National parochialism is ubiquitous across 42 nations around the world

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

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number4456
Pages (from-to)1-8
Number of pages8
JournalNature Communications
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 22 Jul 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support under the Institutional Strategy of the University of Cologne within the German Excellence Initiative (Hans Kelsen-Prize), from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2126/1– 390838866, the European Research Council Starting Grant 635356, the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development Grant FA 2386-15-1-0003, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grant 15H05730, and the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. The authors thank Caroline Graf for support in retrieving part of the cross-national indicators data. The authors thank Ernst Fehr, Simon Gächter, Robert Böhm, Hannes Rush, Andy Delton, Michel Maréchal, and Michelle Gelfand for valuable comments to an earlier version of this paper.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).

Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support under the Institutional Strategy of the University of Cologne within the German Excellence Initiative (Hans Kelsen-Prize), from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2126/1– 390838866, the European Research Council Starting Grant 635356, the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development Grant FA 2386-15-1-0003, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grant 15H05730, and the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. The authors thank Caroline Graf for support in retrieving part of the cross-national indicators data. The authors thank Ernst Fehr, Simon Gächter, Robert Böhm, Hannes Rush, Andy Delton, Michel Maréchal, and Michelle Gelfand for valuable comments to an earlier version of this paper.

FundersFunder number
Universität zu Köln
European Research Council
Max Planck Institute for Research On Collective Goods
H2020 European Research Council635366
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme635356
Asian Office of Aerospace Research and DevelopmentFA 2386-15-1-0003
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science15H05730
Deutsche ForschungsgemeinschaftEXC 2126/1– 390838866

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