Research about Social Capital and what helps or discourages cooperation

Interesting Research on Social Capital or Related Topics

Interesting books:

For a discussion of mathematical and game-theory attempts to understand why we cooperate and trust one-another see: Robert Axelrod. The Evolution of Cooperation. (Basic Books, 1985).

Dan Kahan has an interesting forthcoming book called The Logic of Reciprocity: A Theory of Collective Action and Law. An abstract and copy of summary article is available here for download. The article describes the intersection of trust, collective action and policy and describes some interesting experiments where approaches like social cueing (e.g., letting people know how law-abiding others were) were more effective in increasing collective action (in this case tax compliance) than increasing penalties or enforcement. Also has an interesting discussion of the dynamics of collective action, which tends to have multiple equilibria: behavior is most unstable when some are cooperating and others are free-riding and most stable when virtually all are cooperating or none are.

Yochai Benkler, “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production.” 114 Yale Law Journal 2 (November 2004) looking at the sharing of resources like carpooling or the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI) using millions of individuals’ home computers. A quite interesting article that addresses transaction costs, motivation and the implications for contemporary policy debates.

Michael Cornfield’s fascinating book, Politics Moves Online (2004) describes the potential impact of technology on politics and civics engagement.

Ron Burt has an important new book Brokerage and Closure (2005, Oxford Univ. Press). The book is a bit less accessible, but hints at how rudimentary changes in motivation and compensation can dynamically change the structure and growth of company networks, and the likelihood that factors like silos or distance can be overcome. The book also talks about the importance of brokers in trust and relationships. A pr’cis of this book is available here.

Here is a sprinkling of the research on social capital or its related kin.

Social capital generally
Workplace/Business/Economics
Faith-based
Technology
Altruism/volunteering/voluntary associations/National Service
Education/Youth
Government/Politics
Trust/Neuroeconomics
Medicine/Health
New Urbanism/mixed use housing/Architecture/Suburbs
Neighborhoods/Crime
The arts
The family/Friends
Happiness/Well-Being
Animal Studies on Cooperation
Diversity and Bridging Social Capital
Small Worlds/Social Networks
Dimensionalizing Social Capital
Other

Social capital generally

Review of Social Economy, Volume 65(1) (2007) put out by the Journal of the Association for Social Economics has a special issue on social capital called Beyond Social Capital: a Critical Approach

NEW: David Halpern recently wrote a quite interesting book Social Capital and has been a high level advisor to the British Government on their social capital efforts. On page 12 and 13 of this presentation, he has an interesting conceptualization of social capital into the “micro”, “meso” and “macro” level – basically the individual, community and societal levels. So for example, in the domain of the connection between social capital and economics, there would be micro interactions [e.g., the connection between the individual’s social capital and his/her earnings or employability], meso level interactions [e.g., the NY diamond trade not needing to check every diamond for purity because of underlying trust among the relevant firms], and macro level interactions [e.g., explaining economic differences between nations or regions based on levels of social capital]. Each different domain (like public health, community safety, economic prosperity) might have different pathways by which social capital was associated with these public goods.

NEW: Dora L. Costa & Matthew E. Kahn wrote a paper on some of the ‘highest stakes’ benefits of social capital: how social networks helped individuals survive POW camps, called “Surviving Andersonville: The Role of Friends in Confederate POW Camps” (2005)

NEW: Rupasinghaa, Anil, Stephan J. Goetzb and David Freshwater (2006). The production of social capital in US counties (Journal of Socio-Economics, 35(1): 83-101) attempts to discern what factors produce social capital at the county level using GSS and the Census County Business Patterns data.

Dora L. Costa & Matthew E. Kahn, 2001. “Understanding the Decline in Social Capital, 1952-1998” NBER Working Papers 8295, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

Workplace/Business/Economics

William Eastery, Jozef Ritzen and Michael Woolcock. (2006). “Social Cohesion, Institutions and Growth”. Economics & Politics
18 (2): 103, showing how growth is casually determined by social cohesion (income inequality and ethnic fractionalization), working through institutional quality. Working Paper available here.

Diana Mutz in Social Trust and E-Commerce: Experimental Evidence for the Effects of Social Trust on Individuals’ Economic Behavior [Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 2005. 69(3): 393-416] analyzes how increased trust of others leads to greater willingness to engage in e-commerce.

Faith-based/Religion

NEW: Rajeev Dehlijia, Thomas DeLeire and Erzo Luttmer have a NBER paper (2005) called “Insuring Consumption and Happiness Through Religious Organizations” that shows how being involved with religion can provide social, consumption, or happiness buffers to severe losses in income. They found that religion had effects for whites and blacks but the effects worked differently: whites were able to get consumption insurance, while blacks were able to get more happiness insurance from religion than whites.

Jonathan Gruber, Is Religion Good for You? (NBER Working Paper, May 2005).

NEW: Mary Jo Bane has a paper examining The Catholic Puzzle: Parishes and Civic Life (2005). She explores datasets like our Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey to understand why Catholics don’t get involved more civicly when so much of their theology is about that.

Technology

On Harvard’s Complexity Blog, Ben Waber describes research in a German bank using the Sociometric Badge; the badge developed by the MIT Media Lab, is worn for extended periods of time and measures in real time the proxmity of badge wearers to other badge wearers. When coupled with e-mail logs, the data gathered showed that proximity and e-mail use were strongly negative related. Other findings included the fact that the volume of communication was negative related to its perceived quality. Waber’s paper is being presented at the 2007 NetSci conference.

Weinberg, Bruce & Williams, Christine (2006). The 2004 US Presidential campaign: Impact of hybrid off-line and on-line ‘meetup’ communities.Journal of direct, data and digital marketing practice. 8 (1), 46-57. They looked at 820 people who attended meetups for presidential candidates between January 22 and March 10, 2004, they found that meetup attendance was positively related to various imeasures of campaign effectiveness, such as donations, volunteering and candidate support and advocacy (encouraging others to learn about, work for or vote for the candidate). They concluded that “Meetup may be a useful vehicle for acquiring ‘attractive’ customers” and newcomers to campaigns. They classify Meetup as an e2f (electronic-to-face) community that couples the strengths of technology (stronger search, easier to readh strangers, etc.) wtih the strength of face-to-face ties in building trust.

Glenn Sparks and Hannah Kirk (Purdue) conducted experiments (12/06) to see TV’s effect on social interaction. Participants were asked to bring a friend to the sessions, and randomized which pairs were exposed to TV during their 10 minutes in the waiting room. Questionnaires of the participants revealed that people made twice the amount of eye contact with the TV off and their enjoyment of the time with their friend rose about 40% when the TV was off (from 67% to 94%). They have not yet explored how the content of the TV programs affects social interaction.

Thomas Sander, “E-Associations? Using Technology to Connect Citizens: the Case of Meetup.com” Paper for American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Conference in Washington, DC, September 2005. Another version of this paper available as a Taubman Center Working Paper.

Vincent Price, Citizens Deliberating Online: Theory and Some Evidence (2006) from Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice. Todd Davies and Beth Simone Noveck (eds.). Price has conducted two online experiments in discussion and deliberation: one in discussing politics during the 2000 campaign (in Liberal groups, Conservative groups and mixed groups) and one recently on healthcare policy (with segmented or mixed groups of experts, the Attentive Public, and random Americans). All conversations were text-only discussions with minimally intrusive moderators, but Price found that participation in such groups led to modest increases in social trust, civic engagement, political participation, and political efficacy. The discussions were frank but civil, and participants most valued hearing others’ perspectives. There was little evidence of serious polarization from these groups and “speaking” in the groups was relatively equitably distributed. And the people who were less politically knowledgeable and less technologically savvy liked participation the most.

Shanyan Zhao, Do Internet Users Have More Social Ties? A Call For Differentiated Analyses of Internet Use (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(3), article 8) . [But article in our estimation makes the mistake of assuming that all friendships are equal, and that a friend made and sustained on-line in a chat room affords the same social capital benefits that one would get from a friendship sustained in the real, non-virtual world. Our strong hypothesis is that the real-world friend one would be much more likely to trust, would be much more likely to visit you if you were in the hospital, etc.]

The Strength of Internet Ties (Jeff Boase, Barry Wellman, 2006). The report shows how Americans use e-mail to supplement ties to others by phone or in-person rather than using the Internet to replace their other forms of social connection.

Keith Hampton, e-Neighbors: Neighborhoods in the Network Society. 2006. [Paper is under review, but an abstract can be found here.] A ‘flash’ presentation of Keith’s findings is available here.

Nancy Baym, Yan Bing Zhang, Mei-Chen Lin, Social Interactions Across Media. 2004. (New Media and Society, 6(3):299-318.

William Davies has an interesting booklet written in the U.K. about how technology can be used to enhance communication.

Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm.”112 Yale Law Journal 3 (December 2002) on how and why people collaborate on e-based projects without the hope of financial reward, like Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia), Slashdot, Linux, etc. A few parts are rather technical and quantitative, but the article is quite interesting.

Paul Resnick has an interesting paper ‘Impersonal Sociotechnical Capital, ICTs, and Collective Action Among Strangers‘ (2004).

Some of the research on t-government (transformational government) has started to focus on the issue of co-production, like this article by Stephen King, Citizen Relationship Management: The Rocky Road from Transactions to Empowerment. Co-production, in which the citizens help craft governmental service or are co-producers in the results (like clients taking partial responsibility for improving their health) dates back to this 1980 article: Gordon Whitiker, Coproduction: Citizen Participation in Service Delivery (Public Administration Review).

Benjamin A. Olken’s NBER paper Do Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital? Evidence from Indonesian Villages uses quasi-experimental evidence (which Indonesian villages are blocked by mountains from receiving transmissions) to show that villages with greater TV access and watching are associated with lower levels of social capital. (2006)

Duncan Watts and colleagues have an experiment called the Small World experiment to try to replicate Stanley Millgram’s lost letter experiment that produced the ‘6 degrees of separation’ conclusion. In the experiment, volunteers try to find out in how few links through friends they can find others who are very distant worldwide (geographically and socially).

Networks, Netwars, and the Fight For The Future (First Monday, by David Ronfeldt and John Arequilla)

Altruism/volunteering/voluntary associations/national service

Arthur C. Brooks, “Does Social Capital Make You Generous?” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 86(1): 1-15 (March 2005) exploring the link between social capital and philanthropy using the Social Capital Community Survey Benchmark data.

Abt Associates has issued a longitudinal study on the impact of participation in AmeriCorps on educational and civic engagement outcomes. Study available here.

Harris Wofford’s Cracking The Atom of Civic Power (National Civic Review, Summer 2005) discusses the post WW-II history of national service and its importance to civic renewal.

NEW: Edward C. Metz and James Youniss, “Longitudinal Gains in Civic Development through School-Based Required Service” Political Psychology, vol. 26(3): p. 413 (June 2005) showing that while youth who have baseline inclination to do community service don’t benefit significantly from school-mandated service, those who lacking baseline inclination to serve show marked gains on 3 of 4 civic measures over time from serving.

Education/Youth

Hardwired to Connect, an interdisciplinary study that came out in 2003 shows the connection between lack of social capital among adolescents and a rise in teen depression and suicide.

Nathaniel Leland Schwartz, “Civic Disengagement: The Demise of the American High School Civics Class”
(Harvard senior thesis, 2002).

Government/Politics

Dave Campbell, Why We Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape Our Civic Life (Princeton University Press, 2005)

With all the increased focus on negative political advertising, does this suppress voter turnout by convincing all but the most diehard voters that they should just stay home since neither of the candidates are good. See for example:
Lau, Richard and Gerald Pomper “Effects of Negative Campaigning on Turnout in U.S. Senate Elections 1988-1998“, Journal of Politics, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Aug., 2001), pp. 804-819. They found that “campaign negativism has a curvilinear effect on turnout, with most observed levels of negativism actually stimulating turnout. Only at extremely high levels does negativism in political campaigns generally suppress turnout.”
Clinton, Joshua D. and John S. Lapinski. 2004. “‘Targeted’ Advertising and Voter Turnout: An Experimental Study of the 2000 Presidential Election“, Journal of Politics, Volume 66(1), page 69, finding that exposure to negative political advertising in an experiment generally increased turnout, although it depended at times on the ad’s message and sub-population demographics.
Don Green et al. 2003 “Partisan mail and voter turnout: results from randomized field experiments. ” Electoral Studies 22: 563–579. Green et al. conversely found that partisan campaign mail does little to stimulate voter turnout and may even dampen it when the mail is negative in tone.

Trust/Neuroeconomics

Robert Hurley, The Decision to Trust (Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2006) on the thought process that individuals use in deciding whom to trust.

Diana Mutz in Social Trust and E-Commerce: Experimental Evidence for the Effects of Social Trust on Individuals’ Economic Behavior [Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 2005. 69(3): 393-416] analyzes how increased trust of others leads to greater willingness to engage in e-commerce.

There is a good lay overview of neuroeconomics in the New Yorker’s Mind Games (9/18/06 by John Casidy). Only some of the article discusses trust and the importance of oxytocin in this process.

NEW: The OECD Observer has an article about Trust in Government (Nov. 2005).

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and California Institute of Technology explored which regions of the brain are associated with trust and mapped how the signal to trust comes earlier and earlier in transactions as the level of trust increases. News article here and article appeared in “Getting to Know You: Reputation and Trust in a Two-Person Economic Exchange”. Brooks King-Casas, Damon Tomlin, Cedric Anen, Colin F. Camerer, Steven R. Quartz, and P. Read Montague. Science 1 April 2005: 78-83.

The Journal Nature (6/2/05, p. 571) contains an article by Antonio Damasio called “Human behaviour: Brain trust” discussing a series of clever experiments that examine the neurochemistry of trust and the underlying research “Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans” by Michael Kosfel, Markus Heinrichs, Paul Zak, and Ernst Fehr is in the same issue of Nature (6/2/05, pp. 673-676). The research shows how oxytocin increases the willingness of experimental subjects to engage in ‘approaching behavior’ (offering trust in interpersonal situations) but doesn’t increase a willingness to reciprocate trust nor a general euphoria or optimism. Paul Zak also sketches out the Neuroeconomics of Trust in this paper (2005).

Hakan Holm and Anders Danielson have done some empirical work trying to understand the interconnection between trust, reciprocity, generosity and social trust among Swedish and Tanzanian economics students. The interesting study can be found in Tropic Trust Versus Nordic Trust: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania and Sweden [The Economic Journal, 115 (April 2005), 505-532].

Paul Zak has an article here on the importance of trust for country wealth and why it merits governmental investment.

Nava Ashraf, Iris Bohnet and Nikita Piankov wrote an article called Is Trust a Bad Investment on the motivations for trusting and what types of individuals expected engaging in trustworthy behavior to pay for itself.

Timothy E. Cook and Paul Gronke, “The Skeptical American: Revisiting the Meanings of Trust in Government and Confidence in Institutions” (March 2004).

Martin Nowak, Karen Page and Karl Sigmund, “Fairness versus reason in the ultimatum game” Science, Vol 289, 1773-1775, 8 Sept 2000.
see also: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Publications/Documents/IR-00-057.pdf

Undermining any claim that trust or identification of cheating is a function of culture or levels of economic development, this study by Sugiyama, Tooby & Cosmides [“Cross-Cultural Evidence of Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange Among the Shiwiar of Ecuadorian Amazonia”] found ability to detect cheating both in the Shiwiar, an isolated Amazonian tribe of hunter-horticulturalists, and Harvard undergraduates.

Cross-cultural evidence across 15 societies shows that individuals do not behave in classic self-interested way predicted by homo economicus. “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Simple Societies,” American Economic Review, 91, 2 (May, 2001) 73-78 with R. Boyd, C. Camerer, E. Fehr, H. Gintis, J Henrich, and R. McElreath.

Medicine/Health

Nicholas Christakis (with James Fowler) has very interesting unpublished research on the social transmission of obesity and smoking; the data comes from a coding of family and friendship ties in the Framingham Heart Study (the landmark longitudinal study since the late 1950s that has been used to detect major causes of heart disease in America). They find, as one would expect if the transmission was social, that obesity spreads over a 4 year period between waves of the FHS study from a person (call her X) to those who said X was their friend (controlling for lots of background characteristics) but doesn’t spread from X to another person (Y) if Y didn’t indicate that X was his/her friend. Being further away socially from another (more degrees of separation) reduces the spread of obesity but being further away geographically does not. The transmission of smoking works in much the same way. And their evidence is that the friendships transmit the norms (e.g., it’s okay to be overweight) not the specific practices or behaviors (like exercising less, drinking alcohol, etc.) They also find that discordance in obesity results in increasing severance of friendships: i.e., if you are thin and your friend is fat (or vice versa), this social tie is less likely to persist over time than if your friend has a similar body mass index to yours. They plan in further research to use some genetic markers on FHS participants as instrument variables to control for any genetic predisposition to obesity. Christakis believes that many of our medical policy decisions underestimate benefits by failing to take into account the multiplier benefits on health spending (how treating person X can influence the people who have X as a friend, through social transmissions).

Sherman Folland, Does community social capital contribute to population health? (Social Science & Medicine, In Press, Corrected Proof, April 2007). Article suggests that any causal arrow runs more from social capital to health than the reverse. 2006 paper on this topic by Folland available here.

C. David Jenkins and Desmond K. Runyan (2005). “What’s Killing Americans In The Prime Of Life?” International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 35, Number 2, pp. 291 – 311. Lack of social capital offered as one explanation for why there is such a high mortality rate among Americans 15-59 years of age compared to other countries and adjusting for levels of health expenditures.

Lisa Berkman, Thomas Glass, Ian Brissette, and Teresa Seeman, “From Social Integration to Health: Durkheim in the New Millennium” Social Science and Medicine 51 (2000) 843-857 that speculates on the connection between social networks and health and also reviews literature on sociability of other animals and health.

Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P Kennedy and R Glass (2005). “Social capital and self-rated health: a contextual analysis” American Journal of Public Health, Vol 89, Issue 8 1187-1193, finds low social capital lowers self-rated health in the GSS, controlling for income, health behaviors and other correlates.

Weitzman and Chen (2005) find that social capital reduces the likelihood of heavy alcohol consumption, alcohol abuse, and secondhand alcohol effects among college students. Journal Epidemiology & Community Health 2005;59:303-309. [“Risk modifying effect of social capital on measures of heavy alcohol consumption, alcohol abuse, harms, and secondhand effects: national survey findings”]

Some research has been done showing that sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) spread less quickly in high social capital environments, and the impact of social capital was greater than the impact of poverty or income inequality. A description of this research can be found here and the fuller 2003 article is here by Holtgrave and Crosby ‘Social capital, poverty, and income inequality as predictors of gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia and AIDS case rates in the United States‘. Holtgrave et al. also found that social capital was a significant predictor of risky sexual behaviors, such as early sexual experience and having multiple partners. ‘Social Capital as a Predictor of Adolescents’ Sexual Risk Behavior: A State-Level Exploratory Study‘. AIDS and Behavior, September 2003, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 245-252(8).

NEW: There is an interesting review of Social Capital and Psychiatry in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry (2005: 13:71-84) by Rob Whiteley and Kwame McKenzie. They conclude that the link between social capital and psychiatry is worthy of much more careful analysis, but find that there has not been convincing work done in this field to-date. [Note: They, like many scholars in the field of public health, strangely the social capital to community level effects, since the concept of ‘social support’ pre-existed the recent rise of social capital. Since social support was shown to be important to public health or psychiatry, they largely limit social capital to something new, even though in all other disciplines, social capital stands for the individual level network benefits AND the community level effects.]

New Urbanism/mixed use housing/Architecture/Suburbs

Thomas Sander, “Social Capital and New Urbanism: Leading a Civic Horse to Water?” National Civic Review. Fall 2002. Vol. 91, Issue 3, pp. 213-234.

Thad Williamson, Sprawl, Politics and Participation: A Preliminary Analysis. National Civic Review. Fall 2002. Vol. 91, Issue 3, pp. 235-244. [Thad has done some additional work to this initial article but not in a form that is publicly available yet.]

Ann Forsyth, “Irvine, Columbia, and the Woodlands: Planning Lessons From Three Towns in the 1960s and 1970s.” 2002. Journal of the American Planning Association, 68(4): 387-415. Now a book called Reforming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and The Woodlands (University of California Press, 2005).

Social Interaction and Urban Sprawl. 2006. Jan K. Brueckner (UC Irvine) and Ann Largey (Dublin City University Business School) that purports to show using Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey data from 2000 that “good fences make good neighbors”. News article summary here. As Thad Williamson’s research shows (earlier paper on this topic in National Civic Review), it makes a big difference to one’s findings what variables you use in Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey to proxy for suburbs (for example, population density, average commuting time, average age of housing stock, etc.).

Neighborhoods/Crime

Neal Kumar Katyal, “Architecture as Crime Control”, 111 Yale Law Journal 5 (March 2002)
abstract at: www.yale.edu/yalelj/111/111-5ab.html

Susan Saegert, Gary Winkel, and Charles Swartz, “Social Capital and Crime in New York City’s Low-Income Housing” (Housing Policy Debate, Volume 13, Issue 1) describing how social capital helps lower crime.

***The Annie Casey Foundation has a report highlighting the Role of Social Capital in Building Healthy Communities, focusing on marginalized neighborhoods (2004).

The arts

***The National Endowment for the Arts, in their report The Arts and Civic Engagement: Involved in Arts, Involved in Life (2006) found that people engaged in the arts were more likely to participate in civic or social activities, including volunteering. The report uses data from the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, and while the report doesn’t say so, NEA found similar differences regardless of the gender or educational level of the respondents. NEA’s next Survey of Public Participation in the Arts is likely to be in 2008.

The family/friends

***Two prominent sociologists, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Miller McPherson, and former critics of Bowling Alone found confirming evidence of social isolation in the General Social Survey data. From 1985-2004, the percentage of Americans lacking anyone to discuss important matters with has nearly tripled. Almost half the U.S. population now has either no one or only one confidante with whom to discuss important matters. See June 2006 Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades, American Sociological Review 71(3): 353-375.).

Bruce Sacerdote and David Marmaros have an interesting paper “How Do Friendships Form?” (NBER Working Paper No. 11530, August 2005) that shows clustering by race and social class among college students (inferring friendships based on e-mail patterns among Dartmouth students and alumni). They found that within-building geographic proximity and race are greater determinants of social interaction than common interests, majors, or family background. “Two randomly chosen white students interact three times more often than do a black student and a white student.” However, mixed race freshman dorms increased cross-race socializing threefold but didn’t increase cross-race socializing more generally. David Brooks had a column on this called “Barriers, and Paths, to Integration” (Sept. 21, 2005, NYT).

Happiness/Well-Being

S. Barolini, E. Bilancini, and M. Pugno, Did the Decline in Social Capital Decrease American Happiness? A Relational Explanation of the Happiness Paradox (draft 6/5/07)

John Helliwell (2005). Well-Being, Social Capital and Public Policy: What’s New?

Tayyab Rashid in 2005 found that bridging social capital brings people greater happiness. Rashid, a U. Penn. psychologist, randomly assigned experimental subjects to bowl by themselves, with strangers or with friends and found that the former brings a greater increase in happiness. (Study blurbed in Psychology Today, January 2006).

Helliwell, J. (2001) “How’s Life? Combining individual and national variables to explain subjective well-being.” NBER Working Paper, No. w9065.

Putnam/Helliwell, “The Social Context of Wellbeing” in The Science of Wellbeing (eds. Huppert, F., Baylis, N. and B. Keverne, 2005 Oxford Univ. Press).

Animal Studies on Cooperation

Elephant empathy. A 2006 paper by Iain Douglas-Hamilton et al in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, suggests that elephants remember their dead. See: Behavioural reactions of elephants towards a dying and deceased matriarch.

***This Harvard Gazette article “Taking a look at how ant (and human) societies might grow” (9/29/05) reviews recent research of Edward O. Wilson on ants that suggests that the growth of ant colonies stems from their extraordinary eusocial skills that orient ants to doing acts of cooperation in furtherance of the collective goal. That humans along with ants are one of only 15 species believed to have high levels of eusociality and the fact that humans have also grown quickly may well not be a coincidence.

A very interesting study among baboons by Jeanne Altmann (Princeton), Joan Silk (UCLA) and Susan Alberts (Duke) [published in Science 11/14/03 302:1231-4] showed how sociability in female baboons led to increased survival rates of baboon offspring. This suggests that we may have evolved to be social creatures and built social capital as adaptive evolution to ensure the survival of our genes and our offspring. [A summary of some of the findings can be found by clicking here.] A paper by Joan Silk on the Evolution of Cooperation in Primate Groups (2005) is available.

Earlier research by Sarah Brosnan (Emory) released over the summer of 2003 showed that an innate sense of fairness operates in female Capuchin monkeys. [The piece in Nature is available here, and a summary of the piece in the National Geographic is available by clicking here. Fair and Square (in the Economist, 9/18/03) also covers this topic.]

Click here for a summary piece talking about other work by biologists that show the evolutionary nature of sociability and cooperation.

Diversity/Bridging Social Capital

[for a larger selection of articles on diversity and social capital, click here.]

Dora L. Costa & Matthew E. Kahn, 2001. “Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the American Civil War,” NBER Working Papers 8627, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

NEW: Xavier de Souza Briggs has been doing interesting work on bridging and bonding social capital, such as a PowerPoint presentation from 2001, although this presentation doesn’t focus on fact that the social capital bridgers are more likely than not to also be the social capital bonders and also does not control for opportunity for bridging (it’s much easier to form bridging social ties to blacks in Hispanics in San Antonio than in St. Louis). Xav Briggs has contributed an interested chapter on Social Capital and Segregation in the U.S. and a Conclusion about how to spur greater desegregation in Desegregating the City: Ghettos, Enclaves, and Inequality (ed. David Varady, Albany, SUNY Press, 2005.)

***One of the best things written about principles for building bridging social capital can be found in the Concord Handbook, written by Barbara Nelson, Linda Kaboolian, and Kathryn Carver (2003).

***Small Worlds/Social Networks

Brian Uzzi, Jarrett Spiro, RB Murmann, M Bothner, M Zelek, F et al. (2005) Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem. American Journal of Sociology. Describes how social ties in small worlds can lead to initial high gains in creativity but with longer-term ceiling effects.

Dimensionalizing Social Capital

Yaojun Li, Andrew Pickles and Mike Savage. “Social Capital and Social Trust in Britain” In a methodologically sophisticated article, the authors examine which types of social capital are most important for various socio-economic groups in Britain and which types of social capital best predict future social trust (controlling for earlier levels of social trust and forms of social capital participation). [European Sociological Review 21(2) April 2005, pp. 109-23.]

Fabio Sabatini, Social Capital as Social Networks: A New Framework for Measurement (2005) [Working Paper]

Vella, Venanzio and Deepa Narayan, Building indices of social capital and its outcomes(Electronic Journal of Sociology, 2006)

Social Capital in the Field: Researchers’ Tales by the London Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group highlights how social capital (or certain dimensions of social capital) were critical to various research projects on families.

See Social Capital Generally section for reference to David Halpern’s Social Capital book that talks about micro, macro and mezzo level social capital.

Other

Helliwell, J. (1996) Do Borders Matter for Social Capital? Economic Growth and Civic Culture in U.S. States and Canadian Provinces that discusses how geographic boundaries continue to shape social tie formation, even in a global environment, NBER Working Paper, No. w5863. See also “Maintaining Social Ties: Social Capital in a Global Information Age”(Helliwell, 2003).

The Social Capital Gateway has a section where it posts theses related to social capital and economic development.
You can also subscribe for free to the New Economics Papers on Social Norms and Social Capital.

 

 

 

 

****Social capital measurement overview

We believe that measurement of social capital is important for
3 reasons:
a) Measurement make the concept of social capital more tangiblet;
b) It increases our investment in social capital: in a performance-driven era, social capital will be relegated to second-tier status in the allocation of resources, unless organizations can show that their community-building efforts are showing results; and
c) Measurement helps funders and community organizations build more social capital. Everything that involves any human interaction can be asserted to create social capital, but the real question is does it build a significant amount of social capital, and if so, how much? Is a specific part of an organization’s effort worth continuing or should it be scrapped and revamped? Do mentoring programs, playgrounds, or sponsoring block parties lead more typically to greater social capital creation?

Robert Putnam describes the measurement of social capital in the beginning of this 2006 BBC report; the remaining first half of the broadcast discusses the U.K.’s social capital. We have been undertaking various applied activities in the realm of measurement:

1)2000 S

Social capital measurement overview

We believe that measurement of social capital is important for
3 reasons:
a) Measurement make the concept of social capital more tangiblet;
b) It increases our investment in social capital: in a performance-driven era, social capital will be relegated to second-tier status in the allocation of resources, unless organizations can show that their community-building efforts are showing results; and
c) Measurement helps funders and community organizations build more social capital. Everything that involves any human interaction can be asserted to create social capital, but the real question is does it build a significant amount of social capital, and if so, how much? Is a specific part of an organization’s effort worth continuing or should it be scrapped and revamped? Do mentoring programs, playgrounds, or sponsoring block parties lead more typically to greater social capital creation?

Robert Putnam describes the measurement of social capital in the beginning of this 2006 BBC report; the remaining first half of the broadcast discusses the U.K.’s social capital. We have been undertaking various applied activities in the realm of measurement:

1)2000 S