A new study on the human capacity for cooperation suggests that, deep down, people of diverse cultures are more similar than you might expect. The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports , shows that from the towns of England, Italy, Poland, and Russia to the villages of rural Ecuador, Ghana, Laos, and Aboriginal Australia, at the micro scale of our daily interaction, people everywhere tend to help others when needed. Our reliance on each other for help is constant: The study finds that, in everyday life, someone will signal a need for assistance (e.g., to pass a utensil) once every 2 minutes and 17 seconds on average. Across cultures, these small requests for assistance are complied with seven times more often than they are declined. And on the rare occasions when people do decline, they explain why. This human tendency to help others when needed—and to explain when such help can’t be given—transcends other cultural differences.
The findings help solve a puzzle generated by prior anthropological and economic research, which has emphasized differences among people of diverse cultures in how resources are shared. For example, while whale hunters of Lamalera in Indonesia follow distributional norms when sharing out a large catch, Hadza foragers of Tanzania share food more for fear of generating negative gossip; or while wealthier Orma villagers in Kenya are expected to pay for public goods such as road projects, such offers among the Gnau of Papua New Guinea are likely to be rejected as they would create an awkward obligation to reciprocate. Cultural differences like these present a challenge for our understanding of cooperation and helping in our species: Are our decisions about sharing and helping shaped by the culture we grew up with? Or are humans equally generous and giving by nature? This new global study finds that, while special occasions and high-cost exchange may attract cultural diversity, when we zoom in on the micro-level of social interaction, cultural difference mostly goes away, and our species’ tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible.
This study was coordinated by Giovanni Rossi (UCLA) and Nick Enfield (University of Sydney), director of the European Research Council grant ‘Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use’. See below for full list of team members.
Talking points
Data collection
Our research is based in extensive field work and on the analysis of video recordings of social interaction in everyday home/village life in a set of geographically, linguistically, and culturally diverse field sites (see the Table 1 and Figure 1 below).
We identified and analyzed over one thousand request events in domestic and informal settings on five continents. We extracted these events from video recordings of everyday life featuring more than 350 individuals—family, friends, neighbors—representing eight diverse languages and cultures: Cha’palaa (northern Ecuador), Lao (Laos), Murrinhpatha (northern Australia), Siwu (eastern Ghana), English (UK/US), Italian (Italy), Polish (Poland), and Russian (Russia).
Language
Language family
Location
Data collected by
Coding and analysis by
Cha’palaa
Barbacoan
Ecuador
Floyd
English
IE (Germanic)
UK/US
Rossi
Kendrick
Italian
IE (Romance)
Italy
Lao
Tai
Laos
Enfield
Murrinhpatha
Southern Daly
Australia
Blythe
Polish
IE (Slavic)
Poland
Zinken
Russian
Russia
Baranova
Siwu
Kwa
Ghana
Dingemanse
Table 1. Languages included in this study and authors responsible for data collection and analysis. (IE = Indo-European).
Attached Figure 1. Locations of data collection. (This map is published with the paper and can be used under a Creative Commons license that attributes the source, citing the paper)
What did we NOT do?
Corresponding authors:
Giovanni Rossi (project coordinator and lead author)
N. J. Enfield (project leader and corresponding author)
Co-authors:
Mark Dingemanse
Julija Baranova
Joe Blythe
Simeon Floyd (project coordinator)
Kobin H. Kendrick
Jörg Zinken
Scientific Reports
Observational study
People
Shared cross-cultural principles underlie human prosocial behavior at the smallest scale
19-Apr-2023
This study received funding from the European Research Council, the Australian Research Council, the Dutch Research Council, the Max Planck Society, the Academy of Finland, and the University of Sydney.