Research
To address fundamental questions about human cooperation, my research combines insights from behavioral, survey, and meta-analytic methods, and integrates theories from psychology, sociology, and political science.
Using large-scale meta-analyses, I have investigated key questions about cooperative behavior, including the extent to which cooperation differs across societies and how individual characteristics, such as personality and gender, are associated with people's willingness to cooperate.
Another direction of my research concerns the development of the Cooperation Databank and new approaches to research synthesis. Traditional meta-analyses provide static summaries of the available evidence, with findings often confined to PDF publications that are difficult to update or process computationally. With support from an NWO XS grant (2023), I collaborated with computer scientists to develop living meta-analytic reviews that can incorporate new evidence over time and to evaluate the accuracy of automated hypothesis generation.
More recently, my research has increasingly focused on understanding how culture and institutions shape social relationships and cooperation. Rather than relying exclusively on survey-based approaches, I have investigated these questions experimentally, examining, for example, how perceptions of corruption among institutional representatives influence cooperation across 34 societies. Building on this cross-cultural research, and supported by an NWO XS grant (2025), I have also employed advanced AI methods to identify similarities and differences in cooperative behavior across societies worldwide.
Ongoing grant projects:
Intrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies - A Replication Study
Open Science Replication Studies, awarded by NWO. With: Angelo Romano and Laura Hoenig. Project duration 2026-2028
This project aims to replicate and expand an influential study examining how societal rule violations relate to individual honesty. By collecting data from 9,200 participants across 23 countries, the team will test whether intrinsic honesty is linked to shadow economy, political freedom, and corruption. The approach addresses previous limitations by using a larger, more diverse sample, providing individual-level honesty estimates, and pre-registering our approach to assessing societal rule violations. All data, code, and material will be open-access to promote transparency and reproducibility. The findings can inform policy to strengthen institutional and individual integrity around the globe.
Cooperation Beyond Borders: An AI-driven Approach to the Study of Human Cooperation Across Cultures
SSH Open Competition XS 2025 round 1, awarded by NWO. Project duration 2025-2026
How and why do people cooperate across different societies? Existing research has produced mixed results concerning cross-societal differences in cooperation, leaving many unanswered questions about universal and societal factors associated with cooperative behavior. This project aims to aggregate existing cross-cultural data and use state-of-the-art AI techniques to unveil cross-societal similarities and differences in behavioral patterns around the globe. I will produce a large, open-access, machine-readable dataset containing thousands of individuals’ decisions in online standardized behavioral experiments. Furthermore, I will use symbolic and subsymbolic AI techniques on these data to provide novel insights and, ultimately, novel theories on human cooperation.
