| Popis: |
Across a wide range of cultural contexts, large human groups are defined and organized on the basis of their shared biological descent from the same ancestors. Indeed, many of the typical social units that structure the social organization of many populations are descent groups: lineages, clans, tribes or phratries (Gil-White, 2006; Murdock, 1949; Evans-Pritchard, 1940; Wiessner, 1998). The belief in shared ancestry is also one of the defining characteristics of ethnicity and nationality—whenever nationalism is expressed in ethnic terms (Gil-White, 2006; Horowitz, 1985). In all ethnic groups and many nation-states, people use their shared ancestry to justify the boundaries of their group and, most importantly, the high-levels of cooperation that are expected within these boundaries (Wimmer, 2019; Glowacki, 2022). Nation-states, for instance, require high levels of committment on the part of citizens—they must contribute taxes, serve in the the military and commit to respect the political rights of other citizens—despite strong incentives to shirk these obligations (Weber, 1976). As such, nation-building policies typically rely heavily on myths of shared ancestry to increase the consent of the population to these forms of large-scale cooperation (Weber, 1976; Bouchard, 2013). This research project seeks to understand why shared ancestry is such a powerful organizing principle in many human societies, both in traditional and modern industrial contexts. Our main hypothesis is that shared ancestry is psychologically compelling only to the extent that it conveys information about a group's cultural similarity and ability to cooperate efficiently. As such, shared ancestry is not a natural category of human social cognition, but a useful proxy for information that actually matter for human social behavior. To test this hypothesis, we designed a vignette experiment to examine the interaction effects of shared ancestry with cues of cultural homogeneity and cooperation efficiency on perceived group cohesion. In brief, we predict that information about shared ancestry should have no effect on perceived group cohesion when it is incongruent with more relevant information, such as cultural homogeneity and cooperation efficiency. The goal of this pilot study is to confirm the validity our vignettes—that is, that they are well understood by participants and efficiently modulate participants’ perception of group cohesion. To do so, we assume that the main effects of our variables of interest are true, namely that groups described as having shared ancestry or cultural homogeneity are perceived as more cohesive than groups without these characteristics. These assumptions are justified based on the literature on ethnic and cultural markers in the behavioral sciences (see Table 1 in the preregistration document attached). The goal of this pilot experiment is simply to assess whether our vignettes are appropriate to investigate the interaction effects of shared ancestry with other relevant variables on perceived group cohesion. Consequently, based on these assumptions, we will consider our vignettes as successful if they are able to generate their expected impact on perceived group cohesion. For instance, if a culturally homogeneous group is not rated as more cohesive than a culturally diverse group, we will consider our vignettes to be invalid. This preregistration describes the first step of our pilot investigations. To start, we will assess the effectiveness of our vignettes depicting shared ancestry and cultural homogeneity in eliciting their expected outcomes. |
