Context Factors for Prosociality in Cross-national and Cross-cultural Interactions

Prosociality is fundamentally important for societies. As people from different nations and cultures become increasingly interconnected due to globalization and migration, it is vital to understand the drivers of cross-national and cross-cultural prosociality. Contributing to this endeavor, this dissertation presents empirical studies that examine contextual factors for prosociality in cross-national and cross-cultural interactions. After providing an overview of theoretical models and empirical evidence for prosociality (Chapter 2 and 3) as well as a critical reflection of the methodology (Chapter 4), the studies are presented (Chapter 5). The first study focuses on prosociality between individuals from five different nations (Chile, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, USA). The second study investigates host citizens’ prosociality towards refugees in Germany. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, a further study analyzes potential changes in prosociality before vs. during a crisis. The studies yield the following results: I) People are more prosocial towards the national in-group vs. out-group; hence, prosociality is rooted in a common social identity. However, in-group favoritism is not fixed but rather can be redirected to local cultural out-groups by making a common living environment salient. II) Individuals also act prosocially towards national and cultural out-group members – the degree of prosociality depends on certain out-group characteristics (e.g., closeness, similarity). III) Prosociality increased significantly during vs. before the COVID-19 crisis in Germany; prosociality is thus sensitive to changes in the external context. The results are discussed regarding their significance for existing theories, methodological limitations, and political implications to promote cross-national and cross-cultural prosociality

The German Reproducibility Network - A Strategic Community Effort to Promote Transparent Research Practices in the Scientific System

Placing trust in scientific insight is an endeavor more complicated than it seems at the first glance. On the one hand, the scientific community strives for insights and explanations that hold as generalizable laws. On the other hand, science and research must deal with uncertainty, with questioning assumptions and recognizing epistemological issues. But in addition to this immanent complication, science runs the dangers of gambling away some of the trust placed in it when questionable research practices are used. Open Science as a reform movement aims to make science more transparent, increasing the quality of research, achieving reliable and reproducible scientific results, and thereby ultimately increasing trust in science. Currently, the Open Science movement is largely driven by (groups of) individual researchers organized in grassroots initiatives. We discuss some of these grassroots initiatives, as well as the impact they have had on improving research practices and driving methodological rethinking towards more transparent and robust research. We argue that fundamental change in scientific practice follows similar processes as social change. To take hold, such change processes require not only a quantitative increase in the adoption of changed practices, in this case the adoption of Open Science driven by rising numbers of grassroots initiatives. Complex change processes also benefit from action on qualitatively different levels, such as addressing institutional and system-wide changes, as well as a strengthened system of values based on principles of scientific theory. We introduce the German Reproducibility Network (GRN), a strategic community effort as a large-scale network initiative promoting these fundamental changes towards Open Science. The GRN approaches this goal as an interdisciplinary network in Germany: By more systematically establishing and developing collaborations among grassroots initiatives, research institutions, and other stakeholders like funding agencies, policymakers or publishers, we want to evoke a fundamental rethinking towards transparency and reproducibility in science. To achieve this goal, the GRN attracts members from the different stakeholder groups, facilitating exchange between them, encourages the formation of grassroots initiatives and of institutional Open Science working groups and policies via the membership guidelines, and bundles the voices of the GRN community when interacting with funders, policymakers or publishers. Further, the GRN aims to contribute to the methodical development of transparent research practices and their anchoring in training, teaching and research by acting as a coordination hub for Open Science activities and - in the long term - supporting them with infrastructure and grants. At the same time, the GRN also is intended as a platform for linking German Open Science actors with similar initiatives in other countries, like the already successful UK Reproducibility Network and initiatives currently being established in other countries such as Switzerland, Slovakia, or Australia. The GRN is intended as a catalyst to drive fundamental change and improvement of the science system. As such, discussing the GRN with the Open Science community will be valuable in order to tailor the activities and tools of the GRN to the needs of the community it aims to serve

Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis

Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe

Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost, social mindfulness typically entails small acts of attention or kindness. Even though fairly common, such low-cost cooperation has received little empirical attention. Measuring social mindfulness across 31 samples from industrialized countries and regions (n = 8,354), we found considerable variation. Among selected country-level variables, greater social mindfulness was most strongly associated with countries’ better general performance on environmental protection. Together, our findings contribute to the literature on prosociality by targeting the kind of everyday cooperation that is more focused on communicating benevolence than on providing material benefits

Eleven strategies for making reproducible research and open science training the norm at research institutions

Across disciplines, researchers increasingly recognize that open science and reproducible research practices may accelerate scientific progress by allowing others to reuse research outputs and by promoting rigorous research that is more likely to yield trustworthy results. While initiatives, training programs, and funder policies encourage researchers to adopt reproducible research and open science practices, these practices are uncommon inmanyfields. Researchers need training to integrate these practicesinto their daily work. We organized a virtual brainstorming event, in collaboration with the German Reproducibility Network, to discuss strategies for making reproducible research and open science training the norm at research institutions. Here, weoutline eleven strategies, concentrated in three areas:(1)offering training, (2)adapting research assessment criteria and program requirements, and (3) building communities. We provide a brief overview of each strategy, offer tips for implementation,and provide links to resources. Our goal is toencourage members of the research community to think creatively about the many ways they can contribute and collaborate to build communities,and make reproducible research and open sciencetraining the norm. Researchers may act in their roles as scientists, supervisors, mentors, instructors, and members of curriculum, hiring or evaluation committees. Institutionalleadership and research administration andsupport staff can accelerate progress by implementing change across their institution

The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing Psychology through a Distributed Collaborative Network

Concerns have been growing about the veracity of psychological research. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution to these and other current methodological challenges. The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) is a distributed network of laboratories designed to enable and support crowdsourced research projects. These projects can focus on novel research questions, or attempt to replicate prior research, in large, diverse samples. The PSA\u27s mission is to accelerate the accumulation of reliable and generalizable evidence in psychological science. Here, we describe the background, structure, principles, procedures, benefits, and challenges of the PSA. In contrast to other crowdsourced research networks, the PSA is ongoing (as opposed to time-limited), efficient (in terms of re-using structures and principles for different projects), decentralized, diverse (in terms of participants and researchers), and inclusive (of proposals, contributions, and other relevant input from anyone inside or outside of the network). The PSA and other approaches to crowdsourced psychological science will advance our understanding of mental processes and behaviors by enabling rigorous research and systematically examining its generalizability