Social dilemmas: When self-control benefits cooperation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Strong, Bold, and Kind: Self-Control and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
We develop a model relating self-control, risk preferences and conflict identification to cooperation patterns in social dilemmas. We subject our model to data from an experimental public goods game and a risk experiment, and we measure conflict identification and self-control.
Conditional Cooperation: Evidence for the Role of Self-Control
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
When facing the opportunity to allocate resources between oneself and others, individuals may experience a self-control conflict between urges to act selfishly and preferences to act pro-socially. We explore the domain of conditional cooperation, and we test the hypothesis that increased expectations about others' average contribution increases own contributions to public goods more when self-control is high than when it is low. We pair a subtle framing technique with a public goods experiment. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that conditionally cooperative behavior is stronger (i.e., less imperfect) when expectations of high contributions are accompanied by high levels of self-control.
Self-control and social cooperation
Behavioural Processes, 1999
Participants repeatedly played a self-control game in which choice of the higher of two monetary rewards on the present trial reduced the overall reward ('alone condition'). Other participants played a prisoner's dilemma (social cooperation) game in which choices alternated so that overall reward-reducing consequences of choosing the higher current amount were experienced by the other player ('together condition'). Participants playing the self-control game chose the lower current amount (and higher overall reward) significantly more frequently than did those playing the social cooperation game. In a second phase, half of the subjects who had played the self-control game played the social cooperation game and vice-versa. Little or no transfer was observed between conditions. In a second experiment, raising the amount of the next-trial reward increased self-control but not social cooperation. Some transfer between self-control and social cooperation was observed. The crucial variable responsible for participants' better performance (closer to optimization) in the self-control game compared to the social cooperation game may have been the higher probability in the former that choice of the lower reward on the present trial would be repeated on subsequent trials.
Reconciling Pro-Social vs. Selfish Behavior: Evidence for the Role of Self-Control
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
We test the proposition that individuals may experience a self-control conflict between short-term temptation to be selfish and better judgment to act pro-socially. Using a dictator game and a public goods game, we manipulated the likelihood that individuals identified self-control conflict, and we measured their trait ability to implement self-control strategies. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that trait self-control exhibits a positive and significant correlation with pro-social behavior in the treatment that raises likelihood of conflict identification, but not in the treatment that reduces likelihood of conflict identification. JEL Classification: D01, D03, D64, D70.
Reconciling pro-social vs. selfish behavior: On the role of self-control
2012
We test in the context of a dictator game the proposition that individuals may experience a self-control conflict between the temptation to act selfishly and the better judgment to act pro-socially. We manipulated the likelihood that individuals would identify self-control conflict, and we measured their trait ability to implement self-control strategies. Our analysis reveals a positive and significant correlation between
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008
Cooperation among nonrelatives can be puzzling because cooperation often involves incurring costs to confer benefits on unrelated others. Punishment of noncooperators can sustain otherwise fragile cooperation, but the provision of punishment suffers from a "second-order" free-riding problem because nonpunishers can free ride on the benefits from costly punishment provided by others. One suggested solution to this problem is second-order punishment of nonpunishers; more generally, the threat or promise of higher order sanctions might maintain the lower order sanctions that enforce cooperation in collective action problems. Here the authors report on 3 experiments testing people's willingness to provide second-order sanctions by having participants play a cooperative game with opportunities to punish and reward each other. The authors found that people supported those who rewarded cooperators either by rewarding them or by punishing nonrewarders, but people did not support those who punished noncooperators--they did not reward punishers or punish nonpunishers. Furthermore, people did not approve of punishers more than they did nonpunishers, even when nonpunishers were clearly unwilling to use sanctions to support cooperation. The results suggest that people will much more readily support positive sanctions than they will support negative sanctions.
2011
Peer-to-peer sanctions increase cooperation in multi-person social dilemmas ), but not when subjects have the option to retaliate (Nikiforakis (2008)). One-shot peer-to-peer rewards have been found to enhance efficiency too , ), but it is an open question whether the positive impact on cooperation is weakened or strengthened when we allow for counterrewarding. We examine the impact of possible reciprocity in rewarding on cooperation in a non-linear public bad game, and find that efficiency in the social dilemma is equally low as absent any reward options. We hypothesize that subjects are unwilling to sever mutually profitable bilateral exchanges of reward tokens to induce cooperation in the social dilemma, and identify the underlying mechanism by comparing behavior across three matching protocols.
PLOS ONE
In many work and decision situations, realizing cooperation among individuals is important. However, decision making environments of individuals are far from stable, resulting in changes in task complexity and the social settings they encounter. We argue that past experiences with cooperative behavior can result in different cooperative norms and expectations about the behavior of others and will have an effect on an individual's subsequent behavior in new situations. This study experimentally investigates these dynamics of cooperative behavior in social dilemmas and addresses the role of communication to provide empirical evidence about a cognitive mechanism that may lead to these spillovers. Specifically, the experimental design randomly assigns subjects to one type of repetitive interactions in the first social dilemma (single partner or different partners) and we then examine how this impacts the propensity to behave cooperatively in subsequent social dilemmas with unfamiliar partners (either single or different). Because of the variety in complexity of decision-making environments in practice, we do so by examining behavioral spillovers across three different social dilemmas that vary in difficulty to make cooperation successful. Our findings show that individuals cooperate more during initial interactions with a single partner. More importantly, this has positive spillover effects for subsequent behavior and communication, even to settings without repeated interactions with a single partner. However, environmental conditions affect the ability to transfer established norms of cooperation to subsequent interactions, as an initially learned cooperative norm is gradually replaced by a more competitive attitude when individuals start to interact with unfamiliar others in a setting in which cooperative success is more difficult to achieve. Our findings illustrate the power of repeated interactions for establishing and sustaining cooperation in other settings and enhance understanding of how cooperative decisions can be shaped by both incentives and the broader behavioral context of individuals.
Social Norms and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: The Effects of Context and Feedback
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1999
Drawing from research on social norms, we proposed and tested the hypothesis that people behave more competitively in social dilemmas involving economic decisions compared to those involving noneconomic decisions. We also proposed that people would compete more if they see that others have unexpectedly competed in a prior situation and cooperate more when others have unexpectedly cooperated in a previous situation. Further, we hypothesized that if others behave consistently with expectations, such behaviors (either cooperative or competitive) would not affect subsequent behavior. One hundred ninety-five undergraduate students participated in an experiment in which they made choices in two different social dilemma games. Results support the hypotheses, and the discussion addresses the implications of the study for research on social norms and decision making.
Encouraging Cooperation: Revisiting Solidarity and Commitment Effects in Prisoner's Dilemma Games 1
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2008
Pre-play discussion consistently increases cooperation in dilemma interactions. Most explanations of this "cheap talk" effect are based on either commitment or group solidarity effects. Because discussion about the upcoming dilemma allows participants to both make promises and creates group solidarity, the two explanations are often confounded. This paper aims to clarify past results by having participants engage in an "unrelated" discussion prior to a dilemma interaction. We find that solidarity effects can be induced by minimal group categorizations but are relatively weak. Discussions involving consequential but unrelated coordination tasks are shown to prime cooperative norms and increase cooperation with both in-group and out-group members. Our findings suggest that cheap talk may work for even cheaper reasons than previously thought. Encouraging Cooperation 3 Encouraging Cooperation: Revisiting Solidarity and Commitment Effects in Prisoner's Dilemma Games Social dilemmas are situations where behaviour motivated by individual maximisation leads to socially sub-optimal outcomes. Traditional solutions to social dilemmas rely on changing the consequences of non-cooperative and cooperative acts so that rational individuals will act in ways that promote the public good. Solutions based on this notion of incentive compatibility achieve their intended result either by adding individual costs to defection (acting in ways that are detrimental to the public good), or adding individual benefits to cooperation in order to make that choice a nondominated strategy. 1 A second major class of incentive compatible solutions relies on non-myopic reasoning-taking into account how one's present behaviour will affect future