Abstract

In a globalizing world, conflict between citizens and foreigners hinders cooperation and hampers how well the global community can tackle shared problems. Here, we study conflict between citizens and foreigners and find that people substantially misperceive how competitive foreigners are. Citizens (from 51 countries; N = 12,863; 656,274 decisions) interacted with foreigners in incentivized contest experiments. People across the globe systematically failed to anticipate the competitiveness of foreigners and either competed too much or too little. Competition was poorly explained by differences in cultural values or environmental stress. By contrast, competition and concomitant conflict misperceptions were robustly accounted for by differences in the wealth of nations, institutions, and histories of engaging in international conflict. Our results reveal how macro-level socio-economic differences between countries create false stereotypes and might breed conflict.

Details

Title
Conflict misperceptions between citizens and foreigners across the globe
Author
Romano, Angelo 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Gross, Jörg 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Carsten K W De Dreu 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Social, Economic, and Organizational Psychology Department, Leiden University , 2300 RA Leiden , The Netherlands 
Publication year
2022
Publication date
Nov 2022
Publisher
Oxford University Press
e-ISSN
27526542
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3191373914
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.