Cooperating Across Cultural Differences

Cooperation between groups depends on trust, on rules people expect to be enforced, on shared identity, and on whether people see one group's gain as another's loss.

Joshua Greene and members of his lab at Harvard created Tango, an online quiz game that pairs Democrats and Republicans as teammates. In four experiments led by Lucas Woodley and Evan DeFilippis, US participants who played for an hour with a partner from the other party reported warmer feelings toward that party than those paired with someone from their own. Brian Hare and Wen Zhou study how early children come to see a rival group as less than fully human. Charles Efferson and Sonja Vogt study when a program's effects spread beyond the people it reaches, and what prevents that. Alice Evans compares how gender norms differ across societies and how they have changed.