We propose to replicate the influential study “The competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions” by Gürerk, Irlenbusch and Rockenbach (2006) published in Science. In this laboratory experiment groups of subjects played a public goods game, commonly used to study the fundamental problem of human cooperation. The key innovation of Gürerk et al. was to let subjects choose the institutional regime under which they wished to play the game. Subjects could choose between a sanctioning institution (SI) allowing them to sanction each other contingent on individual contributions to the public good, or a sanctioning-free institution (SFI). Gürerk et al.’s three main findings were that eventually nearly all subjects had migrated to SI, subjects in SI contributed almost all of their endowment to the public good whereas subjects in SFI contributed almost nothing, and subjects’ payoffs were higher in SI than in SFI. These findings had a transformative impact on the interdisciplinary field of research on cooperation, leading to the belief that sanctioning institutions may evolve readily in human groups, thereby enabling large-scale cooperation. However, these pivotal findings are based on a single, low-powered experiment conducted in one specific location. We seek to replicate this study in eight laboratories across four continents, and for purposes of statistical power increase the number of groups in each lab. The authors of the original study have provided us with all necessary materials, and all labs have confirmed in writing their willingness to host our replications. We will pre-register our multi-lab replication including all materials at Open Science Framework and make our materials and data publicly available. The results of our project will not only test the replicability of the original findings but also establish the generalisability of the effects related to the endogenous emergence of sanctioning institutions across different subject pools.

“Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS)” (www.datasproject.org) develops an innovative method to explore African ethnonyms from the era of trans-Atlantic slavery, circa 1500-1867. Ethnonyms index African identities, places and historical events to reconstruct African culture that is linked to a history of slavery, colonialism and racism. The project centres on the need to understand the origins and trajectories of people of African descent who populated the trans-Atlantic world in the modern era. The development of a method for analysing demographic change and confronting social inequalities arising from racism constitutes a social innovation. The team’s methodology implements a research tool developed in Canada for handling ethnonyms that can be applied in a trans-Atlantic context from France and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Caribbean and Africa. This innovation confronts methodological problems that researchers encounter in reconstructing the emergence of the African diaspora. A methodology for data justice is salient because ethnonym decision-making used in our digital platform, requires a reconceptualization of the classification systems concerning West Africans. This methodology depends on an open source relational database that addresses important decisions that researchers face in the field about how to develop best practices and a controlled vocabulary for four reasons. First, scholarly expertise on West Africans is scattered globally. Second, the slave trade was transnational, rarely limited to one country or population, and the transfer of Africans across borders reflects this global relationship between colonial and colonized. Third, DATAS makes available a vast amount of information of immense value to marginalized communities deprived of information on their own history. Fourth, the trans-Atlantic and trans-national nature of this project complements the aims of a platform predicated on global collaboration. The project treats ethnonyms as decision making tools as a method whose concepts require rethinking entrenched assumptions about demography, data justice and research transparency.