The growth of globalization is steadily building more connections among people around the world and altering nearly every aspect of many communities in the process. On a macroscopic scale, globalization is shortening geographical distances for business and trade. Goods, services, technology, information, and other capital can all be rapidly exchanged. Consequently, numerous studies have been done to explore the benefits and detriments of these seemingly boundless international interactions.
While macroscopic effects have been studied extensively, scientists have not done as much work on more detailed microscopic ones. In an advanced article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of scientists focused their attention on one of those semi-neglected topics. They sought to determine if globalization shortened the social distances between individuals when it comes to cooperation and altruism, which are essential elements for dealing with the negatives of globalization, such as natural resource shortages and unjust business practices.
A distinctive pattern emerged when researchers correlated the globalization level of a country and the behavior of its citizens in the experiment: there was a positive correlation between a country’s globalization level and the rate of cooperation.
There are two main hypotheses regarding how globalization could influence people’s attitudes toward strangers from other countries. One proposes that increased globalization will make differences between groups of people more apparent, and parochialism will be bolstered by this differentiation. People will feel more of a need to separate "others" from those in their own circles, which will lead to decreased altruistic behavior. The other side hypothesizes that globalization will reduce barriers and increase cooperation between individuals.
To experimentally determine which of the two hypotheses is more correct, Nancy Buchan and a team of researchers measured a person’s inclination to cooperate with people from both the local and global communities. They asked 1,145 participants from six countries with different levels of globalization (Argentina, Iran, Italy, Russia, South Africa, and the United States) to play a game of resource allocation. Each participant had 10 tokens and could choose to place them however they liked in personal, local, or world accounts.
All tokens in the personal account were safe from change, so the number the participant put in is the number he or she was guaranteed to take out at the end. For the local account, each participant was teamed anonymously with three others. The researchers would double however much the four participants placed in the local account and return an equal share of this total to each participant. In the world account, each participant was teamed anonymously with the three people from the local account group and eight additional participants. The researchers would triple the total amount placed in the world account and distribute it equally among the 12 participants.
Essentially, the participants could earn the most tokens by investing in the world account, but they would have to cooperate with more people. If everyone placed their 10 tokens in individual accounts, no one would lose or gain anything. If everyone placed their tokens in local accounts, they would each gain 10 additional tokens. If all the participants put their tokens in global accounts, each person would make a profit of 20 tokens. If you were the only one to place tokens in the local or global accounts, you would lose tokens. You would also lose tokens if you placed them in local or global accounts that weren’t well-funded by other participants.�
A distinctive pattern emerged when researchers correlated the globalization level of a country and the behavior of its citizens in the experiment: there was a positive correlation between a country’s globalization level and the rate of cooperation. Participants in more globalized countries like Italy and US were significantly more likely to put tokens in the world market than those from less globalized ones like Iran. There was less of a correlation for the local accounts, but there was a slight negative trend, where people from more globalized countries were less likely to place tokens there.
From the results of their experiment, the authors conclude�that�“higher levels of globalization are associated with greater propensities to favor cooperation with globally distal others compared with compatriots living in the same locality.” Although their research draws a correlation, it does not address the causation when it comes to this difference in behavior. Does living in a globalized country make a person more open to the idea of cooperating with people overseas, or does it involve a more complex mix of cultural and economic factors? Understanding global connectivity will take much more research, but the results of this study do tell us that people from highly globalized countries were readily agreeable to cooperating with people outside of their national boundaries.
PNAS, 2009. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809522106