Utilitarianism or Cosmopolitanism? A Study of Education’s Impact on Individual Attitudes toward Foreign Countries

This article attempts to study two different causal mechanisms where education affects individual attitudes toward foreign countries. On the one hand, education stands for human capital and/or skill level. According to the factor endowments model, for example, well-educated people in a capital-abundant country can materially benefit from trade ties with other labor-abundant countries. On the other hand, education cultivates social trust, disseminates information, and expands breadth of social perspective, all of which can make one more pro-outsider. Hence, both explanations tend to predict that one’s educational attainment is associated with a positive opinion of outgroup members and foreigners. By cross-national comparison including both developed and developing economies, I find empirical evidence supporting the socializing not the utilitarian effect of education on outgroup attitudes, using data from the second wave of the Asian Barometer Survey. Further structural equation modeling shows that education socializes an individual to be more internationalist and cosmopolitan mainly through an expanded social perspective.