Conflict misperceptions between citizens and foreigners across the globe

Angelo Romano; Jörg Gross; Carsten K W De Dreu

doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac267

Conflict misperceptions between citizens and foreigners across the globe

PNAS Nexus. 2022 Nov 22;1(5):pgac267. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac267. eCollection 2022 Nov.

Authors

Angelo Romano¹, Jörg Gross^{1

2}, Carsten K W De Dreu^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Social, Economic, and Organizational Psychology Department, Leiden University, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands.
² Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland.
³ Center for Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making (CREED), University of Amsterdam, 1001 NJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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.

Keywords: conflict; cooperation; cross-cultural; ecology; misperceptions.