Culture and cooperation

Does the cultural background influence the success with which genetically unrelated individuals cooperate in social dilemma situations? In this paper, we provide an answer by analysing the data of Herrmann et al. (2008a), who studied cooperation and punishment in 16 subject pools from six different world cultures (as classified by Inglehart & Baker (2000)). We use analysis of variance to disentangle the importance of cultural background relative to individual heterogeneity and group-level differences in cooperation. We find that culture has a substantial influence on the extent of cooperation, in addition to individual heterogeneity and group-level differences identified by previous research. The significance of this result is that cultural background has a substantial influence on cooperation in otherwise identical environments. This is particularly true in the presence of punishment opportunities.

• Publication year

  2010

• Venue

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

• Publication date

  2010-09-12

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rstb.2010.0135PMID 20679109PMCID PMC2936171
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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