The Cooperation Databank: Machine-Readable Science Accelerates Research Synthesis

Abstract

Publishing studies using standardized, machine-readable formats will enable machines to perform meta-analyses on demand. To build a semantically enhanced technology that embodies these functions, we developed the Cooperation Databank (CoDa)—a databank that contains 2,636 studies on human cooperation (1958–2017) conducted in 78 societies involving 356,283 participants. Experts annotated these studies along 312 variables, including the quantitative results (13,959 effects). We designed an ontology that defines and relates concepts in cooperation research and that can represent the relationships between results of correlational and experimental studies. We have created a research platform that, given the data set, enables users to retrieve studies that test the relation of variables with cooperation, visualize these study results, and perform (a) meta-analyses, (b) metaregressions, (c) estimates of publication bias, and (d) statistical power analyses for future studies. We leveraged the data set with visualization tools that allow users to explore the ontology of concepts in cooperation research and to plot a citation network of the history of studies. CoDa offers a vision of how publishing studies in a machine-readable format can establish institutions and tools that improve scientific practices and knowledge.

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

“…Furthermore, the study samples were mostly college students, and college demographics have changed in the United States over the past several decades, to include more women and minorities (Anderson, 2003; Becker et al, 2010). That said, prior research has not found that cooperation varies by gender (Balliet et al, 2011; Spadaro, Jin, et al, 2022) or according to ethnicity in the United States (meta-analytic summary provided in the CoDa; Spadaro et al, in press). In addition, we found no significant difference in cooperation between student and nonstudent samples, and that the overall pattern of an increase of cooperation over time did not change when controlling for student sample (see the ).…”

“…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.…”

“…We used the mean levels of cooperation in the eligible studies from the Cooperation Databank (CoDa; Spadaro et al, in press; see https://cooperationdatabank.org). CoDa contains the entire history of experimental research on human cooperation using social dilemmas that was written in English, Japanese, or Chinese: (a) the English-written documents were retrieved through PsycINFO, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases as well as online university library repositories; (b) the Japanese-written documents were retrieved through the CiNii and Google Scholar databases; (c) the Chinese-written documents were retrieved through China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang Data, and China Science and Technology Journal (CSTJ) databases.…”

“…The search log included the following terms: “Public goods dilemma*,” “Public good*,” “Public good* game*,” “Prisoner’s dilemma*,” “Voluntar* contribut* experiment*,” “Voluntary contribution mechanism,” “Social dilemma,” “Mixed-motive game*,” “Resource dilemma*,” “Matrix games,” “Cooperation” AND “Experiment,” “Common pool game,” “Give-some dilemma,” “Take-some dilemma,” “Give-some game,” “Take-some game.” The output of the search included published research articles, online working articles, book chapters, and doctoral dissertations. Additionally, the search included backward selection and screening of relevant documents from the references of published books, review articles, and meta-analyses on social dilemmas (for more detail, see Spadaro et al, in press). We only searched research documents that included American samples in CoDa, which were only written in English and Japanese (only five samples from one article written in Japanese were included in the meta-analysis).…”

“…The interrater agreement was assessed using Krippendorff’s α (Hayes & Krippendorff, 2007; Krippendorff, 2011) and the percentage of agreement (i.e., agreement rate; for categorical variables only). All coded study and sample characteristics in this databank displayed high interrater agreement (Spadaro et al, in press; for a complete list of variables coded in the databank, see https://cooperationdatabank.org/codebook-2/). In the current meta-analysis, we included as control variables in the meta-regression models all of the following study characteristics that have been hypothesized to explain a statistically significant amount of variation in cooperation across studies (Jin et al, 2021).…”