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Public Goods Games in Japan

Cultural and Individual Differences in Reciprocity

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Abstract

Social dilemmas, in which individually selfish behavior leads to collectively deficient outcomes, continue to be an important topic of research because of their ubiquity. The present research with Japanese participants replicates, with slight modifications, public goods games previously run in the United States. In contrast to recent work showing profound cross-cultural differences, the results of two studies reported here show remarkable cross-cultural similarities. Specifically, results suggest that (1) as in the U.S., allowing incremental commitment to a public good is effective at eliciting contributions, (2) individual differences in trust affect contributions, (3) the distribution of player types in the U.S. and Japan are very similar, and (4) the dynamics of play in the public goods games used here are strikingly parallel. These results are discussed in the context of the relationship between cross-cultural differences and economic institutional environments.

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Notes

  1. The bias in the sex ratio of participants is due to the pool from which they were drawn. Findings that sex differences in social dilemmas are limited (Sell 1997) suggest that there is little reason to be concerned that this bias limits generalizability. See Simpson 2003 for a recent discussion.

  2. Collapsing levels of trust and comparing them with American data is potentially problematic because Japanese participants were not randomly selected, as American participants were. While aware of this difficulty, we nonetheless conducted the analysis because it is potentially informative regarding potential cross-cultural differences in behavior in public goods games.

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Acknowledgments

The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant to the first author from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. We thank members of the Hokkaido University Center of Excellence Program on “Cultural and Ecological Foundations of the Mind” for their support in carrying out this work. The second author acknowledges the generous support of the University of Pennsylvania University Research Foundation and thanks Toshio Yamagishi for stimulating discussions related to this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Behavioral Science, Hokkaido University, N10W7, Kita-ku, Sapporo, 060-0810, Japan

    Keiko Ishii

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Robert Kurzban

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  1. Keiko Ishii
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  2. Robert Kurzban
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Correspondence to Keiko Ishii.

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Ishii, K., Kurzban, R. Public Goods Games in Japan. Hum Nat 19, 138–156 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-008-9034-4

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