Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game

How people cooperate to provide public goods is an important scientific question and relates to many societal problems. Previous research studied how people cooperate in stable groups in repeated or one-time-only encounters. However, most real-world public good problems occur in groups with a gradua...

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Autores principales: Otten, Kasper, Frey, Ulrich J., Buskens, Vincent, Przepiorka, Wojtek, Ellemers, Naomi
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2022
Materias:
Article
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613774/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36302777
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34160-5
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author Otten, Kasper
Frey, Ulrich J.
Buskens, Vincent
Przepiorka, Wojtek
Ellemers, Naomi
author_facet Otten, Kasper
Frey, Ulrich J.
Buskens, Vincent
Przepiorka, Wojtek
Ellemers, Naomi
author_sort Otten, Kasper
collection PubMed
description How people cooperate to provide public goods is an important scientific question and relates to many societal problems. Previous research studied how people cooperate in stable groups in repeated or one-time-only encounters. However, most real-world public good problems occur in groups with a gradually changing composition due to old members leaving and new members arriving. How group changes are related to cooperation in public good provision is not well understood. To address this issue, we analyze a dataset from an online public goods game comprising approximately 1.5 million contribution decisions made by about 135 thousand players in about 11.3 thousand groups with about 234 thousand changes in group composition. We find that changes in group composition negatively relate to cooperation. Our results suggest that this is related to individuals contributing less in the role of newcomers than in the role of incumbents. During the process of moving from newcomer status to incumbent status, individuals cooperate more and more in line with incumbents.
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spelling pubmed-96137742022-10-29 Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game Otten, Kasper Frey, Ulrich J. Buskens, Vincent Przepiorka, Wojtek Ellemers, Naomi Nat Commun Article How people cooperate to provide public goods is an important scientific question and relates to many societal problems. Previous research studied how people cooperate in stable groups in repeated or one-time-only encounters. However, most real-world public good problems occur in groups with a gradually changing composition due to old members leaving and new members arriving. How group changes are related to cooperation in public good provision is not well understood. To address this issue, we analyze a dataset from an online public goods game comprising approximately 1.5 million contribution decisions made by about 135 thousand players in about 11.3 thousand groups with about 234 thousand changes in group composition. We find that changes in group composition negatively relate to cooperation. Our results suggest that this is related to individuals contributing less in the role of newcomers than in the role of incumbents. During the process of moving from newcomer status to incumbent status, individuals cooperate more and more in line with incumbents. Nature Publishing Group UK 2022-10-27 /pmc/articles/PMC9613774/ /pubmed/36302777 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34160-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Otten, Kasper
Frey, Ulrich J.
Buskens, Vincent
Przepiorka, Wojtek
Ellemers, Naomi
Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game
title Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game
title_full Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game
title_fullStr Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game
title_full_unstemmed Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game
title_short Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game
title_sort human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613774/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36302777
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34160-5
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