A global behavioural experiment of more than 100,000 people in 125 countries finds that 69% of participants chose a smaller personal payout to enable a communal $400 donation to climate measures. Yet participants expected only 47% of others to cooperate, a pessimistic gap seen in 124 of the 125 countries. The Bonn–Frankfurt team says the finding — published in Science — shows people are more cooperative than they believe and that correcting misperceptions could boost collective action.
People Are More Cooperative Than They Think, Global Study Finds
FILE PHOTO - Two men shake hands in greeting. (is associated with: «Study finds people are more cooperative than they think») Mohssen Assanimoghaddam/dpa
Most people are willing to cooperate with strangers — but they consistently underestimate how willing others are to do the same, a large international study by a Bonn–Frankfurt research team reports in Science.
The researchers ran behavioural experiments with more than 100,000 participants across 125 representative country samples. Each person was anonymously paired with another participant from the same country and faced a simple monetary choice: take a guaranteed $100 ("do not cooperate") or take $70 ("cooperate").
Crucially, if both partners independently chose to cooperate, a joint bonus of $400 was donated to climate action funds. That setup created a clear trade-off between a larger individual payout and a community-oriented benefit.
Key Findings
Across the global sample, a clear majority — 69% of participants — chose to cooperate and forgo the higher personal payout in order to enable the communal donation. But participants systematically underestimated others' willingness to cooperate: on average they expected only 47% of others to cooperate.
This pessimistic misperception was nearly universal, appearing in 124 of the 125 countries studied. The gap between reality and expectation was particularly pronounced in Germany, the authors note.
"Our results send an encouraging message: We are a more cooperative species than we think," the researchers concluded.
The authors argue that this optimistic reality — higher-than-expected cooperation — matters for tackling collective challenges such as climate change, because correcting misperceptions could strengthen collaborative behaviour and social wellbeing.
Study context: The research is presented as the first globally representative examination of human cooperation, and the University of Bonn helped coordinate the multi-country samples and experimental protocol.
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