How incentives shape identities

Issue 27: An interview with anthropologist Allison Mickel about incentives, expertise, and identity; bots in echo chambers; why people share misinformation; and our recent events

We are excited to feature an interview with Professor Allison Mickel this week. Allison is an archeologist and cultural anthropologist, and one of Dom’s colleagues at Lehigh University.

Allison recently published a fascinating book, ‘Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archeological Knowledge and Labor’—an ethnography with archeological workers in Jordan and Turkey.

Her work illuminates how incentive structures influence how people form and project identities. We are used to environments where people proudly build identities around their expertise (“I am a psychologist” “I am an archeologist”). But what happens when knowledge goes unrewarded or even punished?

Allison has identified a phenomenon she calls lucrative non-knowledge, in which workers who possess deep archeological expertise deny their knowledge and claim to work as unskilled laborers. In our interview, she explained the economic incentives that produce this surprising identity dynamic.

Dom: When I started read…