ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project is a comparative anthropology of conscience, ethics and human rights. Numerous international human rights documents formally declare their commitment to protect freedom of conscience. But, what is conscience and how do we know it when we see it? How do we distinguish it from self-interest or fanaticism? And what happens when the concept, often associated with a distinct Christian or liberal history, travels across cultural boundaries? The project will examine the cultural conditions under which claims to conscience are made possible, and the types of claims that are most persuasive when doing so. The project addresses these issues through the comparative analysis of three case studies: British pacifists, Sri Lankan activists, and Soviet dissidents. These case studies have been carefully chosen to provide globally significant, but contrasting examples of contests over the implications of claims to conscience. If claims of conscience are often associated with a specifically liberal and Christian tradition, mid-twentieth century Britain can be said to stand at the centre of that tradition. Sri Lanka represents a particularly fraught post-colonial South Asian counterpoint, wracked by nationalist violence, and influenced by ethical traditions associated with forms of Hinduism and Buddhism. Soviet Russia represents a further contrast, a totalitarian regime, where atheism was the dominant ethical language. Finally, the project will return specifically to international human rights institutions, examining the history of the category of conscience in the UN human rights system. This project will be ground breaking, employing novel methods and analytical insights, in order to producing the first comparative analysis of the cultural and political salience of claims of conscience. In doing so, the research aims to transform our understandings of the limits and potentials of attempts to protect freedom of conscience.

1 457 869 €

Start date: 2015-08-01, End date: 2020-07-31

Cognitive control regulates our thoughts and actions, helping us avoid impulsive behaviours that are inappropriate, costly or dangerous. In recent years, evidence has emerged that training in behavioural tasks that promote response inhibition or avoidance of specific stimuli can enhance cognitive control, reducing overeating and alcohol consumption. Despite the promising nature of cognitive control training (CCT), we know little about which CCT methods are most effective, how individual differences determine training outcomes, whether CCT produces benefits for real-life behaviour, and how CCT alters – and is determined by – the structure and function of the brain. My aim is to discover what works in CCT and how the effects of training relate to neurophysiology. Subproject 1 will be the largest ever trial on the effectiveness of different CCT methods for achieving weight loss, recruiting 36,000 participants worldwide to complete an internet-based training programme via the Guardian. This study will reveal, with high statistical power, which CCT methods are the most effective and which individual differences are most important for producing real-life benefits. Subproject 2 will investigate how CCT influences neurobiology, and how individual differences in neurobiology influence CCT outcomes. In Subproject 2a, I will focus on theoretically predicted changes to GABAergic systems in prefrontal and motor cortex, and I will test the effect of GABAergic brain stimulation on training outcomes. In Subproject 2b, I will use concurrent brain stimulation (TMS) and brain imaging (fMRI) to test how CCT alters top-down coupling between prefrontal cortex and remote regions that mediate reward and emotion. I will also study how CCT alters, and is altered by, white matter microstructure. This project promises to advance understanding of the causal determinants and moderators of CCT, with implications for its suitability as a clinical adjunct in addiction therapy and behaviour change.

1 998 305 €

Start date: 2015-11-01, End date: 2020-10-31

A vital part of successful everyday social interaction is the ability to infer information about others (e.g. their emotions, visual perspective, and language). Development of these social skills (termed Theory of Mind, ToM) has been linked to improvements in more general cognitive skills, called Executive Functions (EF). However, to date very little is known of how this link varies with advancing age, and no model exists to explain the relationship. Thus, the key aim of the proposed research is to systematically explore the cognitive basis of social communication and how this changes across the life-span. The research will address three complementary objectives: (1) to what degree can variations in ToM ability across the life-span be accounted for by changes in EF skills, (2) how do ToM ability and EF skill change over time in different age groups (using longitudinal methods, i.e. test-retest of the same participants), and (3) can ToM ability be enhanced through training specific EF skills, and how do these training effects differ across the life-span. Contrary to traditional studies of social communication, I will employ an interdisciplinary approach that links theory and practice from cognitive, social, developmental, and clinical (neuro)psychology to study the relationship between ToM and EF across a broad and dynamic age range (10 to 80+ yrs old). I will use cutting-edge combinations of techniques (eye-tracking and EEG) and paradigms, alongside sophisticated statistical methods to track the timecourse of social understanding, and model how it relates to EF and more general cognitive/social skills (eg. IQ, language) within and between individuals. This research will open up new horizons in ToM research by developing an intervention programme to enhance the quality of social communication in older adults (thus improving their mental health and well-being), which has the potential to be applied in other individuals with social communication deficits (eg. autism).

1 488 028 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

Social media can have an impressive impact on civic engagement and political discourse. Yet increasingly we find political actors using digital media and automated scripts for social control. Computational propaganda—through bots, botnets, and algorithms—has become one of the most concerning impacts of technology innovation. Unfortunately, bot identification and impact analysis are among the most difficult research challenges facing the social and computer sciences. COMPROP objectives are to advance a) rigorous social and computer science on bot use, b) critical theory on digital manipulation and political outcomes, c) our understanding of how social media propaganda impacts social movement organization and vitality. This project will innovate through i) “real-time” social and information science actively disseminated to journalists, researchers, policy experts and the interested public, ii) the first detailed data set of political bot activity, iii) deepened expertise through cultivation of a regional expert network able to detect bots and their impact in Europe. COMPROP will achieve this through multi-method and reflexive work packages: 1) international qualitative fieldwork with teams of bot makers and computer scientists working to detect bots; 2a) construction of an original event data set of incidents of political bot use and 2b) treatment of the data set with fuzzy set and traditional statistics; 3) computational theory for detecting political bots and 4) a sustained dissemination strategy. This project will employ state-of-the-art “network ethnography” techniques, use the latest fuzzy set / qualitative comparative statistics, and advance computational theory on bot detection via cutting-edge algorithmic work enhanced by new crowd-sourcing techniques. Political bots are already being deployed over social networks in Europe. COMPROP will put the best methods in social and computer science to work on the size of the problem and the possible solutions.

1 980 112 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31

My proposal consists of two strands linked by a common theme--namely a concern for the impact of disasters, in financial markets and more generally--and by a shared methodology. In the first of these strands, I propose to develop ways of using observable asset price data to infer the beliefs of market participants about various quantities that are central to financial economics, including (i) the equity premium; (ii) the forward-looking autocorrelation of the market (i.e., time-series momentum); (iii) the risk premia associated with individual stocks; (iv) the correlation between stocks; and (v) measures of asymmetric risk, such as the forward-looking probability of a significant downward jump in the stock market over some prescribed time period. This work will exploit theoretical techniques that I have developed in previous research, and that allow for the possibility of jumps and disasters in financial markets. I will therefore be able to avoid the unpalatable assumption—which is made, implicitly or explicitly, in much of the finance literature—that uncertainty is driven by conditionally Normally distributed shocks (or, in continuous time, by Brownian motions). The importance of doing so is underscored by the turmoil in financial markets over the last few years. These techniques will also be applied in the second strand of my proposal, which focuses on issues related to catastrophes more generally, including for example climate change; highly contagious viruses on the scale of the influenza pandemic of 1918; or nuclear or bio-terrorism. This project will be joint with Professor Robert S. Pindyck of MIT. The goal is to provide a framework within which policymakers, faced with multiple different types of potential catastrophe, can determine how society’s limited resources should best be used to alleviate the associated risks.

1 287 755 €

Start date: 2015-05-01, End date: 2020-04-30

National governments operate under the growing constraints of European integration that limit the choices they can offer citizens and the policy instruments they can use. Yet, despite the centrality of political choice to the functioning of electoral democracy, we know very little about the consequences of constrained political choices for citizens’ engagement in democratic processes. Across Europe, an increasing number of citizens are supporting extreme parties or declining to take part in democratic elections. This project offers the first systematic examination of how the range and substance of political choices offered to citizens in the EU shape democratic perceptions and electoral behaviour. Understanding how citizens perceive and react to the growing constraints on domestic politics is crucial to a diagnosis of European democracy and for an evidence-based debate on reform of EU institutions. Building on the Principal Investigator’s award-winning research on electoral democracy and extensive experience of designing and analysing cross-national surveys and experiments, this project is a pioneering study of the consequences of constrained democracy. It uniquely combines a large-N cross-national analysis of citizens’ responses to mainstream party convergence and case studies of the ‘emergency politics’ of the Eurozone crisis with micro-level experimental work. This project aims to transform the study of citizens’ democratic attitudes and behaviour by focusing on the importance of political choice. By developing and testing a theoretical model of heterogeneous citizen responses to the constrained political choice, the project provides insights into why citizens turn against mainstream parties or exit democratic processes altogether. This further allows EUDEMOS to develop proposals for how institutions can be designed to facilitate citizens’ participation in and satisfaction with democratic processes in a multi-level European Union.

1 508 822 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2021-01-31

The objective of the proposal is to examine ways to increase European growth through technological and managerial innovation. The technological innovation aspect is focused on examining the lifecycle of innovators and entrepreneurs across several advanced countries. We will examine the impact of financial constraints, tax and schooling policies on stimulating greater innovation. The second theme will examine by how much managerial practices can account for differences in the wealth of nations and how management quality can be improved, focusing on randomized control trials of business support polices. In addition to conducting our own surveys and drawing on administrative data, we will use Big Data techniques to measure management and corporate culture within firms. As a package this will constitute a ground-breaking piece of social science that will change the way we think about what drives prosperity across firms and countries. We are confident that this will lay foundations for better policies in Europe and elsewhere to help improve growth.

1 957 592 €

Start date: 2015-11-01, End date: 2020-10-31

Can states promote economic development without infringing upon their cultural heritage? Although economic globalization and international economic governance have spurred a more intense dialogue and interaction among nations - potentially promoting cultural diversity and providing the funds to recover and preserve cultural heritage - these phenomena can also jeopardize the cultural wealth of nations. Trade in cultural products can lead to cultural homogenization and even to cultural hegemony. In parallel, foreign direct investments have an unmatched penetrating force with the ultimate capacity of changing landscapes and erasing memory. At the same time, the increase in global trade, economic integration and foreign direct investment has determined the creation of legally binding and highly effective regimes that demand states to promote and facilitate trade and foreign direct investment. Has an international economic culture emerged that emphasizes productivity and economic development at the expense of cultural wealth? Does the existing legal framework adequately protect the cultural wealth of nations vis-à-vis economic globalization? Could existing mechanisms in international and European law constrain negative effects of globalization? HERITAGE aims to map the interaction between economic globalization and each specimen of cultural heritage - world heritage, cultural diversity, intangible cultural heritage, indigenous heritage and underwater cultural heritage - in international and European law by investigating the relevant case law before international courts and tribunals. The study adopts an interdisciplinary approach; the relevant cases will be investigated in consideration of both their legal and cultural relevance. The main outcome of this research project will be a monograph written by the principal investigator to be published by a major international publisher; and a number of articles to be published in major international journals.

485 138 €

Start date: 2015-05-01, End date: 2018-08-31

"World Bank, EC Joint Research Centre, and other bodies have recently highlighted the potential of online labour markets to boost employment and economic growth. While national job markets have stagnated, online labour markets that connect firms with knowledge and service workers around the world have grown up to 60% a year. An overlooked aspect of these markets is that they extricate workers and employers from national institutional frameworks, such as employment law and collective bargaining, and instead impose their own, technologically enforced institutions. For example, a leading marketplace recently instated a global minimum wage of 4.00 USD/h. With over 540,000 employers and 4,000,000 registered workers in 180 countries, this Californian company is making critical labour policy decisions that influence businesses and individuals from Berlin to Manila. The objective of this project is to lay bare the politics and institutions of these next-generation labour markets promoted with discourses of technological progress. Whose interests find expression in their institutions? Some online workers have begun to organize transnationally with the help of digital media. How do online labour movements emerge and assert power on these markets? And finally, to what extent are these relations still reducible to struggles between capital and labour, rather than more ambiguous networked models of production? We will tackle these questions through a combination of conventional social research methods and innovative Internet research methods, on both virtual research sites (online labour markets and workers' online communities) and physical research sites (market operators' premises and worker gatherings). We survey, interview, and observe designers and workers to reconstruct processes through which online markets, institutions, and movements are shaped, and ""scrape"" online data to quantify their influence. The results will open up important new vistas in labour policy debate."

1 499 911 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

Human technology is vastly superior to that of other apes: human tools from telescopes to the Large Hadron Collider exploit causal relationships but also explore them. What change over the brief course of hominid evolution made for such a big difference? One theory implicates a single cognitive distinction: the ability to reinterpret the world in abstract terms. In contrast, in several studies, chimpanzees seemed to rely on surface appearances, as if for the apes there was no more to the situation than met the eye. The theory is seductively simple, but this proposal argues that it is too early to rule out deep evolutionary roots for inquiring minds. Experiments designed specifically to compare humans and other primates are proposed covering two broad lines of study: causal cognition and executive function. To disentangle causal reasoning from simpler mechanisms three approaches are planned. The first will look at intervention: will subjects use exploration to seek hidden causes? The second will focus on natural mechanics: do subjects reason about physical properties or rely on perceptual correlates? The third examines causal learning from observation when the task’s mechanics are opaque. The second line of study explores executive functions. An inquiring primate mind could flourish if more information could be held in mind and manipulated. But we know little about how executive functions compare across primates. A new test battery will explore levels of working memory, inhibition, and attention shifting. Executive functions undergo radical development in human childhood, and individual differences correlate with performance on tests of physical and social reasoning. The intersection between these skills may therefore be particularly revealing. This proposal aims to use cross-sectional testing of causal cognition and executive control in the same individuals to explore how these cognitive skills interact to produce inquiring minds.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2015-08-01, End date: 2020-07-31

Families in Western countries have received a great deal of attention from social scientists but there is less information on family life in other regions of the world. Given its growing rapidly in global influence, China represents a crucial region for sociological advancement and understanding. There have been profound changes in the Chinese family over the last century as a result of industrialization, urbanization, the influence of the West and the political interventions carried out by the Communist Party since 1949. Existing scholarship has shown how the structure and function of Chinese families have adapted to changing political and economic circumstances but little is known about the changes in intimate spheres of Chinese families. This project will approach the subject of modern Chinese family life from an unconventional angle, analysing it as a process of practices and experiences. By setting a new agenda that moves from structures of family relationships to the quality of relationships and through examining ‘doing intimacy’, this project will take a closer, fresher, critical look at the Chinese family dynamics as they are lived. Informed by the emerging literature on gender, intimacy and modernity, this project will examine intergenerational relations as well as gender and sexual relations in the family. Is there an intimate revolution taking place? How is ‘modernity’/’tradition’ closely linked with practices of intimacy? To what extent can doing intimacy be a site of empowerment/domination for women? What will the study of Chinese families tell us about agency and local/global change? Through a multi-sited ethnography (mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan), this study will also compare practices of intimacy in various sites and examine whether/how they are by-products of particular socio-cultural configurations. It will identify the extent to which changes in Chinese families mirror changes in the West and the factors that contribute to these changes.

1 487 500 €

Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2020-09-30

‘Research is an investment in our future’ says Horizon 2020. That’s only true if you know what to do with it. When it comes to social policy, we don’t really know how to put our research results to use. K4U aims to remedy this. K4U will construct a radically new picture of how to use social science to build better social policies. This picture will be founded on an ambitious philosophical study of the technology of social science including a thorough reconceptualisation of objectivity, deliberation and the role of values in the science/society interface. Current work, primarily by the evidence-based policy and practice movement, focusses on knowledge production: encouraging high quality studies and vetting them. Little attention goes to knowledge use: How is social science knowledge to be used in policy design and deliberation – how should it be used so that policy outcomes are more effective and more reliably predictable and competing values and points of view are respected in policy choice and implementation? K4U will provide not just a theoretical but a practical understanding— for users: intelligible and practically helpful to those who need to estimate and balance the effectiveness, the evidence, the chances of success, the costs, the benefits, the winners and losers, and the social, moral, political and cultural acceptability of proposed policies. The philosophical approach of K4U is broadly Popperian. It views ‘science and technology as a means of understanding social problems and responding to them’ and it emphasises the concrete and detailed, where the real content of general philosophical concepts and claims is embodied and interrogated. K4U is a showcase for the kind of philosophy that makes a difference to real life -- philosophy for practice. And it will launch an entire new field in philosophy: the philosophy of social technology.

2 092 125 €

Start date: 2015-11-01, End date: 2020-10-31

Understanding spoken language involves a complex set of processes that transform the auditory input into a meaningful interpretation. Our percept is not of acoustic-phonetic detail but of the speaker’s intended meaning. This effortless transition occurs on millisecond timescales, with remarkable speed and accuracy, and without any awareness of the complex computations on which it depends. How is this achieved? What are the processes and representations that support the transition from sound to meaning, and what are the neurobiological systems in which they are instantiated? In this proposal, we combine advanced techniques from neuroimaging, multivariate statistics and computational linguistics to probe directly the dynamic patterns of neural activity, over bilateral fronto-temporal and parietal cortices, that are elicited by spoken words and sentences. Combined MEG + EEG imaging, linked to parallel fMRI studies, capture the real-time electrophysiological activity of the brain. Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) and related multivariate techniques make it possible to probe the different types of neural computation that support these dynamic processes of incremental interpretation. Computational linguistic analyses of language corpora allow us to build quantifiable models of different dimensions of language interpretation – from phonetics and phonology to argument structure and anaphora - and to test for their presence, using RSA, as the utterance unfolds in real time. By this means we aim to determine directly the nature of the intermediate processes involved in the transition from early perceptual processing through different representational states to the development of a meaningful representation of an utterance, the dynamic spatio-temporal relationship between these processes, and their evolution over time.

2 185 856 €

Start date: 2015-10-01, End date: 2021-09-30

The typical 20th-century firm was capital-intensive and competed on cost efficiency. The 21st-century firm is different. Competitive success increasingly depends on product quality, which in turn hinges on intangible assets such as brand strength, innovation, and corporate culture. Unlike tangible investment such as buying a factory, the fruits of intangible investment may take several years to appear. A manager pressured to maximise short-term earnings may fail to invest, jeopardising the long-term future of his firm. This project will study the determinants and consequences of long-term investment through three linked components. Financial Markets. The traditional view is that financial markets dissuade investment by forcing firms to cater to short-term shareholders. I will study two channels through which markets promote investment. First, traders gather information about a firm’s past investments and incorporate it into stock prices by trading - rewarding the manager for good investment. Second, traders can gather information about a firm’s future investment opportunities - informing the manager about his future investment decisions. I aim to analyse what determines the efficiency of both channels. Incentives. Most research on incentives focuses on either the level of pay, or the sensitivity of pay to performance, but it is the horizon of incentives that is key to promoting investment. I will theoretically analyse the optimal incentive horizon, and empirically demonstrate how it affects long-term decisions. Moving beyond managers, I will study how to incentivise teachers to focus on their pupils’ long-run development rather than “teaching-to-the-test.” Effects of Investment. A key to inducing long-run investment is to demonstrate its benefits, but this is difficult due to data availability. I aim to gather data on a firm’s corporate social responsibility – its investment in its stakeholders – and link it to firm value.

899 105 €

Start date: 2015-04-01, End date: 2018-03-31

Macroeconomic policies and macroeconomic institutions influence aggregate outcomes along a number of significant dimensions. While the empirical literature has traditionally focussed on the direct effects on economic activity and inflation, little is known on the impact that policy and institutional changes exert on the macroeconomy through their indirect effects on the distribution of resources available to households and firms. This proposal describes my research agenda over the next five years to fill this important gap in academic and policy knowledge. The emphasis is on a new empirical framework to revisit the transmission mechanism of changes in macroeconomic policies and institutions through their (possibly unintended) consequences on uncertainty, risk and inequality across diverse groups of society and across countries. The proposed approach combines survey data, international evidence and a narrative identification of policy and institutional changes from the analysis of historical records. Another main contribution will be the development of analytical frameworks to account for the stylized facts uncovered by the proposed empirical approach. These include models of imperfect information on individual tax rates and inter-generational risk-sharing within households as well as characterizations of the way monetary institutions and labour market regulations interact to affect macroeconomic uncertainty and financial market volatility. The ambition is to generate a set of testable predictions that could then be used to identify and assess the relative merits of specific theoretical mechanisms in the data. On the policy side, this research will provide new estimates for the aggregate effects of government and monetary interventions. Furthermore, it will make it possible to identify the groups who have benefitted/suffered most from the specific changes that have dominated most of the recent past and whose redistributive implications appear so far overlooked.

957 089 €

Start date: 2015-08-01, End date: 2018-07-31

One of the most profound and long-lasting effects of the war efforts of all major combatant nations during the First World War was the high number of casualties caused by modern industrial warfare. Examining the case of Britain, this project asks what formal and informal structures developed in the interwar years to provide medical and social care to the unprecedented number of war disabled. It further explores how these different forms of care both were shaped by gendered understandings of care-giving and utilized gender to mobilize public and private support for disabled ex-servicemen. While there have been a number of studies of charitable organizations established for the care of disabled ex-servicemen, and of the relationships between the State, the soldier and his family in this era, this is the first study to examine the role of these formal institutions alongside and in relation to the informal social and medical care provided by the family in this period. Through its examination of issues of social, political and domestic responsibility for the care of disabled ex-servicemen, issues which continue to have relevance in light of the survival of service personnel from conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan who have suffered massive injuries and multiple amputations, the project seeks not only to engage with historical discussions of the development of medical practice in the first half of the twentieth century but also, through engagement with current policy makers working with and for disabled service personnel, to make a significant intervention into contemporary social policy relating to the provision of medical and social care. By utilizing the methodological prism of gender studies, this project also explores the ways in which medical and social care were gendered to interrogate social and cultural understandings of care-giving in the first half of the 20th century and thereby gain greater insight into the relationships between men, women and care.

1 079 426 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

“World literature is literature that circulates globally. It is mostly in English. Its main genre is the novel.” These are caricatures of how World literature as a set of discourses is shaping the field of literary studies, but in fact Non-Western literatures are positioned with reference to a single global timeline and a single map, and translations supposedly ensure that worthy texts enter the global canon. What does not circulate globally is provincial, not good enough, not “world literature”. This picture bears little resemblance to the multilingual world of literature, which consists not of a single map but of many “significant geographies” specific to language, group, and genre. By exploring the often fractured “multilingual locals” and “significant geographies” of literature in north India, Morocco, and Ethiopia—each with different experiences of literary multilingualism, colonial diglossia, and continuing oral traditions—we seek to establish a multilingual and located approach to world literature in place of meta-categories like “global” and “world”. Mindful of older histories and networks of literary multilingualism and critical of the monolingual straitjacket of modern literary histories that partition Anglophone and Francophone literature from Arabic, Amharic, and Hindi/Urdu, we focus on three periods: imperial consolidation, decolonization, and the current globalizing moment. We will study local transculturations, local debates on world literature, old and new forms of multilingualism, actors and technologies of print and orality, to highlight dynamics of appropriation rather than imitation, co-constitution rather than diffusion, and the multiplicity of choices and trajectories that together form local and transnational literary fields (“world literature”). The project will propose a theoretical approach, methods for multilingual training and research, and strategic dialogues with scholars and writers in Morocco, Ethiopia, India, UK and France.

2 482 416 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31

Economics has traditionally assumed that individuals seek to satisfy coherent and asocial preferences, and has used the satisfaction of those preferences as a normative criterion. This ‘neoclassical’ approach has supported a view of the market as an institution in which privately-motivated individual actions tend to produce socially beneficial consequences. These ideas have been called into question by recent developments in behavioural economics, which point to the cognitive limitations of economic agents, the instability of preferences, and the existence of pro-social motivations. A common inference is that traditional presumptions in favour of the market and against paternalism are invalidated. I aim to develop an approach to normative economics, and a corresponding understanding of the role of markets, which do not require neoclassical rationality assumptions but may still support those presumptions. My approach is innovative in two ways. First, the criterion for normative analysis is opportunity, not preference satisfaction. Even if individuals lack coherent preferences, opportunities for mutually advantageous transactions can be defined in a normatively significant way, and competitive markets can be shown to be effective in providing such opportunities. Second, using a new version of the theory of ‘team reasoning’, the relationship between parties to a market transaction can be construed in terms of a joint intention to achieve mutual benefit. This motivation can support practices of trust and cooperation without disabling market incentives. Using the methods of theoretical and experimental economics and analytical philosophy, I will formalise and integrate these ideas and extend them to provide a new understanding of the role of government in the economy. This work will include analyses of distributional fairness, market ethics, and of the role of regulation in maintaining competitive markets in the face of consumers’ cognitive limitations.

1 172 374 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-09-30

In human populations, skills and knowledge accumulate over generations, giving rise to behaviours and technologies far more complex than any single individual could achieve alone. This ratchet-like property of human culture appears absent in nonhuman species, as socially transmitted behaviours in animal populations are generally no more complex than those that can be acquired by trial and error. Scientists from a wide range of disciplines have offered high-profile speculative theories about the underlying differences that might be responsible for this striking evolutionary discontinuity, but adequate empirical evidence is still lacking. In the RATCHETCOG project, Dr Caldwell and her team will, for the first time, implement a comprehensive systematic investigation into cumulative cultural evolution, using an experimental method that offers sufficient flexibility to generate valid comparisons across three critical research domains: species differences across the primate family tree; age differences over human development; and learning condition differences in groups of adult human participants. The methods devised for the project will make it possible to both measure and manipulate the complexity of the behaviours learned, thus offering a tool for analysing the extent of ratcheting under different conditions and across different populations. Each of the three research strands provides a vital source of evidence. Studies of nonhuman primates will reveal the limits on learning in these species, and studies with children will provide key opportunities to determine which cognitive abilities predict the development of capacities for cumulative culture. Finally, comparing different learning conditions in groups of adults is critical, as these experiments will allow clear causal conclusions regarding prerequisites and constraints, in relation to task complexity. The project will therefore fully expose the cognitive machinery responsible for the uniqueness of human culture.

1 780 454 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

This research project is motivated from three observations regarding recent trends in empirical economics using micro-level data. First, researchers are increasingly aware of the trade-off between credibility and the strength of the assumptions maintained, eloquently termed as the law of decreasing credibility by Charles F. Manski. This trend has led to recent intensive research in partial identification. Second, applied empirical research is increasingly based on data collected for study by individual researchers, quite often through laboratory or field experiments. Third, high-dimensional data are more readily available than ever before, and have received growing attention in economics. In view of these observations, there is a call for research to improve standard econometric practice by facing identification problems upfront, by providing econometrically sound guidelines for data collection, and by making use of the increasing availability of high-dimensional data without sacrificing the credibility of econometric methods. This research project aims to contribute to advances in microeconometrics by considering the issues of identification, data collection, and high-dimensional data carefully. The proposed research builds on semiparametric and nonparametric approaches to increase the credibility of proposed econometric methods. In particular, the proposed research will: (1) develop identification results of practical value and characterize optimal data collection for applied researchers; (2) make advances in estimation, inference, and testing in a variety of microeconometric models; (3) produce credible evidence in applied microeconometric research; (4) develop computer software that implements newly available microeconometric techniques.

1 292 297 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31

"We test the working hypothesis that humans are constantly engaging in social chemosignaling, and that this serves as a major yet underappreciated force in shaping human social behavior. A major component of social chemosignaling in macrosmatic mammals is conveying of social status, namely dominance/submissiveness. We start by testing the novel hypothesis that humans similarly share information on social status through chemosignals. In support of this, we provide pilot data for a ""smell of dominance"". Next, we ask how do humans sample these social chemosignals? We hypothesize that handshaking serves subliminal sampling of social chemosignaling, and provide comprehensive pilot data implying that humans indeed subliminally sniff their own hands after shaking. Given the importance we attribute to social chemosignaling, one may ask why aren't anosmic individuals significantly socially impaired? We test the hypothesis that social chemosignals are processed by brain mechanisms independent of the main olfactory system. In support of this, we provide pilot data implying a brain response to social chemosignals in individuals with congenital anosmia. Finally, we ask what happens if social chemosignaling is selectively impaired? Given the social impairment we would predict following such social anosmia, we hypothesize that it may be a component of autism spectrum disorder. In support of this hypothesis we provide pilot data of altered social chemosignaling in high functioning adults with autism, and altered olfactory responses in children just diagnosed with autism. The latter implies a potential non-verbal non-task dependent diagnostic measure for autism. Together, this combines to a radically different perspective on human social behavior. We argue that humans are constantly chemosignaling, and that uncovering these effects will provide for better understanding of human social behavior, and potential diagnosis and treatments for diseases involving altered social performance."

2 074 206 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

This research project critically examines ‘toxic expertise’, the contested politics of making scientific claims about the health impacts of toxic pollution. Toxic expertise has a double meaning: scientific expertise about the effects of toxic pollution, and the toxic nature of expertise that is used to justify a lack of corporate social responsibility. The research focuses on the global petrochemical industry as a significant but controversial source of toxic pollution, with unequal regulations and risks across different countries and populations. Debates about the global petrochemical industry reflect conflicting interests between jobs, prosperity, and health. This research contributes to interdisciplinary social scientific research on science and technology, environmental justice movements, and the uneven geography of capitalism. In particular, it develops sociological arguments that scientific ‘expertise’ is inherently political and socially constructed. This mixed method comparative research will be conducted in three stages. The first stage will examine toxic expertise in the leading global petrochemical companies and environmental non-governmental organisations in Western Europe, North America, and China. The second stage will focus on in-depth case studies in the United States and China, two of the top petrochemical producers in the world. The third stage will develop an international public resource of toxic expertise to address practical challenges of capacity and scale inherent within both dominant and citizen-led epidemiology, by developing accessible information and tools for understanding, monitoring, and reporting toxic pollutants and their health impacts. The project offers the first systematic sociological analysis of the global petrochemical industry in relation to environmental justice, responding to calls within critical social science for the democratisation of science which highlight the need for greater accountability and transparency.

1 455 108 €

Start date: 2015-08-01, End date: 2020-07-31

Two questions about linguistic identity lie at the heart of this project. What is the relation historically between language and identity in Europe? How are cognate languages demarcated from each other? Normative models of national languages helped shape Europe. Yet they did not become hegemonic until the 19th century. Indeed, they were imposed (not always successfully) on a linguistic map of Europe more fluid and complex than most histories of national languages allow. In the Middle Ages multilingualism was common, as was the use of non-local languages, notably Latin, but also French. This project undertakes a revaluation of the nature and value of the use of French in Europe during a crucial period, 1100-1450, less in terms of its cultural prestige (the traditional focus of scholarship) than of its role as a supralocal, transnational language, particularly in Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The project fosters collaboration between, and cuts across, different intellectual and national scholarly traditions, drawing on expertise in codicology, critical theory, linguistics, literature, and philology; it involves scholars from a range of European countries and North America, entailing empirical research around a complex and widely disseminated textual tradition vital to medieval understandings of European history and identity, L’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. This case study will ground and stimulate broader speculative reflection on the two core questions concerning linguistic identity. While the project builds on prior critiques of the construction of, and investment in, national languages and literary traditions, it has a broad historical scope, and will offer an innovative, genuinely international perspective, in terms of both its object of study and method. Indeed, its final aim, through and beyond its consideration of French as a lingua franca, is to interrogate that language’s role in the emergence of a European identity in the Middle Ages.

2 274 225 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

Why do human societies differ in whom they class as family? Why are cousins classed with siblings in some societies but not others? Accounting for the variable ways that cultures classify kin is an enduring puzzle. The VARIKIN project takes a cultural evolutionary approach to variety and unity and engages different fields–cultural phylogenetics, corpus linguistics, and cross-cultural child development. VARIKIN-Evolution asks how and why does kinship diversity evolve across cultures and over time? Using comparative phylogenetic modeling of cultural evolution we investigate the dynamics of how kinship terminologies and family norms change in eight language families. Are there “universal” patterns of change, or does local cultural history and context determine changes in family organisation? How do social norms drive change in kinship terminology? VARIKIN-Usage investigates how people use kinship language by using corpus linguistics, surveys, and interviews to quantify patterns of usage in spoken and written language. How frequently are kinship terms used in different contexts and what meanings are more prevalent? Do patterns vary between languages, and can the patterns of usage at the individual level be linked to historical processes of change? VARIKIN-Development investigates how children acquire and understand kinship across cultures. Using participant observation and elicitation tasks, we characterise children’s social learning of kinship in a small-scale, non-Western community. Are there cross-cultural patterns of acquisition? Can socialisation produce constraints on the kinds of kinship children can learn? These three research directions are united by a coherent framework for the integration of macro- and micro-evolutionary processes. With a highly multidisciplinary background, the Applicant is uniquely positioned to direct this vanguard project towards a comprehensive understanding of diversity in how we classify our social worlds.

1 233 672 €

Start date: 2015-07-01, End date: 2020-06-30