Social dilemmas: conflict between self and others
You write C or D on a piece of paper. If you write C, I give everyone else $1. If you write D, I give you $1.
If everyone else does the same thing, how does this choice affect you?
How does it affect others?
What would you do if this were real? What proportion of others do you think would write C?
How would you feel if you wrote D and everyone else wrote C? What if you wrote C and everyone else wrote D?
What would you like others to do? How could we change the rules to get them to do that?
| N of other cooperators | ||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| D | $6 | $10 | $14 | $18 |
| C | $4 | $8 | $12 | $16 |
Fear of being a sucker.
Reciprocity: desire to punish defection and reward cooperation.
Conformity. Perhaps a good heuristic.
Social norms (Bicchieri): contingent on expectations and behavior of others; costly; not the same as convention.
| Vote | "Minority" (p) | Tie (q) | "Majority" (r) |
|---|---|---|---|
| yes | E | C+A+E | C+A+E |
| no | 0 | 0 | (C+A) |
C=cost of contribution, X=benefit of failure, A=altruism, E=expression
Conditions in experiment:
T1 - all donate if proposal passes (high cost only if pivotal);
T2 - contribute only if you approve and proposal passes (high cost).
Varied Q, % required for the proposal to pass, within-S.
Ss also indicated expectation.
Low-cost hypothesis fails for most Ss.
Bandwagon effect: expressive voting contingent on others.
Second-order dilemmas are dilemmas concerning enforcement of cooperation in first-order dilemmas.
Demands of cooperation less because punishment is cheap.
Repeated PD game: cooperation declined to 0 over 25 games.
Voting in groups of 5, bound by vote: 20% cooperation at end.
Shows advantage of second-order dilemma.
Dictator game: Dictator selected for better performance on homework. 7 Swiss Francs. Gave 34.6%.
Gangster game: Left 24.1% for other player.
Democracy game: Vote on amounts for other player. Gangsters increased to 42.2%, closer to what they judged to be fair. (Dictators did not increase significantly, but had less distance to go.)
The probability of being decisive vote is about 1/N, so expected utility of voting is the expected difference divided by N (the number of voters). In a national election in the U.S., that could be 100,000,000. If you stand to gain $1,000,000 if your candidate wins, the EV of voting is thus one cent.
But this analysis assumes self-interest only. If you count altruism or moralistic reasons, things are different. But, if you count altruism, why limit it?
Quattrone and Tversky (1984):
When subjects in a two-person prisoner's dilemma were told that their partner had defected, 97% of the subjects defected too.
When they were told that their partner had cooperated, 84% still defected.
But when they did not know what their partner had done, only 63% defected.
"Suppose you are an ocean fisherman. The kind of fish you catch is declining from over-fishing. There are 1000 fishermen like you who catch it. The decline will slow down if the fishermen fish less. But, of course, you will lose money if you cut back. Nobody knows how much fish you catch. .... If nobody cuts back, then everyone can keep fishing at roughly their current rate for 2 years and then they will have to stop. Every 100 people who cut back to 50% of their current catch will extend this time for about a year. Thus, if 100 people (out of 1000) cut back this much, fishing can continue for 3 years, and if 200 people cut back, it can continue for 4 years. (It is not expected that many more than this will cut back voluntarily.)"
Would you cut back? Would cutting back "increase your income from fishing over the next few years?"
29% saw cooperation as helping them financially in the long run, although it clearly did not.
E.g., "If I cut back now, I would not have to face the fear of running out of fish to sell and I could keep staying in business for a longer time and everyone else would also benefit." "Because if we cut back, there will be more fish for 4 years of 3 years so it would be a greater profit."
Parochialism is an in-group bias in which people try to help their group even when the out-group harm exceeds the in-group benefit.
Historical examples are racism and sexism, but these are no longer respectable, so they require subtle experiments to detect.
Nationalism, however, is alive and well. It is as respectable as racism was in 1800.
Nationalism has some justification, but people's attachment to it may go beyond what is justified and thus lead to worse consequences in some cases.
Moral values, held whatever the consequences:
Moderators:
In-group cooperation increases when out-group is hurt (Bornstein and Ben-Youssef, 1994), even with arbitrary groups.
Average rate of contribution was 55%. Vs. 27% in control conditions, where the contribution did not affect the other group.
One determinant of the parochialism effect could be that the self-interest illusion is greater when an in-group is in competition with an out-group.
"My cooperation helps people who are X. I am X. Therefore it helps me." This kind of reasoning is easier to engage in when X is a salient property of a particular group than when it is "human."
Baron, J. (2001). Confusion of group-interest and self-interest in parochial cooperation on behalf of a group. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45, 283-296.
Questions:
Those subjects who showed a greater parochialism effect for contributing showed a greater self-interest illusion when the gain for their group was a loss for the other group.
No illusion (self benefit) in a situation that is purely competitive (0 for own group, -4 for other group).
Asking people to do the calculations reduces the parochialism effect:
Two-group condition: "What is the net effect of your contribution on both groups, taking into account your contribution and all the gains and other losses in both groups, including yours?"
Shows causal effect from illusion to parochialism. (Reverse may happen too.)
Sometimes you may think that the voice of an individual doesn't count for much. "What does it matter if I join or not?"
While your membership in the Guild is confidential, management is very aware of the total number of members, so every member counts.
A union with more members can do more. It's as simple as that. ...
There's more protection for our jobs, our salaries, and our benefits.
Check out what the Guild won-including 9% wage increases-what it lost, and what it protected you from when the current contract was negotiated.
Group A is the people who live in your country.
Group B is the people who live in another country of the same size.
Both groups vote. Each nation has 10,000,000 voters.
| Proposal | Income for group A | Income for group B |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | increase by 10% | increase by 2% |
| 2 | increase by 0% | increase by 12% |
| 3 | increase by 6% | increase by 8% |
Which proposal[(s)] would you vote for [approve]?
1 2 3 1 & 2
1 & 3 2 & 3
Three levels:
Political action in favor of a group often hurts both the actor and humanity.
If people did the arithmetic, self-interest might conspire with utilitarianism to keep parochial voters at home and let the utilitarians run the world.
e.g., "Private universities in the U.S. accept foreign students while rejecting some U.S. students who are almost as well qualified."
What do you think of this action?
1. It is not a moral issue. [25]
2. It is morally acceptable. [10]
3. It is a moral issue, but I cannot say in general whether it is
wrong or not. [12]
4. It is morally wrong, but it should be allowed. [9]
5. It is morally wrong, and it should be banned in most cases. [20]
6. It is morally wrong, and it should be banned in all cases,
regardless of the benefits to the outsiders. [13]
7. ... regardless of the benefits to the outsiders and citizens. [11]
| Companies hire foreigners, helping them immigrate, while some citizens who are almost as qualified do not have jobs. | 31 |
| Companies open new facilities in foreign countries rather than their own country, even though the foreign cost is only a little less. | 21 |
| Non-governmental disaster-relief organizations send more help in response to a foreign disaster than to a domestic one, even though the domestic need is almost as great. | 21 |
| Private universities in the U.S. accept foreign students while rejecting some U.S. students who are almost as well qualified. | 26 |
| The national government gives research grants to foreign scientists, while rejecting applications from domestic scientists that are almost as worthy. | 20 |