Multinational investigation of cross-societal cooperation

Significance We present a comprehensive analysis of cross-societal cooperation involving full incentivization and population-representative samples of participants from Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. Our main finding is that individuals have shared stereotypes in terms of expected cooperation for interaction partners from different nations. Individuals also hold (shared) social preferences toward these partners, which are driven by ingroup favoritism, differences in wealth, and additional factors. We discuss our results with respect to theories that explain cooperation behavior by similarity, inequality aversion, and specific expectations. In a globalized world, establishing successful cooperation between people from different nations is becoming increasingly important. We present results from a comprehensive investigation of cross-societal 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.