National parochialism is ubiquitous across 42 nations around the world

Angelo Romano,Daniel Balliet,James H. Liu,Matthias Sutter,Toshio Yamagishi

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-24787-1

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.

Highlights

Cultural evolution theory proposes that culture shaped modern large-scale cooperation—and especially parochialism—through norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history[11,12]
In the prisoner’s dilemma game (PD), participants were endowed with 10 Monetary Units (MUs) and could decide how many of them to keep for themselves and how many to give to their partner
We found national parochialism is a pervasive phenomenon and it occurs around the world with very little variation across nations and cultures

Summary

Introduction

Cultural evolution theory proposes that culture shaped modern large-scale cooperation—and especially parochialism—through norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history[11,12]. Modern world religions are cultural institutions that are hypothesized to promote and enforce norms of cooperation between groups, thereby reducing national parochialism[10,20]. We report an experiment run in December 2018, involving a sample of 18,411 participants representative for age, gender, and income, from 42 nations (Table 1), to test pre-registered hypotheses (https://osf.io/gnxv2/) about the prevalence and variation of national parochialism across nations. Some variables from this project have been used in two other papers. Our findings highlight the ubiquity of national parochialism across 42 nations around the world, and how there is a relatively greater amount of variation in impersonal cooperation across these nations

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