“Tracking the Leakage of Development Goods Using iBeacon Technology”
with Jenny Hamilton and Muthoni Nganga

The leakage of development goods is a major challenge for governments and the aid industry, and a leading preoccupation of development practitioners and academic researchers. Although commonly reported and lamented, such leakage is challenging to quantify precisely. We address this evidentiary blind spot by piloting the use of iBeacon technology to track the distribution of solar lanterns distributed by village heads in off-grid communities in Western Kenya. We provide evidence on the efficacy of the technology for detecting the lanterns and tracking their movement over time. We then draw on survey data collected in every household in which a lantern was ever detected and a random sample of other households to better understand why some households received the lanterns and others did not. We find evidence consistent with the faithful execution of program guidelines, with deviations explained largely by the desire to aid needy community members who would otherwise have been excluded. Our findings run against common depictions of local African elites as predatory actors seeking to capture development resources for their own ends, and suggest the need to rethink the common equation of “leakage” or “misallocation” with malfeasance.

“Ethnic Bias in Urban and Rural Africa”

The project investigates whether coethnic bias (defined as differential altruism toward coethnics and non-coethnics) differs across urban and rural residents in Kenya. The project follows up on the results reported in Berge et al (2020), which investigates coethnic bias among residents of Nairobi and finds no evidence of bias—except among subjects who had lived in Nairobi for fewer than ten years. These findings suggest that, contrary to the expectations of modernization theory, urban residence may dampen rather than heighten coethnic bias. A key implication is that we should see differences in the levels of coethnic bias across urban and rural samples. To measure coethnic bias, I compare patterns of play in Dictator, Public Goods, and “Choose Your Dictator” games across coethnic and non-coethnic partners recruited in urban and rural settings in Kenya. Although prior work has employed behavioral games to measure coethnic bias, this research has been limited either to urban or rural domains. No research to my knowledge has been designed explicitly to compare levels of coethnic bias in urban and rural settings using these techniques.

“Can a Distraction Task Reveal Hidden Bias in Economics Games?”
with Jenny Hamilton and Chad Hazlett

Behavioral economics games such as the Dictator Game (DG) have been widely used to quantify ethnic and other between-group biases. However, in numerous contexts where ethnicity is thought to be extremely salient, the DG has failed to detect any evidence of ethnic bias. A compelling hypothesis for this failure is that economics games like the DG permit participants to alter their behavior to fit social norms that discourage ethnic bias or discrimination. Drawing on dual process models from psychology, we induce cognitive load through a concurrently played distraction task (the Spatial Delayed Recall Task) in a within-subjects experimental design. If self-monitoring explains the apparent lack of ethnic bias in the DG, and if self-monitoring can be reduced through such distraction, then a proportion of bias may be “unmasked” when the DG is played concurrently with the distraction task. We calibrated the difficulty of the SDRT in a separate pilot study with over 200 participants. We deploy this design among 558 Kikuyu and Luo participants in Nairobi, Kenya, a setting in which previous DG studies failed to produce evidence of ethnic bias among these groups even though ample evidence can be found for the salience of such bias in daily life. Contrary to expectations, we find no evidence of differential ethnic bias across DGs conducted with and without the distraction task, notwithstanding evidence that the distraction task does in fact (modestly) increase cognitive load. We conclude that the inability of DGs to detect ethnic bias is likely not because they permit self-monitoring and social desirability bias.

“Modulating Our Better Angels: A Brain Stimulation Study of Cognitive Processes Underlying Effortful Control of Racism”
with Chad Hazlett, Marco Iacobini, and Akila Kadambi

Efforts that many people make to avoid showing biases toward other ethnic or racial groups, while not always sufficient or effective, are critically important to how we treat each other and to the functioning of our diverse society. While this “effort to control racism” has long been studied in social psychology, we know little about  its neurocognitive underpinnings. Our previous work shows that two prefrontal areas of the brain modulate generosity towards others, with the DLPFC particularly operative in controlling racist impulses. We posit they may also control racism. Using multiple assessments of bias and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) we aim to show  that transient inhibition of these areas may reduce the ability to override implicit biases, enhancing racially biased behavior. These results will contribute to an early understanding of how to modulate functional mechanisms to overcome racial bias.

“Promoting Reconciliation in Conflict-Affected Communities in Mali”
with Chad Hazlett and Salma Mousa

The ongoing conflict in Mali has deepened inter-group tensions in many communities. In partnership with USAID, we are designing, implementing, and evaluating the impact of an intervention designed to promote reconciliation in conflict-affected communities in the Mopti and Ségou regions of the country. The intervention and accompanying evaluation will allow us to test the relative and joint impacts of cash transfers and more traditional conflict regulating programming on inter-group tensions.

“Do Farmers Displaced by Farmer-Herder Conflict Update Their Views About Herders When They Are Informed About the Circumstances that Caused the Herders to Leave Their Traditional Grazing Lands?”
with Adejumo Oluwabunmi, Efobi Uchenna, and Jiyoung Kim

Resource-based conflict is a widespread issue that leads to violence, disruption of peaceful coexistence between communities, and disintegration of social ties. Working in IDP camps in herder-farmer zones in Nigeria, we evaluate how exposure to information about the climate change-related factors that induced herders to migrate into farming lands may generate greater acceptance of herders by farmers and improvements in inter-community relations.

“Ethnic Identification and Ethnic Deception: Experimental Evidence from Uganda, South Africa, and the United States”
with Adam S. Harris, Daniel L. Nielson, Lily Medina, Clara Bicalho, Michael G. Findley, Jeremy M. Weinstein, James Habyarimana, and Macartan Humphreys

Social scientists widely believe that ethnicity has special ability to demarcate political cleavages. First, people can generally discern others’ ethnicity by sight or brief interaction. And second, people cannot easily change their ethnicity. While scholars tend to agree that both of these traits are disproportionately associated with ethnicity, the conditions under which ethnic group memberships are more or less visible and sticky have not yet been systematically investigated. This article formalizes ethnic identifiability, operationalizes its key concepts, and tests its causes through 59,000 observations in lab-in-the-field experiments in Uganda, South Africa, and the United States. The results indicate significant differences across and within country contexts in both the discernability and the mutability of ethnic identity. Critically, we find that people can successfully pass as other ethnicities at moderate to very high rates, depending on country and ethnicity. The findings suggest substantial grounds for treating a bedrock assumption in social science with greater conceptual nuance and more empirical rigor.