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Abstract
This paper studies whether individual cooperation is stable across settings and over time. Involving more than 7,000 subjects on two different continents, this study documents positive correlation in cooperative behavior across economic games in Norway, Sweden, Austria, and the United States. The game measures also correlate with a tendency to make deontological judgments in moral dilemmas, and display of general trust toward strangers. Using time-variation in the data, we test whether temporal stability of behavior is similar in the United States and Norway, and find similar stability estimates for both the American and Norwegian samples. The findings here provide further evidence of the existence of a stable behavioral inclination toward prosociality – a “cooperative phenotype,” as it has recently been termed. Also in line with previous research, we find that punishment and cooperation seem to be uncorrelated.
Highlights
There is a substantial body of literature in the social sciences showing that people are willing to cooperate with others at personal cost.1 Theoretical models based on these experiments implicitly assume that the findings capture general insights about human behavior
The survey sent out to the panel members included a series of incentivized economic games capturing different aspects of pro-social behavior: The Dictator Game (DG), the Public Goods Game (PGG) and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD)
The positive correlation between punishment and sharing in the Dictator Game with Punishment (DGP) may reflect that those who choose to punish expect others to punish as well, and perceive it to be in their self-interest to be pro-social in this specific game
Summary
There is a substantial body of literature in the social sciences showing that people are willing to cooperate with others at personal cost. Theoretical models based on these experiments implicitly assume that the findings capture general insights about human behavior. Theoretical models based on these experiments implicitly assume that the findings capture general insights about human behavior. Few studies have explored to what extent the willingness to cooperate is stable across settings and over time. Such knowledge is important for our ability to extrapolate and systematically learn from experimental data. This paper – based on a large sample of more than 7,000 individuals from Norway, Sweden, Austria, and the United States – shows that cooperative behavior is stable across settings and over time. The findings of this study support an implicit assumption underlying theories of social preferences – namely, that people have a domain-general and stable predisposition toward pro-sociality
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