Stabilizing the earth's climate is not a losing game: supporting evidence from public goods experiments.
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The authors' extensive experiments demonstrate that players can behave altruistically to maintain the Earth's climate given the right set of circumstances, and find a nonzero basic level of altruistic behavior, which is enhanced if the players are provided with expert information describing the state of knowledge in climate research.Abstract:
Maintaining the Earth's climate within habitable boundaries is probably the greatest "public goods game" played by humans. However, with >6 billion "players" taking part, the game seems to rule out individual altruistic behavior. Thus, climate protection is a problem of sustaining a public resource that everybody is free to overuse, a "tragedy of the commons" problem that emerges in many social dilemmas. We perform a previously undescribed type of public goods experiment with human subjects contributing to a public pool. In contrast to the standard protocol, here the common pool is not divided among the participants; instead, it is promised that the pool will be invested to encourage people to reduce their fossil fuel use. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that players can behave altruistically to maintain the Earth's climate given the right set of circumstances. We find a nonzero basic level of altruistic behavior, which is enhanced if the players are provided with expert information describing the state of knowledge in climate research. Furthermore, personal investments in climate protection increase substantially if players can invest publicly, thus gaining social reputation. This increase occurs because subjects reward other subjects' contributions to sustaining the climate, thus reinforcing their altruism. Therefore, altruism may convert to net personal benefit and to relaxing the dilemma if the gain in reputation is large enough. Our finding that people reward contributions to sustaining the climate of others is a surprising result. There are obvious ways these unexpected findings can be applied on a large scale.read more
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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Tragedy of the Commons
TL;DR: The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
Book
The Evolution of Cooperation
TL;DR: In this paper, a model based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game was developed for cooperation in organisms, and the results of a computer tournament showed how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Evolution of Cooperation
R. B. Greene,Robert Axelrod +1 more
TL;DR: A model is developed based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game to show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.
Journal ArticleDOI
Altruistic punishment in humans.
Ernst Fehr,Simon Gächter +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment and that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishments are possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out.
Posted Content
Altruistic Punishment in Humans
Ernst Fehr,Simon Gaechter +1 more
TL;DR: It is shown experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation, and that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punished.