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Past research hypothesized that men and women differ in their tendency to cooperate with strangers in situations that involve a conflict of interests. However, recent empirical research has provided converging evidence that men and women cooperate to a similar extent, and that differences in cooperation can emerge in response to specific situational and societal contexts. Here we analyse six decades of empirical research on human cooperation using social dilemmas (1961–2017, k = 126) conducted across 20 industrialized societies, testing pre-registered hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory and social role theory. Overall, our findings revealed little-to-no evidence for an association between gender and cooperation using different meta-analytic approaches. We did not find within-study differences in cooperation between men and women (d = 0.011, 95% CI [−0.038, 0.060]). However, cooperation was slightly higher across studies with predominantly female samples (k = 972). In addition, contrary to our predictions, gender differences in cooperation did not emerge in response to the degree of conflicting interests in the situation, and societal levels of gender equality and economic development. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of gender differences in cooperation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cooperation among women: evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-societal differences in cooperation and trust among strangers in the provision of public goods may be key to understanding how societies are managing the COVID-19 pandemic. We report a survey conducted across 41 societies between March and May 2020 (N = 34,526), and test pre-registered hypotheses about how cross-societal differences in cooperation and trust relate to prosocial COVID-19 responses (e.g., social distancing), stringency of policies, and support for behavioral regulations (e.g., mandatory quarantine). We further tested whether cross-societal variation in institutions and ecologies theorized to impact cooperation were associated with prosocial COVID-19 responses, including institutional quality, religiosity, and historical prevalence of pathogens. We found substantial variation across societies in prosocial COVID-19 responses, stringency of policies, and support for behavioral regulations. However, we found no consistent evidence to support the idea that cross-societal variation in cooperation and trust among strangers is associated with these outcomes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. These results were replicated with another independent cross-cultural COVID-19 dataset (N = 112,136), and in both snowball and representative samples. We discuss implications of our results, including challenging the assumption that managing the COVID-19 pandemic across societies is best modeled as a public goods dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social situations may vary in the severity of conflict between self-interest and collective welfare, and thereby pose collective action problems that might require different institutional solutions. The present study examines the effect of conflict of interests on beliefs, norms, cooperation, and choice of sanctioning institutions in social dilemmas across two experiments (total N = 1304). In each experiment, participants interacted in a public goods game (PGG), and a modified PGG with institutional choice using a 2 (conflict of interests: low vs. high) × 3 (institutional choice: peer punishment/no sanction vs. centralized punishment/no sanction vs. gossip plus ostracism/no sanction) between-participants design. More severe conflict of interests reduces individuals' own cooperation, first-order beliefs about others' cooperation, second-order normative expectations and personal norms of cooperation. This pattern is pronounced over time in repeated interactions. We did not find that conflict of interests influenced the choice to establish a sanctioning institution. Taken together, the challenges arising from stronger conflicting interests can cause the collapse of cooperation, hinder the emergence of trust and norms of cooperation, but do not provide the impetus to support a sanctioning institution to promote cooperation. Implications for solving public goods dilemmas that contain a severe conflict of interests are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impersonal cooperation among strangers enables societies to create valuable public goods, such as infrastructure, public services, and democracy. Several factors have been proposed to explain variation in impersonal cooperation across societies, referring to institutions (e.g., rule of law), religion (e.g., belief in God as a third-party punisher), cultural beliefs (e.g., trust) and values (e.g., collectivism), and ecology (e.g., relational mobility). We tested 17 preregistered hypotheses in a meta-analysis of 1,506 studies of impersonal cooperation in social dilemmas (e.g., the Public Goods Game) conducted across 70 societies (k = 2,271), where people make costly decisions to cooperate among strangers. After controlling for 10 study characteristics that can affect the outcome of studies, we found very little cross-societal variation in impersonal cooperation. Categorizing societies into cultural groups explained no variance in cooperation. Similarly, cultural, ancestral, and linguistic distance between societies explained little variance in cooperation. None of the cross-societal factors hypothesized to relate to impersonal cooperation explained variance in cooperation across societies. We replicated these conclusions when meta-analyzing 514 studies across 41 states and nine regions in the United States (k = 783). Thus, we observed that impersonal cooperation occurred in all societies—and to a similar degree across societies—suggesting that prior research may have overemphasized the magnitude of differences between modern societies in impersonal cooperation. We discuss the discrepancy between theory, past empirical research and the meta-analysis, address a limitation of experimental research on cooperation to study culture, and raise possible directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation among strangers has been hypothesized to have declined in the United States over the past several decades, an alarming trend that has potential far-reaching societal consequences. To date, most research that supports a decline in cooperation has relied on self-report measures or archival data. Here, we utilize the history of experimental research on cooperation in situations involving conflicting interests (i.e., social dilemmas). We meta-analyzed 511 studies conducted between 1956 and 2017 with 660 unique samples and effect sizes involving 63,342 participants to test whether the average level of cooperation observed in these studies had declined over time. We found no evidence for a decline in cooperation over the 61-year period. Instead, we found a slight increase in cooperation over time. In addition, some societal indicators (e.g., income inequality, societal wealth, urbanization level, and percentage of people living alone) measured 10 to 5 years prior to measures of cooperation were found to be positively associated with cooperation, suggesting that they may be potential societal underpinnings of increases in cooperation. These findings challenge the idea that social capital and civic cooperation among strangers have declined in the United States over time, and we offer directions for future research to understand causes of an increase in cooperation. Public Significance Statement: This meta-analysis reveals that Americans' level of cooperation among strangers has increased over the 61-year period from 1956 to 2017. This finding challenges the idea that social capital and norms of cooperation have declined in the American society over time. Changes in American society support greater cooperation among strangers, which could underlie an ability for Americans to cooperate to solve present and future challenges (e.g., solutions to climate change, pandemics, and sustainable resource consumption). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publishing studies using standardized, machine-readable formats will enable machines to perform meta-analyses on demand. To build a semantically enhanced technology that embodies these functions, we developed the Cooperation Databank (CoDa)—a databank that contains 2,636 studies on human cooperation (1958–2017) conducted in 78 societies involving 356,283 participants. Experts annotated these studies along 312 variables, including the quantitative results (13,959 effects). We designed an ontology that defines and relates concepts in cooperation research and that can represent the relationships between results of correlational and experimental studies. We have created a research platform that, given the data set, enables users to retrieve studies that test the relation of variables with cooperation, visualize these study results, and perform (a) meta-analyses, (b) metaregressions, (c) estimates of publication bias, and (d) statistical power analyses for future studies. We leveraged the data set with visualization tools that allow users to explore the ontology of concepts in cooperation research and to plot a citation network of the history of studies. CoDa offers a vision of how publishing studies in a machine-readable format can establish institutions and tools that improve scientific practices and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]