The Effect of Reciprocity on the Public: International Cooperation and COVID Aid

• In Event: Public Opinion and Individual Preferences on International Collaboration

Abstract

International cooperation requires countries and their people to perceive their potential partners as trustworthy in spite of risks of exploitation and incentives to defect. Where do these perceptions come from, and what are their determinants? We theorize that acts of reciprocity, or responding to a positive act with another positive act, powerfully affect how the public updates their beliefs about the cooperative potential of other countries. Fielding an original survey experiment on COVID-19 aid in the United States, we show that people update their beliefs about how trustworthy or threatening another country is based on the principle of reciprocity. Using manipulated news articles based on real events during the height of the COVID pandemic, we demonstrate that the public perceives other countries to be more trustworthy and less threatening when they learn that the country followed the “golden rule” by meeting a kind act with another kind act. If the public is informed that a country is donating COVID aid to the United States that had previously been donated to them, the country is perceived as more trustworthy. We also find that people pay attention to violations of the “golden rule”, with the public adjusting their perceptions of violators accordingly. These results hold even when the cost of the aid-related act or the similarity of the other country are manipulated, two other factors that scholars propose should affect perceptions of trustworthiness. Interestingly, we find that the effect of reciprocity is moderated by how hawkish or dovish a person is, where hawks are more affected by positive reciprocity and doves more affected by violations of reciprocity. Our results provide considerable support for psychological theories of reciprocity that emphasize the relationship between reciprocity, trust, and cooperation, and offer potentially new research directions for studying international cooperation.

Authors

• Andrew Roskos-Ewoldsen, UC Davis

• Brandon J. Kinne, University of California, Davis

• Morgan Ellithorpe, University of Delaware