Social Dilemmas

Decision making in social dilemmas is suggested to rely on three factors: the valuation of a choice option; the relative judgment of two or more choice alternatives; and individual factors affecting the ease at which judgments and decisions are made. Here, we test whether empathy – an individual’s relative ability to understand others’ thoughts, emotions and intentions – acts as an individual factor that alleviates conflict resolution in social decision making. We test this by using a framed, iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) game in two settings. In a behavioral experiment, we find that individual differences in empathic ability (the Empathy Quotient, EQ) was related to lower response times in the PD game, suggesting that empathy is related to faster social choices, independent of whether they choose to cooperate or defect. In a subsequent neuroimaging experiment, using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, we find that EQ is positively related to individual differences in the engagement of brains structures implemented in mentalizing, including the precuneus, superior temporal sulcus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that empathy is related to the individual difference in engagement of mentalizing in social dilemmas, and that this is related to the efficiency of decision making in social dilemmas.

The study of intragroup dynamics in management studies views conflict as a contingency process that can benefit or harm a group based of characteristics of the group and context. We review five models of intragroup conflict in management studies. These models include diversity-conflict and behavioral negotiation models that focus primarily on conflict within a group of people; social exchange and transaction cost economics models that focus primarily on conflict within a group of firms; and social dilemma models that focus on conflict in collectives of people, organizations, communities, and generations. The review is constituted by summarizing the insights of each model, foundational papers to each model; the most recent uses and developments of the models in the last decade; the complementarity of these models; and the future research directions.

EARS, the European Academy on Religion and Society, is a European network of Departments and/or Faculties of Theology and/or Religious Studies. The 19 participating universities and their theologians aim to interpret and to explain societal issues from a theological perspective. Leadership, social dilemmas, politics, economics, technology: we offer perspectives on these and more topics, to inspire and to motivate. This book covers an overview of our 2020 publications.

To investigate the impact of framing on rule-breaking behavior in social dilemmas, we incorporated a rule in a one-shot resource game with two framing-treatments: One frame was a give-some dilemma (i.e., a variant of a public goods game) and the other frame a take-some dilemma (i.e., a variant of a commons dilemma game). In each frame, all participants were part of one single collective sharing a common good. Each participant was initially equipped with one of five different endowments of points from which they must give/could take amounts to/from the common good. The exact amounts of contributions/withdrawals were regulated by the rule. Participants decided whether to cooperate and comply with the rule or to break the rule to their own advantage and at the expense of the collective (i.e., giving lower/taking higher amounts). Results of an online-experiment with 202 participants showed a significantly higher proportion of individuals breaking the rule in the take-some frame than in the give-some frame. In addition, endowment size influenced the proportion of rule-breaking behavior in the take-some frame. However, the average amounts of points not given/taken too much were not different between the frames.

Wyobraźmy sobie sytuację, której wynik zależy od decyzji i działań własnych, ale również od decyzji i działań drugiej osoby. Nie jest to sytuacja do końca komfortowa – nie jesteśmy „władcami własnego losu”, lecz jesteśmy współodpowiedzialni za los własny i innej osoby. Przykładem takiej sytuacji może być grupowa praca domowa, zadana dzieciom przez nauczyciela w szkole. Dla uproszczenia przyjmijmy, że zadanie mają wykonać dzieci w parach. Jedną z par stanowią Jasia i Mikołaj. Konkretnym, wymiernym wynikiem pracy obojga uczniów będzie ocena. Może się jednak okazać, że dla każdego z dzieci postrzegana wartość oceny jest zależna od nakładu pracy włożonej w jej osiągnięcie. Dobra ocena uzyskana bez wysiłku ze strony Jasi (czyli z wysiłkiem dla Mikołaja) będzie dla niej więcej warta, niż ocena wypracowana przez oboje z równym nakładem pracy.
Od czego zależy zachowanie Jasi i Mikołaja w takiej sytuacji? Jakie motywy kierują ludźmi w podejmowaniu decyzji, czy współpracować, czy też pozostawić sprawy w rękach innych?

Although theory suggests individuals are more willing to incur a personal cost to benefit in-group members, compared to out-group members, there is inconsistent evidence in support of this perspective. Applying meta-analytic techniques, we harness a relatively recent explosion of research on intergroup discrimination in cooperative decision making to address several fundamental unresolved issues. First, summarizing evidence across studies, we find a small to medium effect size indicating that people are more cooperative with in-group, compared to out-group, members (d = 0.32). Second, we forward and test predictions about the conditions that moderate in-group favoritism from two influential perspectives – a social identity approach and a bounded generalized reciprocity perspective. Although we find evidence for a slight tendency for in-group favoritism through categorization with no mutual interdependence between group members (e.g., dictator games, d = 0.19), situations that contain interdependence result in stronger in-group favoritism (e.g., social dilemmas, d = 0.42). We also find that in-group favoritism is stronger when there is common (versus unilateral) knowledge of group membership, and stronger during simultaneous (versus sequential) exchanges. Third, we find support for the hypothesis that intergroup discrimination in cooperation is the result of in-group favoritism rather than out-group derogation. Finally, we test for additional moderators of in-group favoritism, such as the percentage of men in the sample, experimental versus natural groups, and the country of participants. We discuss the implications of these findings for theoretical perspectives on in-group favoritism, address implications for the methodologies used to study this phenomenon, and suggest directions for future research.

This paper identifies and analyses a specific psychological barrier that plays a crucial role in explaining why the tourism accommodation sector so far has only made a limited contribution to sustainable development. This barrier represents a so-called social dilemma and relates to behavioural patterns and conflicting interests of relevant stakeholders and their inability to resolve the resulting lock-in. Through presenting and reviewing the outcomes of three empirical studies and relating them to relevant literature, this paper explores the details of this particular social dilemma. It also establishes promising avenues for moving beyond the current stagnation point. The paper concludes that there is an urgent need for more research into the social, cultural and psychological structures and barriers that lock-in the behaviour of relevant stakeholders. However, it is also concludes that actually resolving the dilemma is a shared responsibility of all stakeholders and requires more than just research, for instance setting up galvanising action groups and adjusting tourism and hospitality curricula.

Across five studies using samples from both Japan and United States (N = 2345), we take a multi-method approach to test the prediction from life history theory that a slow, compared to fast, life history strategy promotes investment in cooperative relationships. Studies 1 and 2 examined how different measures as proxies for life history strategy (i.e., Mini-K and High-K Strategy Scale) relate to cooperation in various economic games. Studies 3 to 5 measured early childhood environments (i.e., childhood harshness and unpredictability), manipulated resource scarcity using previously validated methods, and then measured cooperation. Across our studies, we also examined four hypothesized psychological mechanisms that could explain the relation between life history strategy and cooperation: temporal discounting, concern for reputation, social value orientation, and trust in others. Overall, we found no support for the hypothesis that life history strategy predicts cooperation or that early childhood environments interact with current resource scarcity to predict cooperation. Thus, our initial findings imply that life history theory may not account for individual variation in cooperation with unknown others.

This is the illustrated version of the article "“The Lesser of Evils Versus the Common Good: On the Poverty of Ideology in the Washington Post," a  critique of the article “Yes, you do have an obligation to vote for the lesser of two evils. Here’s why," from the Washington Post (June 1, 2016). Psychic Swamp Special Publications Series #1 (June 4, 2016).

Strategic Supply Chain Management (SCM) creates and maintains collective gains through appropriate alliance relationships, which often require initial investments in an uncertain environment. The development of such relationships may be hindered because, as a form of strategic alliance, Supply Chain (SC) alliances are social dilemmas. This paper uses the social dilemma perspective and data gathered from mail survey and case study methodologies to report how strategic SC relationships navigate social dilemmas to collaboratively create and maintain collective gains.