Political scientist’s research looks at relationship between globalization and human cooperation

Political scientist’s research looks at relationship between globalization and human cooperation

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Does globalization increase or decrease human cooperation? In a recently published study, Rice political scientist Rick Wilson and five other academics found that globalization may be “fundamental in shaping contemporary large-scale cooperation and may be a positive force toward the provision of global public goods.”

	RICK WILSON

The study, titled “Globalization and Human Cooperation,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition earlier this month.

Wilson, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science and professor of statistics and of psychology, and co-authors  were interested in two possible explanations of globalization’s effect. The first hypothesis was “that globalization prompts reactionary movements that reinforce parochial distinctions among people. Large-scale cooperation then focuses on favoring one’s own ethnic, racial or language group.” The second “suggests that globalization strengthens locality or nationhood as sources of identification.”

Using samples from Argentina, Iran, Italy, Russia, South Africa and the United States, the researchers designed a multilevel sequential cooperation experiment. One hundred-ninety subjects from each country were asked to allocate money into a personal account, a local account or a world account. Their decisions affected their own payoffs as well as the payoffs of others. In many ways the problem resembled a public goods dilemma for the participants.
 
The experiment was designed to measure whether individuals are self-interested, willing to cooperate exclusively with people from their own locality or, alternatively, willing to cooperate with groups from around the world.   
 
The results were informative. The research, according to the authors, “suggests that globalization is a powerful force for shaping large-scale cooperation in today’s societies,” supporting the second hypothesis.
 
There were significant differences in the degree of cooperation between subjects, however. The general rule, the researchers wrote, was that the greater a country’s level of globalization, the higher the subjects’ willingness to cooperate with subjects in other countries.
 
The authors speculated that other factors might be expected to contribute to this cooperation-globalization correlation, including “rule of law, generalized trust, per capita income and norms of civic cooperation.” But the analysis showed that the country-level globalization index, a model created by the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of Globalization and Regionalisation, “is the only macrovariable that is significantly correlated with the mean cooperation rates at the world level.” 
 
Moreover, the study found that the more subjects were exposed to the rest of the world, the more likely they were to cooperate with other subjects in other countries. “Hence, not only is living in a more globalized country associated with more cooperation at the world level,” the researchers said, “but the same relationship holds as the degree of individual global connectedness increases as well.”
 
Finally, the study looked at the issue of causation. The experiment demonstrated that higher levels of globalization are associated with greater propensities to favor international cooperation. Wilson and his colleagues wrote, “We believe that the effect of globalization can be accounted for by the idea that individuals living in more globalized countries are more likely to engage in social connections with people living in localities distant from their own, which in turn likely stimulates sentiments of empathy with them. In other words, globalization may reduce an individual’s perceived social distance with geographically distant others, thus being conducive to an increased propensity to cooperate with them.”
 
The co-authors of the study are Nancy Buchan, University of South Carolina; Gianluca Grimalda,
University of Warwick in Britain; Marilynn Brewer, Ohio State
University; Enrique Fatas, University of Valencia in Spain and
University of Texas, Dallas; and Margaret Foddy, Carelton University in
Canada

To read the study, go to http://www.pnas.org/search?fulltext=%22Globalization+and+human+cooperation%22&submit=yes.