Cooperation, Trust, and Social Capital in Southeast Asian Urban Slums

We conduct experiments in the field with people who live in urban slums to measure trust and cooperation and to see how behavior varies with demographic factors and associational measures of social capital. Overall, we find high rates of contributions among Thai and Vietnamese participants in a voluntary contribution game and we see that many participants are willing to socially sanction other participants who free ride. At the individual level, we find that behavior varies with many demographic factors (e.g., sex, schooling, age) and with many associational factors (e.g., home ownership and community homogeneity). However, many of these correlations differ significantly between our Thai participants and our Vietnamese participants indicating the role of culture.social capital, cooperation, trust, social disapproval, social dilemma, experiment, Thailand, Vietnam