The Drama of the Commons (2002) / Chapter Skim
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4 Factors Influencing Cooperation in Commons Dilemmas: A Review of Experimental Psychological Research
4 Factors Influencing Cooperation in Commons Dilemmas: A Review of Experimental Psychological Research
Pages 113-156
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From page 113... ...
Messick This chapter reviews recent experiments on psychological factors that influence cooperation in commons dilemmas. Commons dilemmas are social dilemmas in which noncooperation between individual people leads to the deterioration and possible collapse of a resource (Hardin, 1968; Van Lange et al., 1992a)
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INTRODUCTION Historical Roots of Experimental Research on Commons Dilemmas The modern history of social psychological research on common property management, commons dilemmas, resource dilemmas, or social dilemmas as the field is variously labeled began in the 1950s. In their path-breaking book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944)
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More generally, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists examined factors that influence cooperation across the range of social dilemmas, including commons dilemmas, prisoners' dilemmas, and public goods tasks (for a broader review of social dilemmas in the social psychological research, see Dawes, 1980; Komorita and Parks, 1994; Messick and Brewer, 1983~. Much of the early work on prisoners' dilemmas was criticized on the grounds that it was Theoretical and that it had little to say about extra-laboratory affairs (Pruitt and Kimmel, 1977~.
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The decision structure of the ~ commons dilemmas ~ \ (Individual differences) Social motives ~ ~ Gender ( Task structure (Decision struc:)
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You may or may not receive feedback about simultaneous decisions of other participants, about the size of the resource pool, about the replenishment rate, and other variables. As a participant you are not aware of the factors being studied, nor do you know whether you are in a control or experimental group.
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REVIEW OF RECENT FINDINGS IN THE EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE We begin this section by discussing the effects of differences among people, namely social motives and gender. Individual Differences Social Motives Social motives have been conceptualized as stable individual characteristics.
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Similarly, in scenarios that mirror "real-life" social dilemmas such as traffic congestion, prosocial individuals exhibit a greater preference to commute by public transportation rather than private car, and are more concerned with collective outcomes vis-a-vis the environment than proself individuals (Van Vugt et al., 1995; Van Vugt et al., 1996~. The "Might versus Morality Effect" provides a clear example of how social motives influence not only choice behavior but also the interpretation of behavior.
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Van Lange and Liebrand (1991) specifically tested whether individual differences in social motives influence perceptions of rationality in social dilemmas.
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found no influence of group gender composition on contributions to a public good, nor did they find a gender effect when money was the resource; however, when the resource was changed to time with an expert, men cooperated significantly more than women. These mixed findings suggest that gender may have an influence on cooperation in social dilemmas, but its effect may be small and variable.
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What are the risks associated with different choices? The influence of payoff structures has been demonstrated not only in the laboratory, but also in the field (Van Lange et al., 1992b)
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Although many real-world commons dilemmas are related to resources that parties want to last indefinitely, a similar effect is likely to arise when a given party or parties sees an end to their interest in the commons, and therefore, the relationships that attend its management. Nonetheless, consistent with findings described elsewhere in this chapter, the effectiveness of social rewards in reducing free riding and increasing cooperation is enhanced by reductions in social distance and the facilitation of group identity.
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This is problematic given that, unlike the typical understanding of social dilemmas, the manipulation seems to suggest that participants' short-term gains can be improved by considering community issues. Further testing of these findings in a context where moral suasion is less confounded, and in which more powerful and realistic rewards and punishments are utilized, could be both interesting and worthwhile.
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On the other hand, sanctioning systems may undermine intrinsic motivations for cooperation and other generally helpful factors for community life such as interpersonal trust. Uncertainty Environmental uncertainty increases the difficulty of solving social dilemmas.
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In the experimental literature, too, the influence of environmental uncertainty on cooperation has emerged as a focal issue. Ignorance of crucial parameters tends to reduce cooperation in commons dilemmas.
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They have found that environmental uncertainty is not necessarily detrimental to collective interest. In a complex experimental setting, they show that cooperation in social dilemmas depends on the type of dilemma (public goods or common resource dilemma)
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It is not uncommon for individuals to violate the expectations of others in ways that hurt other members of their group. Social dilemmas in general, and commons dilemmas in particular, offer a fertile context for this kind of betrayal of expectations.
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Nonetheless, Mannix's finding that perceived rapid devaluation can lead to increased competition and the formation of excluding coalitions is a noteworthy and instructive caution to those who manage resources. In addition to the discounting of resource value, and perhaps uncertainty, power imbalances within groups that draw on a common resource can increase
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By examining egocentrism before and after discussion, the investigators learned that discussion appeared to decrease egocentric biases. This suggests that the reduction of egocentrism may be one of the reasons why communication has a positive effect on cooperation in social dilemmas in general (see section on communication later in this review)
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Taken as a whole, Tyler and Degoey (1995:482) suggest that authorities' effectiveness is "primarily linked to the nature of their social bonds with community members." Social identification with community is an important variable that should not be overlooked in future studies of resource dilemmas.
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It indicates that groups will opt for a leader when they have failed to manage a resource efficiently and inequalities in harvesting outcomes emerge and that followers will endorse leaders when they are successful in maintaining the common resource (Wilke et al.,l986; Wit and Wilke, 1988; Wit et al., 1989~. Studies on public goods also point out that leaders are not autocratic decision makers but rather need some form of legitimacy in order to be effective in persuading members to cooperate (Van Vugt and De Cremer, 1999~.
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It would be interesting to test whether segmenting an affected population and highlighting subgroup goals or restraints encourages cooperative behaviors in commons dilemmas. For example, one might highlight water consumption behavior in a given apartment building or neighborhood rather than simply highlighting a statewide need for restraint.
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Communication Among the most consistent findings in the experimental social dilemma literature is that a period of discussion among participants yields positive cooperative effects. In the face of an impressive and systematic research program on the effect of communication on cooperation, all but two explanations of this phenomenon had been dismissed as insufficient explanations of the communication effect (Dawes et al., 1990~.
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This suggests that, paired with dialogue, a society's ability to instill well-internalized personal commitment norms among its citizens may be more effective in managing resource dilemmas in the long run than sanctioning systems. However, as Kerr and his colleagues make sure to point out, not everyone
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Commons dilemmas often involve actors from a variety of institutions who are dispersed geographically, and thus e-mail communication may be commonly used to discuss and negotiate the use of a common resource. Comparing the efficacy of e-mail versus face-to-face communications is of both theoretical and practical interest.
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and to systematically change the reasons why things are as they are the framing, verbal description, or context of the problem. The goal is to determine if these noneconomic and noninstitutional variations influence cooperation in the social dilemmas and if so, how.
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When overuse resulted in zero payoffs for everyone, the effect of the justification was nonexistent; when people were allowed to keep whatever they had taken, the participants with prototypical justifications took nearly twice as much as those with unusual justifications. Causal attributions are also important with regard to scarcity or abundance of the resource pool.
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, suggesting that preferences for "solutions" depend on perceptions of causes. There is one other point about causes that needs to be made in this section, which is that people will only try to solve social dilemmas if they think it is their responsibility to do so, and if they place causal agency on themselves.
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Prospect theory requires the specification of a clear reference point for the evaluation of prospects, and social dilemmas are complicated decision situations with a multitude of potential reference points. Moreover, these authors found that although there were no initial differences in cooperation between two versions of a game one in which people gave money to create a public good and one in which people restrained themselves from taking to create the good differences did emerge as the participants gained experience with the task.
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MARK WEBER, AND DAVID M MESSICK 141 social dilemmas and to influence rates of cooperation, and that fact may be the most important result of this line of experimentation.
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were able to show that the differences in cooperation rates were attributable to procedural frames: differences in the ways the actions were described. Specifically, second movers in ultimatum bargaining games are told they may "accept or reject" the offer left by the first mover, while in sequential social dilemmas, the second movers are told they can "claim" what is left by the first mover.
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Perhaps this is not the result of the public goods dilemmas but rather because people are focusing on what is necessary to meet the criterion rather than what they have left. Likewise, in resource dilemmas, people typically focus on achieving equal final outcomes.
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The individual differences approach assumes that people have stable preferences for what they consider fair distributions of outcomes irrespective of the specific person involved. For example, social motives in the social psychological literature are found to be stable individual differences that persist over time (Kuhlman et al., 1986~.
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offers a thoughtful model for the emergence of self-organized cooperation. When do people mobilize themselves to coordinate a common resource?
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Similarly, experimental work on the nature of decision structures and power may be of use in further specifying what parts of the macro-institutional structures identified are of greatest interest in understanding mobilization. It may be complemented by a model of "structural change in resource dilemmas" that was proposed based on earlier studies in the experimental literature (Samuelson and Messick, 1995~.
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Changing the paradigm to an intergroup dilemma changes the incentives and behavior of people in social dilemmas (Bornstein, 1992~. Changes along levels of analysis become especially relevant when designing experiments because variables influencing cooperation may not have the same effect when evaluated in small-scale versus large-scale commons situations.
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Wilson (this volume:Chapter 10) points out that better institutions for managing the commons can be designed, but that this requires a paradigmatic shift in the way that environmental uncertainty is approached.
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Rapoport 1995 Positional and group size effects in resource dilemmas with uncertain resources. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 61(3)
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Dawes, R.M. 1980 Social dilemmas.
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1999 Value priorities, social value orientations and cooperation in social dilemmas. British Journal of Social Psychology 38(4)
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Van Run 1985 The effects of social motives on behavior in social dilemmas in two cultures. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 21(1)
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Lui 1983 Individual adaptations and structural change as solutions to social dilemmas. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44(2)
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Messick 1986 Inequities in access to and use of shared resources in social dilemmas. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51(5)
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Framing property rights and decision making in social dilemmas. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 71(2)
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Bazerman 1996 Egocentric interpretations of fairness in asymmetric, environmental social dilemmas: Explaining harvesting behavior and the role of communication. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 67(2)
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