Meet Our Researchers: Alain Schläpfer
Meet Our Researchers: Alain Schläpfer
Investigating how reputation, cultural norms, and conditional cooperation shape social harmony and conflict with CDDRL Research Scholar Alain Schläpfer.
The "Meet Our Researchers" series showcases the incredible scholars at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Through engaging interviews conducted by our undergraduate research assistants, we explore the journeys, passions, and insights of CDDRL’s faculty and researchers.
Alain Schläpfer is a Social Science Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law as well as a lecturer at the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy (MIP). His research highlights how individuals can better cooperate in societies across cultural divides and the role of reputation in influencing behavior.
What inspired you to pursue research in your current field, and how did your journey lead you to CDDRL?
My current research is inspired by two main sources. One of them stems from a curiosity that emerged during graduate school, where I studied economics. I noticed that behavior was often explained primarily through material incentives, like the desire for consumption and leisure. I thought that reputation was a key factor motivating people’s behavior that was being overlooked.
Secondly, I wanted to study how cultural differences affect cooperation between individuals across societies. This interest arose from my personal background, as I come from Switzerland’s tight individualist culture, while my wife is from the more loose, collectivist country of Greece. I recognized how differently norms are created and enforced in each of our cultures. Therefore, I wanted to systematically study the implications of these informal cultural traditions and how they affect formal means of social organization.
My current research combines these two interests by focusing on how groups can maintain cooperation among their members. CDDRL’s interdisciplinary approach aligns with my work, which lies at the intersection of economics, political science, and evolutionary and behavioral sciences. My research also addresses questions fundamental to CDDRL’s core interests. Democracy itself is a cooperative endeavor that requires those who lose to accept their loss, at times prioritizing the system over their own immediate interests.
To what extent can states facilitate the growth of social capital and cooperation from a top-down approach?
Almost all my research is focused on the bottom-up approach because understanding how we interact with each other at the individual level is necessary before imposing anything from above. However, I’m very excited about an ongoing research project that studies the interactions between formal and informal ways of encouraging cooperation. Both mechanisms can be complementary, but there is a risk that formal institutions may crowd out incentives for individuals to enforce norms informally.
What is the most exciting or impactful finding from your research, and why do you think it matters for democracy, development, or the rule of law?
I’ve been studying how cultural mismatch can be a powerful driver of intergroup conflict. When cultures have fundamentally different mechanisms for building and assessing reputation, such as in honor-based versus dignity-based societies, this can lead to mistrust and even violent escalation. Empirically, differences along this dimension are a strong predictor of everything from discrimination against immigrant groups to large-scale ethnic conflict. This suggests that conflict is driven by more than just material concerns.
We are currently expanding this project by studying the interactions between immigrant groups in Denmark to understand the impact of metanorms, or norms that govern how social rules are enforced in cultures. For example, some cultures rely on direct confrontation, others on more subtle forms like social ostracism to enforce norms. The research will explore how clashing norms can harm intergroup relations, while also identifying potential solutions.
How do you see your research influencing policy or contributing to real-world change?
My research focuses on identifying environments that foster cooperation, enabling policymakers to establish effective institutions and enhance social cohesion. Specifically, identifying sources of intergroup conflict between native and immigrant communities can help mitigate backlash to migration. Our study on this relationship focuses on Greece and Germany, both countries that had a large inflow of mostly Syrian refugees around 2015 and had populations that themselves had experienced forced displacement not long ago. Through a survey experiment, it is revealed that even brief references highlighting the past displacement of native groups fostered more sympathy and openness to refugees. On the other hand, backlash against immigration worsened if people felt their own history had not been sufficiently acknowledged. These results have helped inform campaigns led by NGOs to bridge divides between native and immigrant groups.
Can you discuss your work on anti-social punishment and how it can counterintuitively be leveraged to improve cooperation?
In order to ensure cooperation, society must punish those who behave uncooperatively. Surprisingly, researchers have found that people also punish those who cooperate and contribute to the public good, in some cases to almost the same degree as they punish defectors. This phenomenon of antisocial punishment is often treated as bad for society, although my research suggests otherwise.
I argue that those who are too generous and cooperative may ultimately benefit those who exploit the system, meaning that overly cooperative individuals create incentives for others to defect. Therefore, the ideal social order is one of conditional cooperation, where individuals cooperate only as long as everyone else does. This gives everyone strong incentives to work together harmoniously, because if one person starts taking advantage of others, the rest will retaliate. Conditional cooperation also prevents the enabling of free riders and is proven to be a positive strategy for groups. In this context, anti-social punishment of those who are too generous and whose cooperation is not conditional enough can actually be good.
What gaps do you feel need to be addressed in your research field, and what do you anticipate you will study more in the future?
I plan to research more about the interactions between formal and informal institutions, particularly in the context of how societies can transition from a state of conflict back to a cooperative equilibrium. For one project that’s still in its early stages, we will examine the post-conflict environment of Colombia, where some people want renewed cooperation while others seek retribution. This creates a complex set of incentives that result in a delicate situation. In the future, I hope to conduct more research on how to optimally design processes in the aftermath of conflict that encourage people to work together again.
Lastly, what books would you recommend for students interested in a research career in your field?
One I would certainly recommend is The Social Order of the Underworld by David Skarbek. It’s a fascinating account of how social order is established and enforced in prison societies.
More specifically for the topic of cooperation, there is Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s book, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. It is an excellent starting point for thinking conceptually about how we establish cooperation and the problems society must overcome to maintain it. Slightly less technical, but on the same topic, is Meeting at Grand Central by Lee Cronk and Beth Leech. It discusses how to sustain cooperation despite all the threats along the way.