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Study finds that individuals’ willingness to cooperate with people from other countries is significantly shaped by perceived similarity, their own nation’s level of wealth and institutional reliability, as well as perceived or actual conflict with other countries. This can create a dynamic that either impairs or facilitates the resolution of global challenges / publication in “PNAS Nexus”
Study participants from different countries demonstrated more positive attitudes toward people they perceived to be similar to themselves. That is the result of a social experiment conducted by psychologists at the University of Cologne’s Key Profile Area “Social and Economic Behavior”. The study focused on prosociality, or the tendency to value outcomes of others and to share among individuals from different countries. Prosociality, the researchers found, increased with greater cultural and national stereotype similarity. The results were published under the title “Beyond ingroup favoritism: Investigating cross-national social preferences across 25 nations” in PNAS Nexus in November of 2025.
The researchers started out from the premise that global challenges necessitate cooperation beyond national borders. Prosociality can help achieve this objective. “While it is well-established that people favor their own compatriots, this study demonstrates that people also display substantial prosociality toward others from different nations, though findings show that not all ‘foreigners’ are treated equally,” said Vanessa Clemens, a doctoral researcher at the Social Cognition Centre Cologne.
She and her colleagues at the University of Cologne and at FernUniversität Hagen invited 6,182 participants from 25 nations to take part in a sharing game with individuals from each of the participating nations. Each person received 150 “Talers” — a made-up currency — and chose between different ways of sharing the Talers between themselves and another person from a specific nation. For each participant, one decision was randomly selected to be paid out in local currency, so the stakes were real.
Almost 90 percent of people shared more with people from their own country compared to people from other countries. Participants also shared more with those from culturally similar nations and less with people from nations with which their own country had a present or past national conflict. People from countries with stable institutions shared more in general. People from wealthier nations shared more with individuals from less wealthy nations, possibly reflecting a desire to decrease inequality between nations. Overall, people were most likely to be generous towards people from Ghana and Kenya and least likely to give lots of Talers to people from the United States or China, highlighting systematic differences in how people treat individuals of different foreign nations.
Importantly, cross-national prosociality was associated with both voting accordance in the United Nations General Assembly and with historical and ongoing militarized conflict between nations. This suggests that the experimental patterns capture both cooperative and conflictual dimensions of international relations.
The researchers concluded that reduced cooperation due to a historic or ongoing conflict between two nations might also hinder subsequent cooperation among individuals from these countries, as tensions on the nation level are mirrored on the individual level. “If state-level cooperation and conflict systematically map onto individual-level prosociality, the key implication is that global challenges are not only institutional or strategic problems – they are also psychological coordination problems”, Vanessa Clemens added. Barriers to international cooperation (e.g., on climate change, migration, or conflict resolution) may be partly rooted in how ordinary citizens perceive and relate to people from other nations. If individuals are less trusting and less willing to act prosocially toward members of rival or conflict-afflicted countries, this can constrain political leaders’ room to maneuver, reduce public support for cooperative policies, and make international agreements more fragile.
Vanessa Clemens
Social Cognition Center Cologne
+49 221 470 76763
vanessa.clemens@uni-koeln.de
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/11/pgaf343/8340225?login=true
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