Most people are willing to cooperate with strangers but underestimate the cooperative spirit of their fellow human beings, according to a study by a German research team.
This phenomenon is especially pronounced in Germany, according to the study, which was published in Science magazine on Thursday.
The Bonn-Frankfurt research team stress that cooperation is a fundamental prerequisite for social wellbeing. They said many challenges could only be overcome if people were willing to contribute to the common good beyond their own self-interest.
The study is based on behavioural science experiments involving more than 100,000 people from 125 representative country samples, according to the University of Bonn. It is said to be the first study in the world to examine human cooperation on a globally representative basis.
The same study was conducted around the world: each participant was paired with an unknown person from their own country and asked to choose between two options. The “do not cooperate” option yielded a guaranteed return of $100, while the “cooperate” option yielded only $70.
However, if both individuals – independently and without consultation – chose to “cooperate”, an additional $400 was donated to climate change measures. Participants therefore faced a choice between a higher personal payout or a community-oriented one.
A clear majority of participants – an average of 69% – proved willing to forgo a higher personal sum in favour of contributing to climate measures. However, participants systematically underestimated the willingness of others to cooperate.
While the actual global cooperation rate stood at 69%, respondents expected, on average, only 47% of others to cooperate. This pessimistic misperception was found in 124 of the 125 countries studied, making it almost universal.
“Our results send an encouraging message: We are a more cooperative species than we think,” the researchers concluded.
Germans have overly negative expectations
In Germany, the willingness of others to cooperate was particularly underestimated. While an unusually high share (86%) of German participants actually cooperated, they expected just 47.6% of others to do so, an underestimate of nearly 40 percentage points.
“My suspicion is that we have a tendency to see the glass as half empty,” Armin Falk of the University of Bonn, one of the study authors, told dpa. “That would correspond to this underlying pessimism that many complain about.”
For Falk, however, the most important finding of the study is the following: “If we were less pessimistic and therefore more realistic, we could live in a better world.”
He said many people fell prey to cognitive self-deception by viewing others too negatively. “And in doing so, we weaken ourselves.”