Reciprocity or community: Different cultural pathways to cooperation and welfare.

Anna Heide Gunnþórsdóttir will give an open lecture in English.

Cooperation is decisive to economics and overall societal performance. But, do members of similarly successful economies cooperate for the same reasons? We experimentally compare Iceland and the US, countries with similar per capita GDP. We compare potentially subconscious motives via a novel approach, extracting motivation econometrically from observed behavior. We find that Americans cooperate conditionally, keeping a close tally on the input of others. Icelanders cooperate to a significant extent unconditionally as if out of a moral obligation to contribute to their group. Our findings cast some doubt on the hitherto assumed crucial role of reciprocity in economic and societal performance and suggest that suasion needs to be culturally tailored. We speculate on the historic and geographic reasons for the cultural differences found.