GSSC Seminar Series

19 May 2026

The polarizing impact of witchcraft exposure on economic decision-making among men in Nairobi: ethnographic and experimental evidence that self-help is a modern form of witchcraft

Mario Schmidt (Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, Nairobi)

12:00-13:00

Based upon ethnographic work on male internal migrants in a high-rise settlement and a behavioral economic experiment with mototaxi drivers in Nairobi that I conducted together with behavioral economists, I propose the hypothesis that exposure to economic self-help discourses shares fundamental characteristics with the exposure to witchcraft. In both cases exposure polarizes economic decision-making related to the willingness to take risks, leading to a distribution of economic decisions accumulating at the extreme ends of rationality. In other words, exposure to witchcraft as well as exposure to self-help causes economic decisions that are irrationally risk-averse as well as irrationally risk-embracing. 

Mario Schmidt is an associate engagement director at the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics in Nairobi. Apart from exploring notions of masculinity among rural-urban migrants, he is interested in the effects of evidence-based development aid interventions across East Africa, the epistemological and ethical foundations of the behavioral sciences, and the interdisciplinary potential between anthropology and experimental economics.