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Published on: September 28, 2018
Conflict misperceptions between citizens and foreigners across the globe
Angelo Romano1, Jörg Gross1,2, Carsten K W De Dreu1,3
1Social, Economic, and Organizational Psychology Department, Leiden University, 2300 RA Leiden, 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.
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