National parochialism is ubiquitous across 42 nations around the world
Loading...
Date
2021-07-22
Open Access Location
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Nature Limited
Rights
(c) 2021 The Author/s
CC BY 4.0
CC BY 4.0
Abstract
Cooperation within and across borders is of paramount importance for the provision of public goods. Parochialism – the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members – limits contributions to global public goods. National parochialism (i.e., greater cooperation among members of the same nation) could vary across nations and has been hypothesized to be associated with rule of law, exposure to world religions, relational mobility and pathogen stress. We conduct an experiment in participants from 42 nations (N = 18,411), and observe cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma with ingroup, outgroup, and unidentified partners. We observe that national parochialism is a ubiquitous phenomenon: it is present to a similar degree across the nations studied here, is independent of cultural distance, and occurs both when decisions are private or public. These findings inform existing theories of parochialism and suggest it may be an obstacle to the provision of global public goods.
Description
Keywords
Citation
Romano A, Sutter M, Liu JH, Yamagishi T, Balliet D. (2021). National parochialism is ubiquitous across 42 nations around the world.. Nat Commun. 12. 1. (pp. 4456-).