Researchers and development practitioners often believe small, rural villages throughout the developing world are tightly-knit communities where everybody knows everything about their neighbors. Notably, we often suppose that people in these villages know when their neighbors fall on hard times (like a poor harvest or illness of a household earner), and then may even use this information to assist others within the community. But the Trachtman et al. results suggest that in some local communities, community members may not actually have much welfare information about others.