Remember that the study is westerners trying to make sense of psychological surveys conducted in east asia with the words they have in their vocabulary.

I agree that “cooperation” isn’t the perfect word. What they really mean is that east asian countries are good at large-scale projects: rice farming back then, building high speed rail today.

But westerners overlook that east asian societies, specifically China, often tolerate openly self-interested behavior: pursuit of personal advantage, or advantage for one’s family, without regard to others. There’s a funny Ronny Chieng joke that east asian mothers want their kids to be doctors, but view “helping people” as an undesirable consequence of the job.

By contrast, we think of westerners, and Americans specifically, as highly individualistic, but many subgroups of Americans have a high level of self-organization. They’ll make and socially enforce rules without anyone telling them what to do.