To determine the social networks and cooperation between households, we conducted house-to-house surveys, asking who had children, marriages and partnerships with whom. The work, published in Nature Human Behaviour, was the basis of a long-term collaboration between scientists from University College London, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and Lanzhou University. We examined the social behaviour of those who were labelled with a “witch” tag, and compared it with those who were not. Our study is based on 800 households in five villages in south-western China. However, some empirical studies have shown that witch labelling instead undermines trust and social cohesion in a society. According to this theory, witch tags mark supposedly untrustworthy individuals and encourage others to conform out of fear of being labelled. Anthropologists have long been fascinated by the phenomenon, but have struggled to study it with quantitative methods-our understanding of how and why it arises is therefore poor.īut a study we conducted of one Chinese region provided an opportunity to test the most common hypothesis-that witchcraft accusations act as punishment for those who do not cooperate with local norms. The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.įrom medieval witch hunts in Europe to contemporary “witch doctors” in Tanzania, belief in witchcraft has existed across human societies throughout history.
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