DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Human competition, policing and the tragedy of the commons

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Humans in social groups face a dilemma: how much of an individual's own resources should be cooperatively donated to a common pool, a public good? How can the cooperation of others be ensured? How much of the shared resources should an individual reclaim and how can the selfishness of other group members be limited? Humans, like other animals, do best evolutionarily by being selfish. Many current issues such as climate change and over-harvesting (tragedies of the commons) have arisen from a lack of cooperation by humans over shared resources such as clean air and land for growing crops. The maintenance of cooperation in social groups is therefore not only a core question in behavioral ecology and many other academic disciplines, but also one of great environmental significance. Public Goods Games are a standard laboratory technique for investigating human cooperation, but these games are not widely applicable to real-world situations. The investigators have shown that when players are allowed to compete for shared resources in a public goods game conducted under laboratory conditions (as they do over many shared resources outside the laboratory) they are significantly less cooperative. The project builds on this work and will investigate how mechanisms of enforcing fair division of a public good affect cooperation (e.g., whether people are more inclined to conserve environmental resources under different methods of allocating such resources and monitoring their conservation). In particular, the project investigates whether Policing (i.e., whether repression of competition and assigning shares of a public good based on contribution) promotes cooperation. The project involves outreach activities to junior high school students.