Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Cultural Norms and Institutions Organize Behavior?
Map the chain from historical exposure to present trust, marking the assumptions that connect group history with an individual survey answer.
Why you’re reading it. Develop a historical explanation precise enough to examine its proposed mechanisms and predictions.
A question to consider. If distance from the coast also predicts later access to institutions, what would that imply for the instrument’s causal interpretation?
Why this reading
Nunn and Wantchekon connect historical exposure to the slave trade with trust reported by later survey respondents. Their analysis makes two possible channels explicit: inherited norms and the institutional or social environment in which people now live.
Before you read
The study links historical estimates for ethnic groups to individual responses in the 2005 Afrobarometer survey. Regression compares associations after adjusting for measured variables. An instrumental variable is used to estimate a causal effect only under additional assumptions; here historical distance from the coast must affect later trust through slave-trade exposure rather than another pathway.
Read for
- Trace how historical exposure, ancestry, current location and each kind of reported trust are measured.
- Distinguish the regression evidence, the instrumental-variable argument and the tests proposed to separate internal norms from the surrounding environment.
Consider afterwards
- What other historical process could connect distance from the coast to present trust, and how could it be investigated?
- What pattern in later surveys would be difficult to reconcile with a stable, inherited trust disposition?
Editorial context
The historical comparison is observational. Its causal and mechanism claims depend on assumptions about measurement, omitted influences, migration and the proposed instrument. A 2025 replication by Zanella reproduces the original calculations but finds that several central associations do not persist in later survey waves; some evidence for trust in neighbors remains. That challenge concerns stability and interpretation, not a computational error or proof that history has no effects. The findings cannot justify treating mistrust as an immutable characteristic of an ethnic group or of Africa as a whole.