Impersonal cooperation among strangers enables societies to create valuable public goods, such as infrastructure, public services, and democracy. Several factors have been proposed to explain variation in impersonal cooperation across societies, referring to institutions (e.g., rule of law), religion (e.g., belief in God as a third-party punisher), cultural beliefs (e.g., trust) and values (e.g., collectivism), and ecology (e.g., relational mobility). We tested 17 preregistered hypotheses in a meta-analysis of 1,506 studies of impersonal cooperation in social dilemmas (e.g., the Public Goods Game) conducted across 70 societies (k = 2,271), where people make costly decisions to cooperate among strangers. After controlling for 10 study characteristics that can affect the outcome of studies, we found very little cross-societal variation in impersonal cooperation. Categorizing societies into cultural groups explained no variance in cooperation. Similarly, cultural, ancestral, and linguistic distance between societies explained little variance in cooperation. None of the cross-societal factors hypothesized to relate to impersonal cooperation explained variance in cooperation across societies. We replicated these conclusions when meta-analyzing 514 studies across 41 states and nine regions in the United States (k = 783). Thus, we observed that impersonal cooperation occurred in all societies-and to a similar degree across societies-suggesting that prior research may have overemphasized the magnitude of differences between modern societies in impersonal cooperation. We discuss the discrepancy between theory, past empirical research and the meta-analysis, address a limitation of experimental research on cooperation to study culture, and raise possible directions for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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合作中的跨文化差异：荟萃分析。

陌生人之间的非个人合作使社会能够创造有价值的公共产品，例如基础设施、公共服务和民主。已经提出了几个因素来解释社会之间非个人合作的差异，这些因素涉及制度（例如，法治）、宗教（例如，信仰上帝作为第三方惩罚者）、文化信仰（例如，信任）和价值观。例如，集体主义）和生态学（例如，关系流动性）。我们在对 70 个社会 (k = 2,271) 进行的 1,506 项社会困境（例如，公共产品博弈）中的非个人合作研究的元分析中测试了 17 个预先注册的假设，在这些社会中，人们做出与陌生人合作的代价高昂的决定。在控制了 10 个可能影响研究结果的研究特征后，我们发现非个人合作的跨社会差异很小。将社会分类为文化群体并没有解释合作中的差异。同样，社会之间的文化、祖先和语言距离几乎不能解释合作中的差异。假设与非个人合作有关的跨社会因素都没有解释跨社会合作的差异。我们在对美国 41 个州和 9 个地区的 514 项研究进行荟萃分析时复制了这些结论（k = 783）。因此，我们观察到非个人合作发生在所有社会中——并且在不同社会中的程度相似——这表明先前的研究可能过分强调了现代社会之间在非个人合作方面的差异程度。我们讨论理论之间的差异，过去的实证研究和荟萃分析，解决了合作研究文化的实验研究的局限性，并为未来的研究提出了可能的方向。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2022 APA，保留所有权利）。