The Path to Cooperative Action during Group Social Dilemmas: A Literature Review, Set of Propositions, and Model Describing How the Opportunity to Communicate Encourages Cooperation

A social dilemma is a circumstance in which each of an aggregate of people must make an individual decision whether to acquire a short-term benefit for themselves or to forego some of that benefit for the long-term benefit of the aggregate. The intent of this essay is to describe how communication, in terms of both the opportunity to talk and the content of what is said, interacts with other "cooperative mechanisms" - group identity, reciprocity and equity norms, and trust and trustworthiness - to largely determine individual cooperation versus defection. Two variables with relatively complex impacts on the cooperative mechanisms - social value orientation and group size - are also discussed. A model and set of propositions relating these variables are also included; and areas for further are explored

The Role of Rivalry. Public Goods versus Common-Pool Resources

Despite a large theoretical and empirical literature on public goods and common-pool resources, a systematic comparison of these two types of social dilemmas is lacking. In fact, there is considerable confusion about these two types of dilemma situations. As a result, they are often treated alike. In this paper we argue that the degree of rivalry is the fundamental difference between the two games. We show that rivalry implies that both games cannot be represented by the same game theoretic structure. Fur-thermore, we experimentally study behavior in a quadratic public good and a quadratic common-pool resource game with identical Pareto opti-mum but divergent interior Nash equilibria. The results show that partici-pants clearly perceive the differences in rivalry. Aggregate behavior in both games starts relatively close to Pareto efficiency and converges to the respective Nash equilibrium.

Cooperation and the In-Group-Out-Group Bias: A Field Test on Israeli Kibbutz Members and City Residents

The in-group-out-group bias is among the most well documented and widely observed phenomenon in the social sciences. Despite its role in hiring decisions and job discrimination, negotiations, and conflict and competition between groups, economists have paid little attention to the in-group-out-group bias. We question the universality of the bias by conducting field experiments to test whether it extends to the cooperative behavior of one of the most successful and best-known modern collective societies, the Israeli kibbutz. The facts that kibbutz members have voluntarily chosen their lifestyle of cooperation and egalitarianism, the ease with which they could join the surrounding capitalist society and their disproportionate involvement in social and national causes suggest that if ever there was a society of individuals whose cooperativeness extends equally to members and non-members, the kibbutz is it. Nonetheless, our results indicate that kibbutz members display higher levels of cooperation when paired with anonymous kibbutz members than when paired with city residents. In fact, when paired with city residents, kibbutz members-observed levels of cooperation are identical to those of the city residents. Moreover, we show that self-selection rather than kibbutz socialization largely accounts for the extent to which kibbutz members are cooperative.cooperation, in-group-out-group bias, field experiment, self-selection, socialization, kibbutz

Economic games: An introduction and guide for research

Prosocial behaviors constitute vital ingredients for all types of social interactions and relationships as well as for society at large. Corresponding to this significance, the study of prosocial behaviors has received considerable attention across scientific disciplines. A striking feature of this research is that most disciplines rely on economic games to measure actual prosocial behavior in controlled experimental settings. However, empirical research often fails to fully exploit the richness of this class of paradigms. The current work aims to overcome this issue by providing a theory-driven overview of and introduction to the variety of economic games for researchers in psychology and beyond. Specifically, we introduce prominent theories of games (Game Theory and Interdependence Theory) and show how the concepts from these theories can be integrated in a unifying theoretical framework considering games as providing specific situational affordances for behavior. Additionally, we describe several games in detail, including their structural features, the affordances they involve, the social motives that may guide behavior, the flexibility they entail to manipulate specific situational aspects and, thus, affordances, and typical research findings. We conclude that tailored selection and combination of games and game variants allows to obtain a unique understanding of the underlying psychological processes involved in prosocial behavior. As a practical tool for researchers, we also provide standardized game instructions and guidelines for the implementation of games in future research. Ultimately, the review can foster optimal use of economic games in future work and thereby set the stage for high-class, replicable, and innovative research on human prosociality

`How Many of Us Are There?' Group Size Uncertainty and Social Value Orientations in Common Resource Dilemmas

In two studies, we investigate the effects of group size (un)certainty and social value orientations in common resource dilemmas. By focusing on this largely unexplored type of environmental uncertainty, we show that, in contrast to the often replicated finding that resource size uncertainty leads to over-harvesting in common resource dilemmas, group size uncertainty is not necessarily detrimental to the collective interest. Furthermore, we argue and show that whereas under group size certainty people base their individual harvests on the equal division rule, under group size uncertainty they base their harvests on their own social value orientations: whereas under group size certainty both proselfs and pro-socials harvest about an equal share of the common resource, under uncertainty prosocials show self-restraint in order to further their group's outcomes

Reciprocity towards groups : a laboratory experiment on the causes

Field studies of conflict report cycles of mutual revenge between groups, often linked to perceptions of intergroup injustice. We test the hypothesis that people are predisposed to reciprocate against groups. In a computerized laboratory experiment, subjects who were harmed by a partner’s uncooperative action reacted by harming other members of the partner’s group. This group reciprocity was only observed when one group was seen to be unfairly advantaged. Our results support a behavioral mechanism leading from perceived injustice to intergroup conflict. We discuss the relevance of group reciprocity to economic and political phenomena including conflict, discrimination and team competition

A Model of Human Cooperation in Social Dilemmas

Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity and their importance, social dilemmas have been studied by economists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. These studies typically explain tendency to cooperation by dividing people in proself and prosocial types, or appealing to forms of external control or, in iterated social dilemmas, to long-term strategies. But recent experiments have shown that cooperation is possible even in one-shot social dilemmas without forms of external control and the rate of cooperation typically depends on the payoffs. This makes impossible a predictive division between proself and prosocial people and proves that people have attitude to cooperation by nature. The key innovation of this article is in fact to postulate that humans have attitude to cooperation by nature and consequently they do not act a priori as single agents, as assumed by standard economic models, but they forecast how a social dilemma would evolve if they formed coalitions and then they act according to their most optimistic forecast. Formalizing this idea we propose the first predictive model of human cooperation able to organize a number of different experimental findings that are not explained by the standard model. We show also that the model makes satisfactorily accurate quantitative predictions of population average behavior in one-shot social dilemmas

More than Words: Communication in Intergroup Conflicts

Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies the problem of collective action. We observe the effect of different communication structures on collective action in the context of finitely repeated intergroup conflict and demonstrate that conflict expenditures are significantly higher if communication is restricted to one's own group as compared to a situation with no communication. However, expenditures are significantly lower if open communication within one's own group and between rivaling groups is allowed. We show that under open communication intergroup conflicts are avoided by groups taking turns in winning the contest. Our results do not only qualify the role of communication for collective action but may also provide insights on how to mitigate the destructive nature of intergroup conflicts.Communication, Conflict, Experiment, Rent-seeking