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Germans arrive at every appointment 5 hours before the scheduled time, all Indians are called Ranjid and have a red mark on their foreheads, the Japanese bow 10,000 times a day, and Americans all speak with chewing gum in their mouths. The list of stereotypes can be as long as you wish, and every country has its own prejudices about other cultures. These are meant to help with a quick appraisal of the people we are dealing with. The influence of clichés about people from different nations on the willingness to cooperate with one another was the subject of an investigation by Angela Rachael Dorrough and Andreas Glöckner from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods focusing on six different countries. Their work revealed that expectations, which are often influenced by strong cross-societal clichés, play an important role.

In an increasingly globalized world, establishing successful cooperation between people from different nations is becoming more and more important. "Nowadays, it's common to talk with someone on the phone or interact with people from all over the world without knowing anything about them other than their nationality," says Dorrough. "Here, the usual economic theories often neglect to take psychological and cultural aspects into consideration."

The Max Planck researchers wanted to find out how the participants of various nations behave when they interact with one another. For their study, they invited 1,200 people from Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico and the US to take part in an online game with one another. The willingness of the players to share and collaborate can be investigated with the scientific study of this prisoner dilemma game. The participants, who cannot make any arrangements with one another, must decide on whether their behaviour is going to be selfish or cooperative for the game. If both opt for selfish behaviour, they both get nothing. If both decide to cooperate and share, then there is a medium-level gain for both. If only one of the two behaves selfishly, he or she will get the lion's share and the other will be exploited to the maximum.

The dilemma lies in not knowing what the other person will do. So the partners have to try and assess the behaviour of the other. If a player thinks their partner will behave selfishly, then they will likewise choose selfish behaviour. If a player judges their partner to be cooperative, then they will also choose to cooperate. In the game, which was played just once, the only thing the player knew about the other was their nationality. Besides making a cooperation decision, participants also indicated their expectation regarding their current interaction partner's cooperation. To learn more about how the participants formed their expectations, they were subsequently asked about how they assessed their co-players – namely on the basis of criteria for assuming a willingness to cooperate: trustworthy, friendly, generous or likeable. In order that the researchers could look in greater detail at a country that rated poorly in the assessment of willingness to cooperate, they also asked the participants about other characteristics. For example, the participants had to specify how attractive, spiritual, sociable, sporty and wealthy they considered the others to be.

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