Cross-cultural variation in cooperation: A meta-analysis.

Abstract

Impersonal cooperation among strangers enables societies to create valuable public goods, such as infrastructure, public services, and democracy. Several factors have been proposed to explain variation in impersonal cooperation across societies, referring to institutions (e.g., rule of law), religion (e.g., belief in God as a third-party punisher), cultural beliefs (e.g., trust) and values (e.g., collectivism), and ecology (e.g., relational mobility). We tested 17 preregistered hypotheses in a meta-analysis of 1,506 studies of impersonal cooperation in social dilemmas (e.g., the Public Goods Game) conducted across 70 societies (k = 2,271), where people make costly decisions to cooperate among strangers. After controlling for 10 study characteristics that can affect the outcome of studies, we found very little cross-societal variation in impersonal cooperation. Categorizing societies into cultural groups explained no variance in cooperation. Similarly, cultural, ancestral, and linguistic distance between societies explained little variance in cooperation. None of the cross-societal factors hypothesized to relate to impersonal cooperation explained variance in cooperation across societies. We replicated these conclusions when meta-analyzing 514 studies across 41 states and nine regions in the United States (k = 783). Thus, we observed that impersonal cooperation occurred in all societies—and to a similar degree across societies—suggesting that prior research may have overemphasized the magnitude of differences between modern societies in impersonal cooperation. We discuss the discrepancy between theory, past empirical research and the meta-analysis, address a limitation of experimental research on cooperation to study culture, and raise possible directions for future research.

Gender differences in cooperation across 20 societies: a meta-analysis

“…However, none of these seven indicators was significantly correlated to mean differences in cooperation across studies ( p-values ≥ 0.292). These findings are consistent with recent meta-analytic work showing no evidence for cross-cultural variation in cooperation more broadly [53]. It is worth mentioning, however, that despite our effort to obtain more studies (e.g.…”

Did cooperation among strangers decline in the United States? A cross-temporal meta-analysis of social dilemmas (1956–2017).

“…A second limitation is that behavior and outcomes within experimental social dilemmas do not allow us to infer which psychological processes and motives (e.g., values, beliefs, and self-concept) are changing over time in American society to produce these changes in behavior. Importantly, cooperation in social dilemmas, including the studies reported in the CoDa (Spadaro et al, in press), can be used to test many other theories about cooperation and prosocial behavior that are not addressed in the present work, such as understanding prosocial personality (Thielmann et al, 2020), how institutional rules affect cooperation (Jin et al, 2021), how cooperation varies across regions, countries, and cultures around the world (Spadaro, Graf, et al, 2022). The annotation of these studies has been made open access for researchers to use to test hypotheses and answer research questions about cooperation.…”

Partner choice does not predict prosociality across countries

“…Conversely, a recent meta-analysis found that people in higher relational mobility societies did not contribute more in incentivised social dilemma experiments (Spadaro et al, 2022). However, this previous work has focused on only a subset of possible measures of prosocial behaviours and attitudes: social support and cooperation in social dilemmas.…”

“…For example, research has shown that people in higher relational mobility societies provide social support to others more frequently (Kito et al, 2017), have greater trust in strangers (Thomson et al, 2018) and are more likely to give gifts in romantic relationships (Komiya et al, 2019). Conversely, a recent meta-analysis found that people in higher relational mobility societies did not contribute more in incentivised social dilemma experiments (Spadaro et al, 2022). However, this previous work has focused on only a subset of possible measures of prosocial behaviours and attitudes: social support and cooperation in social dilemmas.…”