Original title: Public attention to artificial intelligence predicts helping between humans across 86 countries
Chenxi Li, Xiaoxue Hu, Xue Wang, Mengchen Dong · September 2026
People often debate how artificial intelligence shapes how humans treat one another. Researchers wanted to know if paying attention to AI actually changes human relationships worldwide. They looked at daily Google search data for AI across 86 countries. Then, they matched that search data with how often people voluntarily helped each other in an online game. When a country gave more attention to AI, players from that nation helped other humans more often. This pattern grew even stronger when players felt a shared human identity, or when changes from AI felt pressing. As AI is often described as a threat to humanity, helping each other more may be a way people collectively adapt to the rise of this technology.
Imagine you and your neighbors hear news that a big storm is coming. Normally you might just keep to yourself, but when everyone is talking about the storm, you start checking on each other, offering to share supplies, or helping board up windows. The shared worry makes you act more like a community. In this paper, attention to AI acts like that storm news—when a country is focused on AI, people in an online game help each other more, as if the collective concern strengthens their bonds.
If you live in a country where people talk a lot about AI, you might be more likely to help a stranger online. This suggests that even worrying about technology can bring people together, not just push them apart. It matters for understanding how societies adapt to big changes like AI.
The study does not establish whether the effect is driven by positive or negative attention to AI, nor does it measure real-world helping outside the game. The quasi-experimental analysis relies on a single event (OpenAI DevDay), so generalizability to other AI events is unknown. The abstract does not report effect sizes or control for other country-level variables that might correlate with both AI attention and helping.
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Public attention to artificial intelligence predicts helping between humans across 86 countries — Chenxi Li, Xiaoxue Hu, Xue Wang et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/zcpmv_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.