The shadow of the future and the shadow of the past: Studying the impact of climate change on human behaviour

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Abstract

There is consent among researchers that climate change results in increasing number of extreme weather events, migration and even the need to resettle entire populations. Understanding the behaviour of climate refugees and people exposed to extreme events are key in order to avoid emergency mass movements or even conflict over natural and social resources. I propose a research project with two related parts that identify the human reaction to the impacts of climate change by combining a comparative research design and the use of economic experiments, survey methods and modelling techniques. The first part of the project builds upon a unique sample of experimentally measured risk and solidarity preferences of 800 Filipinos taken in 2012 in. In order to assess the impact of the damages induced by typhoon 'Haiyan' and the following recovery aid we will carry out two follow-up studies with the same people in order to obtain panel data on solidarity and risk preferences for robust statistical inference.The second part of the project will focus on the effects of anticipated forced and permanent relocation. The major innovation offered by the proposed set-up is a sample of inhabitants from atoll and island communities where the communities only differ in the timing of the expected relocation due to sea level rise with additional use of priming techniques. The set-up allows studying how preferences and behavior of people change with the prospect of being severely affected by climate change and whether and how these affect short and medium-term adaptation strategies such as an increased extraction of natural resources and migration.

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"Economic man" in cross-cultural perspective: behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies.

Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles … (2005)

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model - based on self-interest - fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.