“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”

I investigate whether coethnic bias (defined as differential altruism toward coethnics and non-coethnics) differs across urban and rural residents in Kenya. The study 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.

“The Backstory Matters: Reducing Anti-Herder Bias Among Displaced Farmers in Benue State, Nigeria”
with Adejumo Oluwabunmi, Efobi Uchenna, and Jiyoung Kim

Do farmers displaced by farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria update their views about herders when they are informed about the circumstances outside of the herders’ control that forced them to leave their traditional grazing areas and encroach on the farmers’ lands? We address this question by randomizing the exposure of nearly 2,000 displaced farmers to a video depicting the devastating impact of climate change on the herders’ traditional grazing lands. Farmers exposed to the video are more compassionate about the herders’ plight, report greater comfort with a range of hypothetical social interactions with herders, reduce their negative stereotypes about herders, become more trusting of herders, and voice greater support for policies that might improve herders’ livelihoods. Our findings have important implications for improving social cohesion following climate-related conflict and displacement. They also underscore a broader phenomenon: that victims’ responses to harm can be shaped by a deeper appreciation of the circumstances that drove the behavior of the perpetrators.

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

Social scientists widely use behavioral economics games such as the Dictator Game (DG) to measure inter-group biases, including ethnic discrimination. Yet, in numerous contexts where ethnicity is thought to be extremely salient, the DG has failed to detect any evidence of ethnic bias. One explanation is that economics games like the DG permit participants to alter their behavior to fit social norms that discourage ethnic bias or discrimination, thereby masking biases that are nevertheless relevant to real-world and political behavior. We test this explanation by experimentally reducing self-monitoring through a cognitive load manipulation. In a within-subjects design, 555 Kikuyu and Luo adults in Nairobi, Kenya played multiple DG rounds under varying levels of cognitive load induced by a spatial delayed recall task (SDRT). If self-regulation explains the lack of ethnic bias in the DG and is meaningfully impaired through this demanding distraction task, we anticipate stronger evidence of ethnic bias under cognitive load. Despite evidence that our manipulation increased cognitive load, we find no evidence of differential ethnic bias across DGs conducted at varying cognitive loads. These results suggest that participants are not suppressing ethnic bias through effortful self-control. We argue instead that the intergroup bias in this context may arise from dislike, fear, or threat perception, which are not well measured by the DG.  

“Broken Pipeline: Higher Education and the Production of African Development Researchers”
with Annet Adong

Any meaningful effort to address the underrepresentation of African voices in development research must begin with the teaching, mentorship, and inspiration of young scholars that happens in African universities. This is where the pipeline of African researchers is created and where scholars are equipped with the training required to produce research that can shape policy debates and guide decision making. In this paper, we draw on original survey and interview data to characterize the challenges faced by African universities in producing development researchers. We discuss the factors that cause so many promising scholars at the undergraduate level to choose not to continue their training at the graduate level. We assess the quality of the training that is available for the students who do elect to continue their studies. And we discuss the attractiveness of, obstacles to, and implications of acquiring graduate training outside of Africa. 

“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

CANCELLED DUE TO THE SHUTDOWN OF USAID

“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.