Cooperation on a large scale is crucial to solving several current challenges characterizing an increasingly globalized world, including climate change mitigation, pandemic responses, and international conflict. However, cooperation is often hard to achieve, especially in interactions between strangers in diverse groups. Decades of interdisciplinary research in economics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology have tried to understand what are the factors promoting or undermining cooperative behaviour. However, most of this research has focused on a very limited set of societies in the Global North.

This workshop addresses growing calls to understand cooperation and the mechanisms that support it beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. It will bring together an international network of experts in the field of human cooperation, who take a cross-cultural approach and use a broad set of methods to study the full variation in cooperative behaviours around the globe. Researchers from four different groups will meet to discuss the latest developments of large-scale cross-cultural projects, including work in progress, as well as their approach to methodological challenges that characterize cross-cultural research on cooperation.

Participating groups:

• Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision-Making, University of Amsterdam
• Social Cognition Center Cologne, University of Cologne
• Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Department of Social, Economic and Organisational Psychology, Leiden University

This is an invitational event.