Periodic Reporting for period 2 - PRINCIPLES (Behavioural Principles of Large-Scale Cooperation)
Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-08-31
Many of societies’ biggest problems are social dilemmas: individual incentives are often at odds with what is good for society as a whole. Take climate change: limiting global warming is in mankind’s collective interest but individual incentives are to ignore one’s impact on the climate. To recall the Covid-19 crisis, in a pandemic the collective incentive is that people follow rules to wear masks, stay at home and get vaccinated but the individual incentives might be to ignore those rules. These are just two examples for large-scale cooperation problems, which are the focus on this project: When are people willing to cooperate to achieve the common good?
From a behavioural science point of view, understanding behavioural principles of human cooperation is a fundamental task. Progress has been made within disciplines, such as economics, sociology, and social and moral psychology. However, research programmes on human cooperation are largely discipline-specific and only loosely connected. For example, economists often focus on(mis)perceptions of incentives in social dilemmas or on “strong reciprocity” (conditional cooperation); psychologists study “social value orientations” and “interdependence” structures; and many social scientists study descriptive and injunctive norms of cooperation or the influence of moral reasoning on cooperation. How these behavioural principles are connected to each other is an important open research question.
The first overarching objective of PRINCIPLES is to develop a common framework and a shared methodology that connects the hitherto rather disjointed approaches. Such a framework is required to make progress in understanding large-scale cooperation, because people’s behaviour in them is likely influenced by all these behavioural principles at the same time. A second objective of PRINCIPLES is to deploy this framework to investigate how people behave in important problems of large-scale cooperation, such as caring for the climate.
From a behavioural science point of view, understanding behavioural principles of human cooperation is a fundamental task. Progress has been made within disciplines, such as economics, sociology, and social and moral psychology. However, research programmes on human cooperation are largely discipline-specific and only loosely connected. For example, economists often focus on(mis)perceptions of incentives in social dilemmas or on “strong reciprocity” (conditional cooperation); psychologists study “social value orientations” and “interdependence” structures; and many social scientists study descriptive and injunctive norms of cooperation or the influence of moral reasoning on cooperation. How these behavioural principles are connected to each other is an important open research question.
The first overarching objective of PRINCIPLES is to develop a common framework and a shared methodology that connects the hitherto rather disjointed approaches. Such a framework is required to make progress in understanding large-scale cooperation, because people’s behaviour in them is likely influenced by all these behavioural principles at the same time. A second objective of PRINCIPLES is to deploy this framework to investigate how people behave in important problems of large-scale cooperation, such as caring for the climate.
PRINCIPLES has three work packages that aim to develop the framework and to apply it. The first work package is about developing the interdisciplinary framework in the context of rule following. Studying rule following is important for our purposes because to cooperate often simply means to follow the rules. As an example, take following the rules during the Covid pandemic. To uncover the behavioural principles of rule-following, we have developed CRISP, an experimental framework that dissects rule-conformity as a function of intrinsic Respect for rules, extrinsic Incentives, Social expectations, and social Preferences. We have run large-scale experiments to establish the behavioural importance of the four behavioural motives of CRISP in one unifying framework and plan to study how rule following varies across cultures.
As part of the second work package, we are now working on extending CRISP to further problems of cooperation. This includes studying the detailed behavioural processes behind CRISP in various prototypical cooperation problems behavioural scientists have used as models of large-scale cooperation, such as threshold models (often called step-level public goods).
Preliminary work has started on the third work package which aims to apply the integrated framework to study real-world large-scale cooperation problems, such as cooperating during a pandemic or to avoid dangerous climate change.
As part of the second work package, we are now working on extending CRISP to further problems of cooperation. This includes studying the detailed behavioural processes behind CRISP in various prototypical cooperation problems behavioural scientists have used as models of large-scale cooperation, such as threshold models (often called step-level public goods).
Preliminary work has started on the third work package which aims to apply the integrated framework to study real-world large-scale cooperation problems, such as cooperating during a pandemic or to avoid dangerous climate change.
We have developed an integrated experimental framework, called CRISP, to dissect the behavioural drivers of rule following and rule breaking. No such framework has existed so far and providing such a framework is a breakthrough for PRINCIPLES. In current and planned work, we will develop this framework further and then use it to explain real-world behaviours in large-scale cooperation problems.