Attitudes Towards Cooperation, Globalisation, and Social Identity: Results from a Six-Country Experimental Study

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In a globalised world many cooperation problems are global in nature. However, our understanding of individual propensity to cooperate at a global scale, as opposed to the national or local scale, is severely hampered by lack of evidence. This study sheds some light on this issue using experiments conducted in six industrialised countries. We analyse the patterns of individual cooperation with distal others in multi-level public goods experiments conducted on general population samples within the United States, Italy, Russia, Argentina, South Africa, and Iran. Our theoretical background contrasts parochialism - namely, a preference for favouring members of one's own ethnic, racial or language group- with cosmopolitanism - namely, the tendency to broaden the boundaries of one's "in-group" to the whole of humanity. We construct a measure of individual-level "globalization", which mirrors a country-level measure of globalization in the economic, social, cultural, and political domain. In each country participants were either inhabitants of large metropolitan areas or of smaller urban centres lying within a 200km radius from the former. They were selected from different age groups and socio-economic status according to a quota sampling method. Participants took part in a public goods game at the local level, and in two nested co-operation problems at the local/national levels, and at the local/world levels. We show that as country and individual levels of globalization increase, so too does individual cooperation. This is the case at each of the possible level of interaction (local, national, or global). This finding indicates that "globalized" individuals draw broader group boundaries than others, eschewing parochial motivations in favour of cosmopolitan ones.

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Junior Research Associate
Carlo Gallier
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