Continuing my trend of reporting on papers about cooperation, I thought I'd comment on a recent paper by Nancy Buchan and co-authors about human cooperation and globalization. I've argued previously about the role of parochialism in punishment and in theories about the evolution of war and cooperation, today, though, the theme is the extent to which more cosmopolitan countries tend to foster individuals who are more willing to cooperate globally. Sounds intuitive, but how does it work experimentally?

Consider a prisoner's dilemma in the form of a multi-layer public goods game (PGG). A basic PGG works as follows: each player is given some money to contribute to a communal pot, that amount is multiplied by some factor (rate of return), but everyone gets a share of the total minus what they initially contributed. Therefore, I do my 'best' if everyone cooperates fully and contributes all their money, while I free ride and contribute nothing. It's a prisoner's dilemma in action - everyone sees this and they shouldn't cooperate. Consider a similar game, but with two communal pots: one 'local' where only people from my area can contribute to, the amount of which is then doubled and of which I receive 1/4 (3 other people in my group can contribute to it), and one 'global' or 'world' account that I and others can contribute to, the total amount of which is tripled, and of which I receive 1/12 (11 other people can contribute to it) . The tension is the following: the direct return is 0.5 from the local account and 0.25 from the world account. But if everyone contributes a maximal amount to the world account, then we all make off with the most money rather than if we had all defected and not made any contributions. This is also a prisoner's dilemma, but with more layers of complexity.

Buchan et al ran this experiment in 6 countries: the US, Italy, Russia, Argentina, South Africa and Iran, looking specifically at large cities in each of the countries. They made two hypotheses. First, globalization could lead to greater parochialism by emphasizing ethnic, local or national groupings. Conversely, globalization could have a palliative effect on parochialism and perhaps enable and sustain greater tolerance. They indexed a country level globalization index (CGI), an index produced by the University of Warwick. They also constructed an individual level globalization index (IGI) based on questions that each subject answered. The authors used quota sampling methods for gender, age and socioeconomic status (though not for rural-urban, which I comment on later).

Now we come to the reason I'm interested in the research. When the authors ran the experiments, they showed that South Africans ranked 5th out of the 6 countries in the CGI: above Iran, but below Argentina. Considering the experimental results, South Africa also ranked 4th or 5th below Italy, Russia and the United States, but almost exactly equal to Argentina in terms of probability of allocating resources to a global account. Iran came in lowest . Globalization at the individual and country seemed a good predictor of international cooperation. If you're sceptical of the globalization result, the authors also point out that:

"analysis of the CGI along with a host of macroindicators such as the rule of law, generalized trust, per capita income, and norms of civic cooperation shows that the CGI is the only macrovariable that is significantly correlated with mean cooperation rates at the world level." (4140)

This week's Nature has a paper by Elizabeth Tricomi, Antonio Rangel, Colin F. Camerer & John P. O’Doherty, reporting on 'Neural evidence for inequality averse social preferences'. Eurekalert reported on it here. I would have read the paper anyway, but a quotation from one of the researchers, John O'Doherty in the Eurekalert article pricked my ears up, "[We can] try to understand how these changes in valuation actually translate into changes in behavior. For example, the person who finds out they're being paid less than someone else for doing the same job might end up working less hard and being less motivated as a consequence. It will be interesting to try to understand the brain mechanisms that underlie such changes." Now this interpretation would be great, if that's what the experiment had examined. But it didn't. I suspect that O'Doherty was led on by the journalist to say something 'print-worthy'. I comment briefly on the paper, and examine what we need to do to make more claims like O'Doherty's above.

Here's the description of the method from the article:

Twenty pairs of healthy, previously unacquainted male participants participated in the experiment. They were each paid a base $30 fee; each then drew a ball from a hat, labelled ‘rich’ or ‘poor’. The ‘rich’ (high-pay) subject received an immediate payment of $50, whereas the ‘poor’ (low-pay) player received no bonus payment. They then performed an identical task in consecutive fMRI scanning sessions. In each trial subjects viewed possible monetary transfers from the experimenter to themselves and to the other player, ranging from $0 to $50 (Fig. 1). Participants rated how appealing they found the possible transfers on a scale of -5 (very unappealing) to 5 (very appealing). After both players’ scans, a single trial was randomly picked from the set, and the transfers for that trial were paid out.

A recent Slate article comments on work in Psychological Science in which people are used for an experiment (the 'people' are probably university students) on moral behaviour and 'buying green'. The subjects are asked 'What do you want to buy from Online Store X' (the experimenters manipulate the store's stocks), which is all good and fits with experimental protocols (oh yes, though it's imaginary, and they aren't spending money, so hey?). What is not cool, not cool at all, is that the experimenters then set up a dictator game telling the players they were paired with someone, when they weren't. The money they were 'giving' to someone else, didn't get given to anyone. The experimenters deceived their subjects. Not cool. Fantastic that they are doing experimental work, and using economicky experiments to do it, but not cool that they deceive their subjects. Why? Experimenter legitimacy! One of the big battles as an experimentalist is having your subjects BELIEVE that what you say you will do, you ACTUALLY will do. If word of this kind of deception (almost always by psychologists) gets out, then more and more experimental subjects won't believe experimenters and therefore won't behave in ways consistent with how they would outside of the laboratory or experiment. This is why economics experimenters have such a strong code of ethics about not deceiving and doing what you say you will do.