Heinz-Christoph Steinhardt

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With the Social Credit System, the Chinese state has begun a radical experiment to engineer trustworthy behavior in society and business. The Social Credit System collects information from all citizens, businesses and organizations and seeks to steer behavior through incentives and punishments. The system is a work in progress and displays substantial regional variation. In this ERC Consolidator project H. Christoph Steinhardt will over the coming five years use opinion surveys, field research as well as qualitative and quantitative content analysis to study the Social Credit System. The project ENGINEERING will trace the Social Credit System’s evolution and regional variation, its perception by the Chinese public, and its social, political and cultural impacts. The project will thereby help to evaluate which objectives the Chinese state managed to achieve and which unintended consequences novel instrument could bring about.