When People Are Better Able To Rely On Their Own Resources, Group Cooperation Breaks Down

By Matthew Warren Imagine that you live in a village which is threatened with rising sea levels. If you don’t do anything, your home is going to be flooded. You could pool your resources together with other villagers and build a large dam around the entire village to ensure that everyone’s property is safe. Or, if you have enough resources yourself, you could build a smaller dam around your own house, protecting your property — and leaving everyone else to either do the same or try and co-operate without you. Human societies constantly face similar choices between public and private solutions to pressing issues: think about the provision of healthcare or education, for instance. But only some people can afford to build a dam around their own house, or send their child to a private school. Now a new study in Nature Communications suggests that when group members are able to be self-reliant in this way, the provision of public goods suffers. Jörg Gross and colleagues at Leiden University recruited 200 participants, who were divided into 50 groups of four to play an economic game. Across a series of rounds, each participant chose how many of their personal “resource points” to invest in both a public and private fund. If the four participants collectively put enough points into the public fund to reach a certain threshold, then they would each be able to keep any of their remaining uninvested points, which could later be converted into real cash (this is...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Money Social Source Type: blogs