Suckers or Saviors? Consistent Contributors in Social Dilemmas

Weber JM, Murnighan JK.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2008;95(6):1340-1353.
doi:10.1037/a0012454

Abstract

Groups and organizations face a fundamental problem: They need cooperation but their members have incentives to free ride. Empirical research on this problem has often been discouraging, and economic models suggest that solutions are unlikely or unstable. In contrast, the authors present a model and 4 studies that show that an unwaveringly consistent contributor can effectively catalyze cooperation in social dilemmas. The studies indicate that consistent contributors occur naturally, and their presence in a group causes others to contribute more and cooperate more often, with no apparent cost to the consistent contributor and often gain. These positive effects seem to result from a consistent contributor's impact on group members' cooperative inferences about group norms.

From the Discussion:

Practical Implications

These findings may also have important practical implications.Should an individual who is joining a new group take the risk and be a CC (Consistent Contributor)? The alternative is to risk being in a group without one.Even though CCs seemed to benefit economically from their actions, they also tended to get relatively little credit for their positive influence, if they got any credit at all. Thus, future research might explore how consistent contributions can be encouraged and appreciated and how people can overcome the fears that are naturally associated with becoming a CC.

These data also provide further support for Kelley and Stahelski’s (1970) observation that people consistently under estimate their roles in creating their own social environments. In particular, in the contexts that we studied here, the common characterization of self-interested choices as “strategic” or “rational” appears to be behaviorally inappropriate. Characterizing CCs as suckers may be both misleading and fallacious (see Moore & Loewenstein, 2004,p. 200).  If “rational” choices maximize personal outcomes, our data suggest that the choice to be a CC can actually be rational. In this research, we examined CCs’ effects, not their motives or strategies. The data suggest that in these kinds of groups, CCs are saviors rather than suckers.

A serious impediment to the emergence of CCs is the fact that like Axelrod’s (1984) tit-for-tat players, CCs can never do better than the other members of their own groups. This means that CCs cannot do better than their exchange partners: Anyone who cooperates less, even if they ultimately move to mutual cooperation, will obtain better short-term outcomes than CCs. The common tendency to make social comparisons (Festinger, 1954) means that these outcome disparities will probably be noticed. Relatively disadvantageous outcomes are particularly noxious (e.g., Loewenstein, Thompson, & Bazerman, 1989), as is feeling exploited (e.g., Kelley & Stahelski, 1970). Thus, in the absence of formal agreements and binding contracts (which have their own problems; Malhotra & Murnighan, 2002), cooperative action can be exploited. The inclination to self-interested action may even be a common default (Moore & Loewenstein, 2004).

------------------

In essence: Economic theories often assume people look out mostly for themselves, cooperating only when punished or cajoled.  But even in anonymous experiments, some people consistently cooperate. These people also (i) perform better and (ii) inspire others to cooperate.

The behavioural ecology of irrational behaviours

Philippe Huneman Johannes Martens
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
September 2017, 39:23

Abstract

Natural selection is often envisaged as the ultimate cause of the apparent rationality exhibited by organisms in their specific habitat. Given the equivalence between selection and rationality as maximizing processes, one would indeed expect organisms to implement rational decision-makers. Yet, many violations of the clauses of rationality have been witnessed in various species such as starlings, hummingbirds, amoebas and honeybees. This paper attempts to interpret such discrepancies between economic rationality (defined by the main axioms of rational choice theory) and biological rationality (defined by natural selection). After having distinguished two kinds of rationality we introduce irrationality as a negation of economic rationality by biologically rational decision-makers. Focusing mainly on those instances of irrationalities that can be understood as exhibiting inconsistency in making choices, i.e. as non-conformity of a given behaviour to axioms such as transitivity or independence of irrelevant alternatives, we propose two possible families of Darwinian explanations that may account for these apparent irrationalities. First, we consider cases where natural selection may have been an indirect cause of irrationality. Second, we consider putative cases where violations of rationality axioms may have been directly favored by natural selection. Though the latter cases (prima facie) seem to clearly contradict our intuitive representation of natural selection as a process that maximizes fitness, we argue that they are actually unproblematic; for often, they can be redescribed as cases where no rationality axiom is violated, or as situations where no adaptive solution exists in the first place.

The article is here.