Social climate under the threat of scarcity: Learning from exposure to droughts – INEXTREMIS

Popular beliefs hold that danger brings out the worst in us. Yet, altruism, social trust, and group cohesion are the norms rather than the exception in the face of deadly danger. This brighter picture of humanity as cooperative and trustful when exposed to danger should bring hope for the troubled times to come, with climate change and the aggravated risk of disasters. However, while we know how humans respond to the actual presence of danger, we know little about how danger affects sociality in the long run. Specifically, we know little about how disasters affect our social dispositions, notably our capacity to trust others when resources are to become scarce.
Focusing on droughts (a most urgent global threat), I will carry out INEXTREMIS, an ambitious but realistic interdisciplinary research project. INEXTREMIS will elucidate the extent to which past and present exposure to droughts shapes our capacity to trust others, and the psychological and cognitive mechanisms linking exposure to droughts, perception of scarcity, and social trust. My interdisciplinary background will enable me to coordinate 2 WPs, each meant to exploit complementary expertise, methods, and resources to address these objectives, i.e., the anthropological and ethnographical records and field experimental psychology.
INEXTREMIS will produce unprecedented progress on the question of how drought, a long-lasting and scarcity-inducing form of disaster, shapes our social disposition for trust. With climate change and frequent droughts, this is a necessary and urgent task.