Nancy R. Buchan

Globalization and human cooperation

Globalization magnifies the problems that affect all people and that require large-scale human cooperation, for example, the overharvesting of natural resources and human-induced global warming. However, what does globalization imply for the cooperation needed to address such global social dilemmas? Two competing hypotheses are offered. One hypothesis is that globalization prompts reactionary movements that reinforce parochial distinctions among people. Large-scale cooperation then focuses on favoring ones own ethnic, racial, or language group. The alternative hypothesis suggests that globalization strengthens cosmopolitan attitudes by weakening the relevance of ethnicity, locality, or nationhood as sources of identification. In essence, globalization, the increasing interconnectedness of people worldwide, broadens the group boundaries within which individuals perceive they belong. We test these hypotheses by measuring globalization at both the country and individual levels and analyzing the relationship between globalization and individual cooperation with distal others in multilevel sequential cooperation experiments in which players can contribute to individual, local, and/or global accounts. Our samples were drawn from the general populations of the United States, Italy, Russia, Argentina, South Africa, and Iran. We find that as country and individual levels of globalization increase, so too does individual cooperation at the global level vis-à-vis the local level. In essence, “globalized” individuals draw broader group boundaries than others, eschewing parochial motivations in favor of cosmopolitan ones. Globalization may thus be fundamental in shaping contemporary large-scale cooperation and may be a positive force toward the provision of global public goods.

Global Social Identity and Global Cooperation

This research examined the question of whether the psychology of social identity can motivate cooperation in the context of a global collective. Our data came from a multinational study of choice behavior in a multilevel public-goods dilemma conducted among samples drawn from the general populations of the United States, Italy, Russia, Argentina, South Africa, and Iran. Results demonstrate that an inclusive social identification with the world community is a meaningful psychological construct that plays a role in motivating cooperation that transcends parochial interests. Self-reported identification with the world as a whole predicts behavioral contributions to a global public good beyond what is predicted from expectations about what other people are likely to contribute. Furthermore, global social identification is conceptually distinct from general attitudes about global issues, and has unique effects on cooperative behavior.

Gain and Loss Ultimatums

This chapter investigates the difference between ultimatum games over gains and over losses. Although previous research in decision making has found that individuals treat losses and gains differently, losses have not previously been investigated in strategic situations. In the field, however, the problem of negotiating over losses is as unavoidable and problematic as the problem of negotiating over gains. In addition, data on how we bargain over losses can shed some theoretical light on fairness preferences. Two experiments use within-subject designs, the first in the U.S. and the second in the U.S., China and Japan. We find that offers and demands are higher in losses than in gains, and that these results hold across the three countries. We adapt Boltons (1991) model of fairness to explain the results. Specifically, we extend prospect theorys loss aversion to unfairness, suggesting that unfairness in losses looms larger than unfairness in gains.

Conceptualizing Culture as Communication in Management and Marketing Research

Decades of management and marketing researchers are grateful to Geert Hofstede for bringing an empirical approach to studying culture in the workplace. Since Hofstede’s (1980) original publication of the cultural values of IBM employees in 40 nations, hundreds of researchers have used the Hofstedean framework to understand culture’s influence on managerial, consumer, and organizational behavior. This includes conceptualizing culture as a nation-level construct capturing a set of shared values and measuring culture empirically through self-reports of value statements. For managers and marketers, this approach has proven fruitful. When our goals are to explain and predict the behavior of employees, managers, and consumers in an increasingly global workplace, we agree that there is utility in measuring culture empirically at the individual level, in describing and categorizing individuals from different nationalities when shared values are apparent (though some authors in this volume might question the value of such an approach), and in empirically testing the relationship between cultural values and organizational outcomes. At the same time, we believe that it is time to move beyond the empirical study of cultural values to address other facets of culture that have the power to predict marketing and management behaviors.

Local Reasons to Give Globally: Identity Extension and Global Cooperation

Recent political events across the world suggest a retrenchment from globalization and a possible increase in parochialism. This inward-looking threat from parochialism occurs just as the global community faces growing challenges that require trans-national cooperation. In this research, we question if strong identification with an in-group necessarily leads to parochialism and ultimately is detrimental to global cooperation. Building on research on global social identification, we explore whether strong local identification can expand in inclusiveness to global identification, and among whom this is likely to happen. The results of our global public goods study – conducted in South Korea and the United States – show that high levels of social identification with a local group can extend to the global collective, particularly for individuals who are also high in concern-for-others. Furthermore, this identification translates into behavior that benefits the global, anonymous group at a cost to oneself. These results shed light on how to avoid the trap of parochialism and instead engender cooperative behavior with the broader global community.