Multinational investigation of cross-societal cooperation

Abstract

In a globalized world, establishing successful cooperation between people from different nations is becoming increasingly important. We present results from a comprehensive investigation of crosssocietal cooperation in one-shot prisoner's dilemmas involving population-representative samples from six countries and identify crucial facilitators of and obstacles to cooperation. In interactions involving mutual knowledge about only the other players' nationalities, we demonstrate that people hold strong and transnationally shared expectations (i.e., stereotypes) concerning the cooperation level of interaction partners from other countries. These expectations are the strongest determinants of participant cooperation. Paradoxically, however, they turn out to be incorrect stereotypes that even correlate negatively with reality. In addition to erroneous expectations, participants' cooperation behavior is driven by (shared) social preferences that vary according to the interaction partner's nationality. In the cross-societal context, these social preferences are influenced by differences in wealth and ingroup favoritism, as well as effects of specific country combinations but not by spatial distance between nations.M any social interactions have the structure of a social dilemma, which is characterized by the fact that mutual cooperation-that is, completely transferring one's own resources to an interaction partner (or a group account)-would lead to a socially optimal outcome in that the sum of pay-offs for all persons involved is maximized. However, irrespective of the interaction partner's behavior, each individual person would be better off by defecting: that is, transferring no resources. Thus, mutual defection is the dominant strategy that should be chosen by rational money-maximizing agents (1). Still, cooperation has been observed even in fully anonymous one-shot social dilemmas (2) in which individuals interact only once, so that any selfish incentive to cooperate strategically is excluded. Specifically, it is impossible to cooperate with the aim to later profit from a good reputation (3) or reciprocity (2).Various factors have been identified that, in combination, could explain this puzzling finding. Individuals might have social preferences in that they value the outcome of others and gain utility from the absolute pay-off of other players or lose utility from inequality in pay-offs (4-6). Additionally, individuals might have specific expectations that the other player will cooperate as well (7,8). Social preferences and expectations might thereby be driven partially by similarity and kinship, in that individuals cooperate with genetically similar others to increase biological fitness of their own genotype and expect others to do the same (9, 10).In the present study, our key goal is to investigate the determinants of cooperation between people from different nations. Specifically, cooperation-related expectations and social preferences cannot only account for cooperation behavior in general. These expectations...

Right-wing authoritarianism and stereotype-driven expectations interact in shaping intergroup trust in one-shot vs multiple-round social interactions

“…We found that participants were more likely to invest in trustees from national groups perceived high in warmth and competence (in agreement with SCM predictions about the role of warmth and competence in inter-group social cognition; [ 19 , 56 ]). This finding is also in line with a recent work reporting that individuals have shared stereotypes in terms of expected cooperation for interaction partners from different countries and that these stereotype-driven expectations represent the strongest predictor of participants’ actual cooperation [ 70 ]. In addition, we showed that individual differences in Right-Wing Authoritarianism interacted with SCM social dimensions in shaping intergroup decision-making.…”

Parochial trust and cooperation across 17 societies

“…Thus, at least some ingroup favoritism may be explained by a belief that people cooperate more with ingroup members. Furthermore, this belief generalized across all 17 countries and could not be explained by stereotypes of people from certain nationalities being more cooperative ( 28 ), and previous work suggests that the belief is not merely a byproduct of a positivity bias in thinking about ingroup members ( 29 ). Future research is necessary to understand the development and function of this belief in regulating cooperative interactions within and between groups.…”

A cross‐national analysis of sex differences in prisoner's dilemma games

“…Our findings generally support an in-between position taking into account both inherent factors and social influences as suggested by Social Role Theory. On the one hand, we observed a gap in transfers and expectations that remains stable when controlling for sender and receiver nations and additional factors that have been demonstrated to influence cross-national cooperation (Dorrough & Gl€ ockner, 2016; see Supporting Information, B3; Table B2) and that can also be observed for cooperation with a random interaction partner and the ingroup only. These results indicate some degree of universality in sex differences and, therefore, provide partial support for an evolutionary perspective assuming that those differences are a result of innate temperamental differences between men and women that evolved by natural selection (e.g., Buss & Kenrick, 1998).…”

“…It is even more pronounced when analysing transfers towards a random interaction partner only ( b = 6.89 US cents, p < .001). Furthermore, when controlling for additional factors, such as cultural similarity or spatial distance between nations that have been demonstrated to influence cross‐national cooperation (Dorrough & Glöckner, ), the effect also remains stable (Supporting Information, B3). These results speak for the fact that the observed gender differences are not (only) a result of specific country combinations.…”