Professor Brandon Kinne and PhD candidate Andrew Roskos-Ewoldsen publish on reciprocity in international relations in the Journal of Conflict Resolution

Professor Brandon Kinne and PhD candidate Andrew Roskos-Ewoldsen have published an article in the Journal of Conflict Research testing a theory of how reciprocity in international relations affects the beliefs and attitudes of individual citizens. This study uses the theoretical framework of Unbounded Generalized Reciprocity, where reciprocity operates as an informational shortcut about the trustworthiness of others, to understand how people interpret situations where countries return favors, or fail to. In an experimental survey of US adults, Kinne and Roskos-Ewoldsen test the roles of exposure to between-country reciprocity, perceived similarity, and costliness on trust toward a counterpart country, using the context of cooperation during the COVID-19 pandemic. They find that reciprocity, compared to a reciprocity violation, predicted significantly more trust, and this was not moderated by similarity or costliness. They conclude that reciprocity, at the individual-level, acts as a heuristic tool for determining the trustworthiness of other countries. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027251342144