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We employ a behavioral measure of trustworthiness obtained from a trust game carried out with a sample of the general British population, the individuals of which were extensively interviewed on earlier occasions. Our basic finding is that given past income, higher current income increases trustworthiness and, given current income, higher past income reduces trustworthiness. Past income determines the level of financial aspirations, and whether or not these aspirations are fulfilled by the level of current income affects trustworthiness.

We present the first laboratory-in-the field experiment on the Italian North-South divide. Using a representative sample of the population, we measure whether regional disparities in ability to cooperate emerge even if differences in geography, institutions and criminal intrusion are silenced. We report that a behavioural gap in cooperation exists: Northern and Southern citizens react differently to the same incentives. Moreover, this gap cannot be accounted for by tolerance for risk, proxies of social capital and 'amoral familism'. At least a share of North-South disparities is likely to derive from persistent differences in social norms.

Different indicators show that Italy is an outlier in terms of corruption. As developed a country as Italy should have a much lower level of corruption. All the factors scholars have found to be affecting corruption fail to explain this puzzle. I start instead from the assumption that corrupt exchanges thrive when parties can trust each other both to comply with their obligations and not to snitch. Could Italians enjoy a greater ability to cooperate successfully in illegal markets, and could this ability to make their illegal pacts stick explain their anomalous propensity at striking corrupt deals? One could think of mafia enforcement, which certainly helps. Yet, corruption occurs also outside the regions with heavy mafia presence—it seems rather a white-collar affair in which threats are unnecessary and no blood is spilt. I consider a special bonding mechanism, the sharing of compromising information (SCI), and—relying on evidence from case studies and an experiment—I illustrate how SCI works in bringing about cooperation in other illegal markets. But why should Italians be in a better position to rely on SCI to pursue their corrupt deals? The answer, I contend, lies in the peculiarity of Italy’s judicial system, which is at once inefficient yet independent, and jointly these features make it exploitable by villains as a cheap, reliable and unwitting enforcing mechanism for their deals.

Available online 28 July 2014. When we become aware that our past actions carry information about qualities that we possess or lack, which others use to decide how to deal with us, are we unconcerned, content to rely on what we have done, or do we take action to alter this information? We study this question experimentally using generosity as a sign and a signal of trustworthiness, and a trust game. Subjects play a dictator game unaware that later they will play a trust game and that their level of generosity in the dictator game will be revealed to trusters, with some inaccuracy, before trusters decide whether to trust or not. Once made aware of what follows, trustees have the option to play a second dictator game, from which their choice will be accurately conveyed to trusters in addition to their decision in the initial game. Consistent with ‘countersignalling theory’, those who, in the first dictator game, were either miserly or generous do not play the second dictator game, resigned or content with the information conveyed by their past actions. Those neither miserly nor generous in the first dictator game, an intermediate generous group, are likeliest to use the second dictator game; many of them for the purpose of signalling, so that they are not confused with the miserly.

The marked difference in the development of the North and the South of Italy represents a prototypical case of seemingly intractable within-country disparities. Recent research found that a plausible determinant of this socio-economic gap would be a difference in the ability to cooperate. Through a laboratory experiment we investigate whence this difference derives, whether from different preferences or from different beliefs. Our findings indicate that Northerners and Southerners share the same individual pro-social preferences, and that the cooperation gap lies rather in the pessimistic beliefs that Southerners have about their cooperativeness. Southerners, furthermore, manifest a stronger aversion to social risk, as compared to the risk of nature. A policy implication is that an intervention or an event that reduced pessimistic beliefs would directly boost cooperation levels.

The article assesses the effects, direct and indirect, intended and unintended, of the 1993 national electoral reform and the results of the 1994 general elections in Italy. It shows that the new system is not an eccentric compromise, and that those who forecast either its unworkability or its evil consequences were mistaken. However, in evaluating the success of the reform with respect to the ambitions which were held for it, it concludes that the reform was a predictable failure. The article then explores the role played by the electoral reform in the unexpected electoral success of the Polo della Liberta, the emergence of Forza Italia, and the ability of Berlusconi to strike a compromise with two such different parties as La Lega and the AN.

The violent actions of a few extremists can alter the course of history, yet there persists a yawning gap between the potential impact of these individuals and what we understand about them. In Engineers of Jihad, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog uncover two unexpected facts, which they imaginatively leverage to narrow that gap: they find that a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background, and that Islamist and right-wing extremism have more in common than either does with left-wing extremism, in which engineers are absent while social scientists and humanities students are prominent. Searching for an explanation, they tackle four general questions about extremism: Under which socioeconomic conditions do people join extremist groups? Does the profile of extremists reflect how they self-select into extremism or how groups recruit them? Does ideology matter in sorting who joins which group? Lastly, is there a mindset susceptible to certain types of extremism? Using rigorous methods and several new datasets, they explain the link between educational discipline and type of radicalism by looking at two key factors: the social mobility (or lack thereof) for engineers in the Muslim world, and a particular mindset seeking order and hierarchy that is found more frequently among engineers. Engineers' presence in some extremist groups and not others, the authors argue, is a proxy for individual traits that may account for the much larger question of selective recruitment to radical activism. Opening up markedly new perspectives on the motivations of political violence, Engineers of Jihad yields unexpected answers about the nature and emergence of extremism. -- 1. The Education of Islamist Extremists 1 -- 2. Relative Deprivation in the Islamic World 34 -- 3. Relative Deprivation Probed 60 -- 4. The Ideology of Islamist Extremism Compared 85 -- 5. The Education of Other Extremists 100 -- 6. Mind-sets for Extremists 128 -- 7. Conclusions 159 -- Bibliography 167 -- Index 185

Summary We measure trust and trustworthiness in British society with a newly designed experiment using real monetary rewards and a sample of the British population. The study also asks the typical survey question that aims to measure trust, showing that it does not predict ‘trust’ as measured in the experiment. Overall, about 40% of people were willing to trust a stranger in our experiment, and their trust was rewarded half of the time. Analysis of variation in the trust behaviour in our survey suggests that trusting is more likely if people are older, their financial situation is either ‘comfortable’ or ‘difficult’ compared with ‘doing alright’ or ‘just getting by’, they are a homeowner or they are divorced, separated or never married compared with those who are married or cohabiting. Trustworthiness also is more likely among subjects who are divorced or separated relative to those who are married or cohabiting, and less likely among subjects who perceive their financial situation as ‘just getting by’ or ‘difficult’. We also analyse the effect of attitudes towards risks on trust.

There is anecdotal evidence that since the late 20th century young, educated, and urban Muslim women veil more frequently and strictly. Does this imply that the classical sociological theories of religion, which predict that modernization should cause a decrease in religious behaviours, do not apply to Islam? We investigate this question using structural equation modelling to analyse three datasets, one from Turkey, one covering 25 Muslim countries, and one from Belgium where Muslims are a minority. We find that averagely religious women conform to the classical theories’ predictions. But among highly religious women the modernizing forces—education, occupation and higher income, urban living, and contacts with non-Muslims—increase veiling. We conjecture that for highly religious women modernizing factors raise the risk and temptation in women's environments that imperil their reputation for modesty: veiling would then be a strategic response, a form either of commitment to prevent the breach of religious norms or of signalling women’s piety to their communities. Our findings have implications for cultural policy and Muslim integration in Europe.

Social life offers innumerable instances in which trust decisions involve multiple agents. Of particular interest is the case when a breach of trust is not profitable if carried out in isolation, but requires an agreement among agents. In such situations the pattern of behaviors is richer than in dyadic games, because even opportunistic trustees who would breach trust when alone may act trustworthily based on what they believe to be the predominant course of action. Anticipating this, trusters may be more inclined to trust. We dub these motivations derived trustworthiness and derived trust. To capture them, we design a “Collective Trust Game” and study it by means of a laboratory experiment. We report that overall levels of trustworthiness are almost thirty percentage points higher when derived motivations are present, and this generates also higher levels of trust. In our set-up, the effects of derived trustworthiness are comparable in size to positive reciprocity, and more important than concerns for equality.

Driving a taxi is dangerous, and picking up the wrong fare can be devastating. Yet drivers only have a moment to make a choice.

Individuals who engage in deviant behaviors are more likely to be friends with other deviants compared to non-deviants. This pattern has been observed across different types of deviant activities and among different age groups. In question, however, is the mechanism that underlies this pattern. In this article we develop and test a new theory to explain homophily among deviants. Deviance makes one vulnerable to the risk of being caught and sanctioned. This vulnerability imposes a stringent constraint on deviants’ choice of friends. Following Thomas Schelling, we conjecture that a way to establish trust consists of making oneself “blackmailable” by disclosing compromising information on one’s misdeeds, or sharing compromising secrets (SCS). If two individuals share their illicit behaviors with one another, both are made vulnerable and a friendship can be established. We propose a series of hypotheses derived from SCS comparing levels of homophily in deviant and non-deviant behaviors. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health we estimate adolescents’ preferences for deviant and non-deviant friends, within and across types of activities, and across different social contexts. Together, these tests allow us to distinguish between the theory we develop, SCS, and alternatives.

OnlineFirst Version of Record - Apr 9, 2012. We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high-quality goods and services, but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than had been promised. While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt to, but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low-quality exchanges; in fact, they seem to resent high-quality ones, and are inclined to put pressure on or avoid dealing with agents who deliver high quality. The equilibrium among low-quality producers relies on an unusual preference ranking which differs from that associated with the Prisoners’ Dilemma and similar games, whereby self-interested rational agents prefer to dish out low quality in exchange for high quality. While equally ‘lazy’, agents in our low-quality worlds are oddly ‘pro-social’: for the advantage of maximizing their raw self-interest, they prefer to receive low-quality goods and services, provided that they too can in exchange deliver low quality without embarrassment. They develop a set of oblique social norms to sustain their preferred equilibrium when threatened by the intrusion of high quality. We argue that high-quality collective outcomes are endangered not only by self-interested individual defectors, but by ‘cartels’ of mutually satisfied mediocrities.

My attention to gossip as a notion worthy of reflection was attracted by a trivial detail: the English etymology of gossip isgod-sib, godfather, or, generally, god parent, ‘denoting—says the English Oxford Dictionary—the spiritual affinity of the baptized and their sponsor’. This intriguing origin alludes to gossip as the performing of an initiation ritual, the creation of an exclusive bond; above all, it bears an uncanny association with the mafia which happens to have been the topic of my research for sometime. I suppose I could have interpretedgod-sibthrough the obvious gender bias as deriving from godmother rather than from godfather; this tallies with the Italiancomareor the Frenchcommèrewhich can also denote a gossip. But I did not think of this possibility at first. Instead, carried away by linguistic speculation, I went to check the etymology of the main Italian word for gossip,pettegolezzo. I was not a little surprised to find that the word comes from a rather less inspiring source. It comes frompeto, to fart. In some northern Italian dialects, venetian, piedmontese and emilian, a common expression, ‘contar tutti i peti’, ‘to tell every fart’, refers to the habit of reporting and speculating about trivial events.

Unlike markets that are subject to asymmetric information, in inscrutable markets—such as religions and psychotherapies—not just buyers but sellers too do not know much about the quality of their products. Because buyers cannot discern which products are of good quality and sellers cannot construct “honest” signals to guide them, rational choice theory predicts their failure. Yet these markets emerge. The hypothesis of this article is that suppliers pursue two general strategies that rely on symbols (trademarks, logos, languages, styles). First, they try to engender associations between the inscrutable commodity and symbols that are easier to rank than it; second, because these markets attract pirates, to protect their property rights, they seek imitation-resistant symbols. The solution is unlikely to come from any one symbol, but from a string of interrelated symbols that are costly to imitate. It consists of gaining a distinctive identity that pirates find hard to imitate regardless of external enforcement. Examples from the mafia are presented.

This article examines signaling theory as an element of analytical sociology, and particularly as an analytic framework for accounting for irrational behaviors. It first provides an overview of the basic principles of signaling theory, focusing on the distinction between signs and signals as well as the concepts of differential costs and differential benefits. It then considers various sources of signal costs, including receiver’s independent cost, receiver-dependent cost, and third party-dependent cost, along with multiple sources of cost and signals that cost nothing to honest signalers. It also takes a look at a number of applications for signaling theory and concludes with an assessment of the genealogy of the theory, from Thorstein Veblen and Marcel Mauss to Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Spence, and Alan Grafen.

Most expressions and symbols associated with the mafia—indeed, the term mafia itself—are made up of an almost surrealist cocktail of bogus and genuine sources, mythical and prosaic characters, fiction and reality. Already in 1876, Franchetti was puzzling over ‘the tendency to turn a mafioso into a legendary type, a feeling natural enough indeed in a professor of literature, but much harder to explain in wealthy landowners…’ (p. 34).

Foreword 1. Kamikaze 1943-5 2. Tamil Tigers 1987-2002 3. Palestinians 1981-2003 4. Al Qaeda, September 11, 2001 5. Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations 1963-2002 6. Killing Without Dying: The Absence of Suicide Missions 7. Motivations and Beliefs in Suicide Missions 8. Can We Make Sense of Suicide Missions? References

The system of proportional representation by which all Italian governments have been elected since the ratification of the present constitution dates from 1946. It predated the constitution itself and was never included in that document, so the reform of the electoral system requires no constitutional amendment. There were some minor alterations in 1948, and a short-lived attempt at imposing a high majority premium in 1953 (the so-called ‘tricky law’ or legge truffa). This led to a bitter parliamentary fight between the Christian-democrats (DC) and the communist party (PCI), which eventually resulted in the full reinstatement of the proportional system in 1956.

In this article we embark on a re-orientation of the theory of trust which contains three steps1.

Predicting who will become a terrorist is a tough job, but we're beginning to get good clues from what people study

My course, which comprised 4 lectures, was an introduction to the principles of signalling theory, its history, and its common misconceptions. I also presented two applications: to trust decisions and to interpersonal violence. Herewith, I give a brief overview of the theory and of the range of its applications, without going into the details of the two particular applications which I presented in my lectures. Signalling theory (ST) tackles a fundamental problem of communication: how can an a...