POSITIVE CORNER #17: People are more cooperative than we think

➡️↗️⬆️TOWARDS THE ω-DIMENSION OF LEADERSHIP

A number of previous posts in the POSITIVE CORNER have already highlighted the far-reaching successes of cooperation between countries and internationally networked actors for the global common good. These successes do not happen by chance. The ability and willingness to cooperate is a profoundly human and social phenomenon. If scientific evidence is required to support this, a very well-founded study has recently been published in the renowned scientific journal SCIENCE (ref. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec9483).

ref. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec9483

The research team, comprising members from various renowned institutions, has filled a major gap in collaborative research through an international study involving over 100,000 participants from 125 countries worldwide, representing 92 per cent of the global adult population.

The study’s design drew on an approach from so-called game theory, an important field of research within economics.

"Each participant is paired with a stranger from their country and decides whether to cooperate or defect: Defection yields a payoff of $100, whereas cooperation yields $70, and if both cooperate, a donation of $400 is made to fight global warming."

One of the main findings of the study:

69% of participants worldwide opt for cooperation!

When it comes to the common good, people all over the world prefer to cooperate, even if non-cooperation would have brought them a greater personal and immediate benefit.

The study’s findings become even more striking when we realise that people all over the world actually underestimate the willingness of others to cooperate far more than is actually the case.

Only 47% of people believe that the person they are dealing with will cooperate!

This means that over two-thirds of people choose to cooperate, even though they assume that fewer than half of the other people will do so.

The researchers conclude that people’s willingness to cooperate is systematically underestimated worldwide.

We are more cooperative than we think!

In some of the country-specific results, there are even significantly greater, pessimistic misjudgements. In Germany, 86% of study participants chose to cooperate individually, whilst they believed that only around 48% of other people would cooperate – a difference of almost 40 per cent (ref. https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/forschung-innovation/globale-untersuchung-studie-menschen-sind-kooperativer-als-sie-denken/100230890.html).

The current research findings support the view that the willingness to cooperate, as a human need, is by no means the exception, but the rule worldwide. Where we still assess other people’s willingness to cooperate far too pessimistically, there lies enormous potential to significantly build on the existing successes of global cooperation for the benefit of the international community!