This paper examines the relationship between witchcraft beliefs, a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon, and various elements of social capital. Using novel survey data from nineteen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa we establish a robust negative association between the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs and multiple measures of trust which holds after accounting for country fixed effects and potential...

This article reviews research from several behavioral disciplines to derive strategies for prompting people to perform behaviors that are individually costly and provide negligible individual or social benefits but are meaningful when performed by a large number of individuals. Whereas the term social influence encompasses all the ways in which people influence other people, social mobilization...

Human genetic research databases cast a new light on the controversial issue of which uses of the human body are morally permissible. More specifically, banking human tissue raises issues relating to the ownership of the samples that the participants have donated, to the ownership of the data that are derived through processing the donated samples, and to the management arrangements that better...

In this paper we investigate the connection between language and community membership of long time community participants through computational modeling techniques. We report on findings from an analysis of language usage within a popular online discussion forum with participation of thousands of users spanning multiple years. We find community norms of long time participants that are character...

Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge the support of our funders – the Nuffield Foundation – and the members of our project advisory group. The Nuffield Foundation is an endowed charitable trust that aims to improve social wellbeing in the widest sense. It funds research and innovation in education and social policy and also works to build capacity in education, science and social science ...

Project LION (Learning In Our Neighborhood) was a community partnership between local University, Charitable Foundation, the City, and Parish (County) School System that provided affordable after-school academic enrichment activities for students who are at risk in grades 4 through 8. The multiple-year foundation grant program development fee waivers allowed broad participation among low-income...