraged to actively participate in class.

Assessment will be based on a combination of in-class participation (50% of the final grade) and a final presentation to the class (50% of the final grade). These will be conducted through the Zoom platform.

This course will address the objectives and outcomes by examining the relevant literature with a focus on applications from across the world. We will discuss and examine relevant literature on, among others, cooperation and collective action, social norms, signalling, trust, social preferences, social structure, and honesty. Students are expected to think critically about this literature and to participate in class discussions.

Participants will rely on a range of sources during the course. Some key texts are:

Gelfand, Michele J., Jana L. Raver, ... and Susumu Yamaguchi. 2011. ‘Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study’. Science 332(6033):1100–1104.

Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, ... and David Tracer. 2005. ‘“Economic Man” in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies’. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(6):795–815; discussion 815-855.

Kollock, Peter. 1998. ‘Social Dilemmas: The Anatomy of Cooperation’. Annual Review of Sociology 24(1):183–214.

Students will have class slides, with notes, available to them through a shared folder.