People Are More Cooperative Than They Think
A global study finds most people are willing to cooperate with strangers, but they underestimate that willingness in others.
Intelligence analysis by GPT-5.4 Mini
Researchers from Bonn, Frankfurt and the Frankfurt School found that cooperation is far more common than people assume. Across 125 countries, willingness to act for the common good was higher than expected, including a particularly large gap in Germany.
The study is like asking people whether they would share crayons with a stranger. Most people actually do choose to share, but they guess that other people would not. In Germany, the sharing was even higher than expected.
Analysis
What the study found
A research team linked to the University of Bonn, Goethe University Frankfurt, and the Frankfurt School of Finance published a global study in Science on cooperation. Using behavioral experiments with more than 100,000 people from 125 nationally representative samples, the researchers found that cooperation is widespread across countries.
In the experiment, participants were paired with strangers and had to choose between a safer private payoff and a lower cooperative payoff. Choosing the selfish option meant a guaranteed $100. Choosing the cooperative option meant $70, but if both people chose cooperation, an extra $400 would be donated to climate action.
On average, 69 percent of participants chose the cooperative option, while people expected only 47 percent cooperation. That gap appeared in 124 of 125 countries, suggesting a broad tendency to underestimate how willing others are to help the group.
Germany stood out
Germany showed an especially large gap between reality and expectation. In the German sample, 86 percent cooperated, far above the global average, but respondents still expected only 47.6 percent cooperation from others. One of the authors, Armin Falk, said the result may reflect a habit of seeing the glass as half empty.
The article frames cooperation as a basic condition for social well-being. Its central point is not that people are perfectly altruistic, but that many are more willing to contribute to the common good than others assume.
Key points
- Researchers from Bonn, Frankfurt, and the Frankfurt School published a global cooperation study in *Science*.
- More than 100,000 people in 125 countries took part in the behavioral experiments.
- On average, 69 percent chose the cooperative option, but respondents expected only 47 percent cooperation.
- Germany showed a particularly large gap: 86 percent cooperated, while expected cooperation was 47.6 percent.
- The researchers argue that people often underestimate how willing others are to contribute to the common good.
If people realize others are more willing to cooperate than they assumed, trust could improve. That could make it easier to support shared goals like climate measures or other public goods that need collective action.
If people keep underestimating one another, they may stay more suspicious and less willing to act together. That could weaken support for collective solutions, even when many people are already ready to participate.
