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.
