Much research exists discussing how globalization influences societies at the aggregate level, however we have no clear understanding of how this process influences individuals in their everyday social and economic interactions with those around them in their locality, their country, and the world. Our research goal is to address the fundamental question of whether and how an individual's participation in the global system influences the propensity to cooperate to provide public goods at the local, national, and global levels.
Our research methodology is experimental. We replicate the same interactions among and between citizens in six countries: Argentina, Great Britain, Iran, Russia, South Africa and the United States. Participants from each country will represent varying degrees of participation in the global system and the research sample will be balanced across the categories of age, gender, and social-economic status. Participants will engage in a series of experimental interactions intended to make salient for them the tension between cooperating to increase overall local welfare, or cooperating to increase global welfare. This research is a first step toward understanding the degree to which people - who demonstrate differing levels of interconnectedness with the world - will cooperate to provide public goods at the local and global levels, and to explore why they do so. With this deepened understanding, we may be able to increase global cooperation and to reduce the monetary and human costs associated with non-provision of global public goods.
