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Corruption is a pervasive phenomenon that affects the quality of institutions, undermines economic growth and exacerbates inequalities around the globe. Here we tested whether perceiving representatives of institutions as corrupt undermines trust and subsequent prosocial behaviour among strangers. We developed an experimental game paradigm modelling representatives as third-party punishers to manipulate or assess corruption and examine its relationship with trust and prosociality (trust behaviour, cooperation and generosity). In a sequential dyadic die-rolling task, the participants observed the dishonest behaviour of a target who would subsequently serve as a third-party punisher in a trust game (Study 1a, N = 540), in a prisoner's dilemma (Study 1b, N = 503) and in dictator games (Studies 2-4, N = 765, pre-registered). Across these five studies, perceiving a third party as corrupt undermined interpersonal trust and, in turn, prosocial behaviour. These findings contribute to our understanding of the critical role that representatives of institutions play in shaping cooperative relationships in modern societies.Across five studies, Spadaro et al. show that perceiving representatives of institutions as corrupt is associated with lower interpersonal trust and prosocial behaviour among strangers.

In the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries attempt to enforce new social norms to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus. A key to the success of these measures is the individual adherence to norms that are collectively beneficial to contain the spread of the pandemic. However, individuals’ self-interest bias (i.e., the prevalent tendency to license own but not others’ self-serving acts or norm violations) can pose a challenge to the success of such measures. The current research examines COVID-19-related self-interest bias from a cross-cultural perspective. Two studies ( N = 1,558) sampled from the United States and China consistently revealed that participants from the United States evaluated their own self-serving acts (exploiting test kits in Study 1; social gathering and sneezing without covering the mouth in public in Study 2) as more acceptable than identical deeds of others, while such self-interest bias did not emerge among Chinese participants. Cultural underpinnings of independent versus interdependent self-construal may influence the extent to which individuals apply self-interest bias to justifications of their own self-serving behaviors during the pandemic.

BackgroundThe effective implementation of government policies and measures for controlling the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic requires compliance from the public. This study aimed to examine cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of trust in government regarding COVID-19 control with the adoption of recommended health behaviours and prosocial behaviours, and potential determinants of trust in government during the pandemic.MethodsThis study analysed data from the PsyCorona Survey, an international project on COVID-19 that included 23 733 participants from 23 countries (representative in age and gender distributions by country) at baseline survey and 7785 participants who also completed follow-up surveys. Specification curve analysis was used to examine concurrent associations between trust in government and self-reported behaviours. We further used structural equation model to explore potential determinants of trust in government. Multilevel linear regressions were used to examine associations between baseline trust and longitudinal behavioural changes.ResultsHigher trust in government regarding COVID-19 control was significantly associated with higher adoption of health behaviours (handwashing, avoiding crowded space, self-quarantine) and prosocial behaviours in specification curve analyses (median standardised β = 0.173 and 0.229, p < 0.001). Government perceived as well organised, disseminating clear messages and knowledge on COVID-19, and perceived fairness were positively associated with trust in government (standardised β = 0.358, 0.230, 0.056, and 0.249, p < 0.01). Higher trust at baseline survey was significantly associated with lower rate of decline in health behaviours over time (p for interaction = 0.001).ConclusionsThese results highlighted the importance of trust in government in the control of COVID-19.

Cooperation among strangers has been hypothesized to have declined in theUnited States over the past several decades, an alarming trend that has potential far-reaching societal consequences. To date, most research that supports a decline in cooperation has relied on self-report measures or archival data. Here, we utilize the history of experimental research on cooperation in situations involving conflicting interests (i.e., social dilemmas). We meta-analyzed 511 studies conducted between 1956 and 2017 with 660 unique samples and effect sizes involving 63,342 participants to test whether the average level of cooperation observed in these studies had declined over time. We found no evidence for a decline in cooperation over the 61-year period. Instead, we found a slight increase in cooperation over time. In addition, some societal indicators (e.g., income inequality, societal wealth, urbanization level, and percentage of people living alone) measured 10 to 5 years prior to measures of cooperation were found to be positively associated with cooperation, suggesting that they may be potential societal underpinnings of increases in cooperation. These findings challenge the idea that social capital and civic cooperation among strangers have declined in the United States over time, and we offer directions for future research to understand causes of an increase in cooperation.

Impersonal cooperation among strangers enables societies to create valuable public goods, such as infrastructure, public services, and democracy. Several factors have been proposed to explain variation in impersonal cooperation across societies, referring to institutions (e.g., rule of law), religion (e.g., belief in God as a third-party punisher), cultural beliefs (e.g., trust) and values (e.g., collectivism), and ecology (e.g., relational mobility). We tested 17 pre-registered hypotheses in a meta-analysis of 1,506 studies of impersonal cooperation in social dilemmas (e.g., the Public Goods Game) conducted across 70 societies (k = 2,271), where people make costly decisions to cooperate among strangers. After controlling for 10 study characteristics that can affect the outcome of studies, we found very little cross-societal variation in impersonal cooperation. Categorizing societies into cultural groups explained no variance in cooperation. Similarly, cultural, ancestral, and linguistic distance between societies explained little variance in cooperation. None of the cross-societal factors hypothesized to relate to impersonal cooperation explained variance in cooperation across societies. We replicated these conclusions when meta-analyzing 514 studies across 41 states and nine regions in the United States (k = 783). Thus, we observed that impersonal cooperation occurred in all societies – and to a similar degree across societies – suggesting that prior research may have overemphasized the magnitude of differences between modern societies in impersonal cooperation. We discuss the discrepancy between theory, past empirical research and the meta-analysis, address a limitation of experimental research on cooperation to study culture, and raise possible directions for future research.

Many citizens distrust powerful societal institutions, and hold conspiracy theories about them. What are the implications of this suspicion of institutions for people’s social relationships? The current paper proposes that institutions have at least two functions to regulate citizens’ social relationships: providing people with a sense of safety, and providing models for group norms and values. Suspicion of institutions undermines both of these functions, and therefore yields a range of negative societal outcomes by impacting people’s interpersonal, within-group, and between-group relationships. More specifically, suspicion of institutions reduces trust between strangers, within-group cooperation, commitment, and prosocial behavior, and increases prejudice, intergroup conflict, polarization, and extremism. We conclude that institutional distrust and conspiracy theories erode the fabric of society.

Publishing studies using standardized, machine-readable formats will enable machines to perform meta-analyses on demand. To build a semantically enhanced technology that embodies these functions, we developed the Cooperation Databank (CoDa)—a databank that contains 2,636 studies on human cooperation (1958–2017) conducted in 78 societies involving 356,283 participants. Experts annotated these studies along 312 variables, including the quantitative results (13,959 effects). We designed an ontology that defines and relates concepts in cooperation research and that can represent the relationships between results of correlational and experimental studies. We have created a research platform that, given the data set, enables users to retrieve studies that test the relation of variables with cooperation, visualize these study results, and perform (a) meta-analyses, (b) metaregressions, (c) estimates of publication bias, and (d) statistical power analyses for future studies. We leveraged the data set with visualization tools that allow users to explore the ontology of concepts in cooperation research and to plot a citation network of the history of studies. CoDa offers a vision of how publishing studies in a machine-readable format can establish institutions and tools that improve scientific practices and knowledge.

Cross-societal differences in cooperation and trust among strangers in the provision of public goods may be key to understanding how societies are managing the COVID-19 pandemic. We report a survey conducted across 41 societies between March and May 2020 (N = 34,526), and test pre-registered hypotheses about how cross-societal differences in cooperation and trust relate to prosocial COVID-19 responses (e.g., social distancing), stringency of policies, and support for behavioral regulations (e.g., mandatory quarantine). We further tested whether cross-societal variation in institutions and ecologies theorized to impact cooperation were associated with prosocial COVID-19 responses, including institutional quality, religiosity, and historical prevalence of pathogens. We found substantial variation across societies in prosocial COVID-19 responses, stringency of policies, and support for behavioral regulation. However, we found no consistent evidence to support the idea that cross-societal variation in cooperation and trust among strangers is associated with these outcomes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. These results were replicated with another independent cross-cultural COVID-19 dataset (N = 112,136), and in both snowball and representative samples. We discuss implications of our results, including challenging the assumption that managing the COVID-19 pandemic across societies is best modelled as a public goods dilemma.

Decades of research document individual differences in prosocial behavior using controlled experiments that model social interactions in situations of interdependence. However, theoretical and empirical integration of the vast literature on the predictive validity of personality traits to account for these individual differences is missing. Here, we present a theoretical framework that identifies 4 broad situational affordances across interdependent situations (i.e., exploitation, reciprocity, temporal conflict, and dependence under uncertainty) and more specific subaffordances within certain types of interdependent situations (e.g., possibility to increase equality in outcomes) that can determine when, which, and how personality traits should be expressed in prosocial behavior. To test this framework, we meta-analyzed 770 studies reporting on 3,523 effects of 8 broad and 43 narrow personality traits on prosocial behavior in interdependent situations modeled in 6 commonly studied economic games (Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, Prisoner's Dilemma, Public Goods Game, and Commons Dilemma). Overall, meta-analytic correlations ranged between -.18 ≤ ρ̂ ≤ .26, and most traits yielding a significant relation to prosocial behavior had conceptual links to the affordances provided in interdependent situations, most prominently the possibility for exploitation. Moreover, for several traits, correlations within games followed the predicted pattern derived from a theoretical analysis of affordances. On the level of traits, we found that narrow and broad traits alike can account for prosocial behavior, informing the bandwidth-fidelity problem. In sum, the meta-analysis provides a theoretical foundation that can guide future research on prosocial behavior and advance our understanding of individual differences in human prosociality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Highlights • Risk perception of COVID-19 was associated with more negative/less positive emotions. • Risk perception of COVID-19 was inversely associated with subsequent mental health. • The association between risk perception and mental health was mediated by emotions. • Specification curve analysis was used to avoid subjective analytical decisions., Background Although there are increasing concerns on mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, no large-scale population-based studies have examined the associations of risk perception of COVID-19 with emotion and subsequent mental health. Methods : This study analysed cross-sectional and longitudinal data from the PsyCorona Survey that included 54,845 participants from 112 countries, of which 23,278 participants are representative samples of 24 countries in terms of gender and age. Specification curve analysis (SCA) was used to examine associations of risk perception of COVID-19 with emotion and self-rated mental health. This robust method considers all reasonable model specifications to avoid subjective analytical decisions while accounting for multiple testing. Results : All 162 multilevel linear regressions in the SCA indicated that higher risk perception of COVID-19 was significantly associated with less positive or more negative emotions (median standardised β=-0.171, median SE=0.004, P0.05). Limitations Reliance on self-reported data. Conclusions : Risk perception of COVID-19 was associated with emotion and ultimately mental health. Interventions on reducing excessive risk perception and managing emotional distress could promote mental health.

Background. Interpersonal relationships contribute to the psychological adjustments to chronic disease, directly affecting health and, more generally, life satisfaction of patients. Those factors are often threatened by the fear of becoming target of prejudices and discrimination from those who share their daily life with. Thus, this study proposes a contribution to the Italian adaptation and validation of the Chronic Illness Anticipated Stigma Scale (CIASS), a brief questionnaire (12 items) that aims to assess perceived stigma of chronic illness patients in family, work and health care contexts. Method. 279 chronic illness patients have completed the questionnaire, comparing the scores with those obtained in depression (BDI-II), anxiety (STAI), and internalized stigma scales. Results. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the Italian sample has shown the same structure of the original questionnaire, composed by three dimensions of anticipated stigma, experienced with family and friends, work colleagues and health care providers. Correlation analyses confirm the relation between scores of anticipated stigma and other mental health indicators as anxiety and depression. Conclusion. Italian version of CIASS demonstrates to be a valid and reliable instrument, considering it both as an indicator of person's state of health and a promising marker of the specific kind of perceived discrimination in family, care and working contexts.

Despite menstruation being a physiological phenomenon in women’s life, social research has highlighted that there are still many taboos, also conveyed by advertising, which prevent an open discourse on the topic and can have negative impacts on women’s well-being. The present study examined the influence of the exposure to existing TV advertisements for sanitary napkins depicting menstruation as a taboo on self-objectification in women from Italy (n = 160) and Sweden (n = 159). To do so, we also investigated the moderating role of menstrual knowledge in this relationship. Our findings showed that in the Italian sample, exposure to the taboo TV commercial led to more self-objectification especially for participants with lower knowledge of menstruation. These effects did not occur for their Swedish counterparts, showing no differences in self-objectification when women were exposed to the taboo advertisement. The present results are discussed in light of cultural differences in sexual and menstrual education between the two countries. Theoretical and practical implications are drawn.

Interpersonal relationships contribute to the psychological adjustments to chronic disease, directly affecting health and, more generally, life satisfaction of patients. Those factors are often threatened by the fear of becoming target of prejudices and discrimination from those who share their daily life with. Thus, this study proposes a contribution to the Italian adaptation and validation of the Chronic Illness Anticipated Stigma Scale (CIASS), a brief questionnaire (12 items) that aims to assess perceived stigma of chronic illness patients in family, work and health care contexts.279 chronic illness patients have completed the questionnaire, comparing the scores with those obtained in depression (BDI-II), anxiety (STAI), and internalized stigma scales.Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the Italian sample has shown the same structure of the original questionnaire, composed by three dimensions of anticipated stigma, experienced with family and friends, work colleagues and health care providers. Correlation analyses confirm the relation between scores of anticipated stigma and other mental health indicators as anxiety and depression.Italian version of CIASS demonstrates to be a valid and reliable instrument, considering it both as an indicator of person's state of health and a promising marker of the specific kind of perceived discrimination in family, care and working contexts.Introduzione. Le relazioni interpersonali concorrono al processo di adattamento dei pazienti cronici, influenzandone lo stato di salute e, più in generale, la soddisfazione verso la vita. Un atteggiamento che spesso minaccia questi fattori è rappresentato dalla paura di essere bersaglio di pregiudizi e discriminazione da parte delle persone con cui tali pazienti si trovano a vivere la quotidianità. Il presente studio dunque propone un contributo all’adattamento italiano e alla validazione del Chronic Illness Anticipated Stigma Scale (CIASS), uno strumento breve (12 items) che indaga lo stigma percepito da parte di pazienti cronici in contesti familiari, di cura e professionali. Metodo. Lo strumento è stato somministrato a pazienti (N=279) affetti da patologia cronica e i punteggi ottenuti sono stati messi in relazione con gli indici di depressione (BDI-II), d’ansia (STAI) e di stigma interiorizzato. Risultati. I risultati dell’analisi fattoriale confermativa (AFC) sul campione italiano hanno mostrato la stessa struttura dello strumento originale, che si articola nelle tre dimensioni di stigma anticipato tra familiari e amici, colleghi di lavoro e operatori sanitari. Le analisi di correlazione confermano la relazione tra lo strumento e altri indicatori di salute mentale come l’ansia e la depressione e confermano la validità dello strumento. Conclusione. Il CIASS risulta essere uno strumento valido e affidabile anche nella versione italiana, sia come indice per valutare lo stato di salute della persona sia come un promettente indicatore del tipo di discriminazione percepita all’interno dei contesti di cura e di lavoro.

Years of research on bystander apathy have demonstrated that the physical presence of others can reduce the tendency to help individuals needing assistance. Recent research on the implicit bystander effect has suggested that simply imagining the presence of others can lead to less helping behavior on a subsequent unrelated task. The present study was designed to contribute to previous findings on the implicit bystander effect by demonstrating these effects on commitment to help and on real helping behavior, rather than simply on intentions to help. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrate that merely priming participants with the construct of being in a group at Time 1 created significantly less commitment to future helping on a subsequent task at Time 2. Study 2 aimed to extend this effect to behavioral measures and verified that participants exposed to a group prime helped less than those who were exposed to a single-person prime. The implications of these findings for the literature on the bystander effect are discussed.