Guest researcher Dr Gianluca Grimalda talking to his hosts at the University of Passau, Dr Katharina Werner and Professor Johann Graf Lambsdorff University of Passau, University of Passau
In his office at the University of Passau, Dr Gianluca Grimalda is surrounded by souvenirs he brought with him from his travels University of Passau, University of Passau
Does market integration make people more selfish? “If you ask that question people on the street, 99 per cent would affirm that. But in anthropology, many scholars say the opposite,” says Dr Gianluca Grimalda, a social scientist who studies the social impacts of climate change. His experimental studies on Bougainville Island, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, paint a more complex picture. In one village very close to a market town, he was surprised to find people who were very cooperative and most likely to share equally in the experiments.
Dr Grimalda has become known as the scientist who refuses to fly, which was ultimately one of the reasons that cost him his job as a senior researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. His story attracted national and international media attention. It was then that the University of Passau’s Dr Katharina Werner and Professor Graf Lambsdorff decided to invite him to become a research fellow at the PICAIS.
Dr Werner, who is a senior researcher at the Chair of Economic Theory, and Dr Grimalda share a research interest in experimental economics and have already met at various international conferences. “We are delighted that Dr Grimalda will be spending six months in Passau as his research approach fits perfectly with my chair’s focus on experimental and behavioural economics,” says Professor Graf Lambsdorff. During his research stay, Dr Grimalda - with the help of Dr Werner – will analyse the data that he collected during his recent field studies on the island of Bougainville. His aim is to find out if and how the exposure to climate change might have altered previous findings on social cohesion. “People there have started to suffer from food shortages due to longer periods of droughts. In some places, they have told me that they are no longer able to grow certain foods. So that’s worrying.”
About the Passau International Centre for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies (PICAIS)
For his research project, Dr Grimalda has been awarded a fellowship at the Passau International Centre for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies (PICAIS). It is the central platform for interdisciplinary research and networking for visiting scholars from Germany and abroad at the University of Passau. PICAIS promotes interdisciplinary research aligned with the University's strategic guiding themes of Digitalisation, Europe and Sustainability. Its fellowship programme is aimed at internationally outstanding academics and promising early career researchers. During their time at PICAIS, fellows can focus their full attention on their research project – away from the demands of everyday academic life. Calls for applications for the PICAIS Research-in-Residence-Fellowship are currently open.
Four questions about Dr Grimalda's research
How do you measure market integration in your fieldwork?
"For example, we ask people about their diet. How many calories come from food you buy from the market? And how many come from food you grow in your garden? In fact, my team and I have interviewed 1800 people about what they ate yesterday and last week. One of my tasks here in Passau will be to analyse this and reconstruct the market integration from the calories. Another indicator is how close people live to the market, how long it takes to get there and how much money it costs. We are also looking at how much of their income derives from selling their products to international markets. For example, in Bougainville, where I conducted my research, people sell coconut oil to international markets. During our research in 2019, we were able to show that it was mainly the link to the international market that mattered in terms of social cohesion. In some villages, we started to see inequality and tolerance of inequality. And we wanted to look at that more closely."
How did you do that?
"We use experimental economics. That means that we involve people in games. In the villages in Bougainville, we played an ability game between two people at a time. They had to throw rings into a bucket. By doing so, they were assigned 24 kina - local currency in Papua New Guinea - in total. The "winner" would get 20 kina and the "loser" 4 kina. And then we asked them, how they would divide the 24 kina between the two of them. That was our measure of prosociality, the willingness to help each other. They didn’t know who they were dealing with. They knew that it could either be a person from the village or from another village far away. In some villages, many people chose to share fifty-fifty. In some other villages, we found that the person who threw more things into the bucket wanted a bigger share of the 24 kina. And in other villages, in two villages close to the market, we found very selfish people. But in our new data, it seems that the picture is not so clear."
What has changed? Can you give us an example?
"In some villages close to the market town we found very cooperative people, very willing to share. You ask for an example – I was particularly intrigued by one village that was very close, just a four-minute drive on a very good road. So I expected, based on my previous studies, that people would be relatively selfish. Instead, they were super cooperative, they were the people most likely to share equally in the second wave of research. So I wanted to know more about them. They told me that they used to have a cooperative enterprise that involved many people in the community to sell fish. People would go fishing, sell the fish in the market and all the revenues would be shared equally in the community. So in this respect it makes sense that people were so cooperative in our game, it was because they also were cooperative in real life."
What about the concept of homo oeconomicus? How does that fit into this theory?
"The methodology of experimental economics has really been instrumental in destroying that concept and finding that, fortunately, only a minority of people behave like a homo oeconomicus in real life. In our sharing games, we usually find that about a third of participants follow that behaviour. In strategic games, in so-called Trust Games, beliefs on others’ behaviour also matter. But the assumptions of the homo oeconomicus concept coupled with the belief that other people are also homo oeconomicus only predict 5 percent of the behaviour. Most people have social norms and norms of fairness. Of course, you could argue that it’s easier to be nice to other people when there is little money. But even when there is a lot of money, experiments show that people are not completely selfish. In research, we like to talk about homo reciprocans. If I expect you to be nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. This seems closer to our psychology than the psychology of homo oeconomicus. And this is also what I learnt from my travels: I see a lot of propensity to help others, especially to help me. In my travels, I have met at least 50 people who have given their time and sometimes even their money without asking for anything in return, just because they wanted to help. But in many situations it’s true that we don’t cooperate very well. Climate change is probably the most difficult cooperation problem because it involves 8 billion people with very different cultural backgrounds. At the international level, with many different cultures, we see very little cooperation."
Contact for scientific information:
Professor Johann Graf Lambsdorff
Chair of Economic Theory
Innstraße 27
94032 Passau, Germany
mail: Johann.GrafLambsdorff@Uni-Passau.De
