Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost, social mindfulness typically entails small acts of attention or kindness. Even though fairly common, such low-cost cooperation has received little empirical attention. Measuring social mindfulness across 31 samples from industrialized countries and regions (n = 8,354), we found considerable variation. Among selected country-level variables, greater social mindfulness was most strongly associated with countries’ better general performance on environmental protection. Together, our findings contribute to the literature on prosociality by targeting the kind of everyday cooperation that is more focused on communicating benevolence than on providing material benefits.

Using Greenfield's theory of sociocultural change and human development as a point of departure, we carried out two experimental studies exploring the implications of decades of globalised social change in Mexico for children's development of cooperation and competition. In rural San Vicente, Baja California, the baseline was 1970 and the historical comparison took place 40 years later. In Veracruz, the baseline was 1985 and the historical comparison took place 20 years later. In Veracruz, children were tested in both rural and urban settings. We hypothesized that cooperative behavior would decrease in all three settings as a result of the sociocultural transformations of the past decades in Mexico. The Madsen Marble Pull Game was used to assess cooperative and competitive behavior. As predicted by Greenfield's theory of social change and human development, the Marble Pull procedure revealed a striking decrease over time in levels of cooperative behavior, with a corresponding rise in competitive behavior, in all three settings.

In this article, we explore theory-driven hypotheses linking ecological change with changing patterns of socialization. These studies are part of a larger project begun by Garcia in 2004; it aims to assess the effects of social change on Millard Madsen’s experimental findings concerning social behavior and socialization strategies in different regions of Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. The present two studies apply Greenfield’s theory of social change and human development to maternal socialization in San Vicente, Baja California, Mexico. As San Vicente’s population, commercial activity, modern technology, and connections (through immigration and television) to the United States grew, maternal socialization shifted. Mothers’ behavior as their children played two beanbag games developed by Madsen and Kagan revealed that, over a 43-year period, San Vicente mothers became less giving while augmenting their use of achievement-promoting behavior in several ways: In Study 1, mothers in 1972 were more generous in giving their children rewards, compared with mothers in 2015; the 2015 mothers had also become more selective in preferentially rewarding children’s successes rather than failures. In Study 2, mothers in 2015 set higher goals for their children than did mothers 43 years earlier.

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