Does Globalization Influence Cooperative Behaviour to solve Global Issues?

By Peter Anthony

The HL extension topic of the sociocultural approach focuses on the influence of globalization on individual behaviour. You are required to study the effect of the interaction of local and global influences and the research methods used to study the influence of globalization on behaviour.

Globalization has increased dramatically in its scope and reach in the last several decades, and psychologists have contributed to the debate by investigating positive and negative influences on behaviour. A recent article in this collection, The Influence of Globalization, described a study by Becker et al. (2002) about Western television's role in the rise of eating disorders among Fijian teenage girls.

Buchan et al. (2009) offer a more positive view of globalization. Their study aimed to determine how globalization influences human cooperative behaviour, especially in finding solutions to global challenges of resource depletion, climate change and other social dilemmas. They examined two competing hypotheses: globalization favours one’s own ethnic, racial, or language group and the alternative that globalization strengthens cosmopolitan (cosmopolitan = showing interest in different cultures, ideas, etc.) attitudes by weakening local and national sources of identification.

To test these hypotheses, 1145 participants were recruited using a quota sampling method from urban centres of industrial nations with varying globalisation levels. These nations included the United States, Italy, Russia, Argentina, South Africa, and Iran. Participants completed a survey to determine their score on the Individual-level Globalization Index, which measures the extent they participated in global economic, social, and cultural networks.

Participants were asked to make a series of decisions about allocating tokens between a personal account, a local account, and a world account. Incentives were structured so that decisions could be used to measure whether the participants were self-interested (most contributions to their personal account) or willing to cooperate exclusively with people from their own locality (most contribution to the local account) or more willing to cooperate with groups from around the world (most contributions to the world account.)

An analysis of how these tokens were distributed found that as country and individual levels of globalization increased, so too does an individual’s cooperative behaviour at the global level. These results supported the cosmopolitan hypothesis that globalization strengthens worldly attitudes by weakening the local and national sources of identification. The study concluded that globalization is a powerful force influencing large-scale cooperative behaviour among citizens from very different countries.