Does one’s cultural background relate to group identification and cooperation with strangers in social dilemmas?
Summary
Why individuals choose to cooperate or not in society has long been of interest to many scholars. It has been widely researched with the usage of experiments including social dilemmas. Group identification and the national culture with regards to individualism are often said to play an important role in increasing contributions by theorists and researchers, but this has been rarely tested. The goal of this research, therefore, is to answer the research question ‘How does one's national culture in terms of individualism-vs-collectivism relate to feelings of group identification in social dilemmas and how does this relate to the contribution to the common good?’. To answer this question, experimental data of public good games is used including 192 participants from 44 different countries. This data has been quantitatively analyzed using multiple regression analyses. The results show that identifying more highly with the group leads to more contributions to the common good. There was however no relation found between the collectivism vs individualism dimension and group identification. Nevertheless, contrary to the expectations, it was found that coming from a more individualistic society leads to more contributions to the common good. The results implicate that when trying to increase contributions, one could try to increase group identification in societies.