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Ergonomics and Nudging Read chapter Read first chapter

2023 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

How to Promote Cooperation for the Well-Being of Individuals and Societies

Author : Valerio Capraro

Published in: Ergonomics and Nudging for Health, Safety and Happiness

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The most successful human societies are those that have found better ways to promote cooperative behaviour. Yet, cooperation is individually costly and, therefore, it often breaks down, leading to enormous social costs. In this article, I review the literature on the mechanisms and interventions that are known to promote cooperative behaviour in social dilemmas. In iterated or non-anonymous interactions, I focus on the five rules of cooperation, as well as on structural changes, involving the cost or the benefit of cooperation, or the size of the interacting group. In one-shot and anonymous interactions, I focus on the role of internalised social heuristics as well as moral preferences for doing the right thing. For each account, I summarize the available experimental evidence. I hope that this review can be helpful for social scientists working on cooperation and for leaders and policy makers who aim at promoting social cooperation or teamwork.

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Footnotes
1
This suggests that there might be intermediate cases in which the individual return of full cooperation increases too slowly with the group size, leading to a null or even a negative effect of group size on cooperation. For example, it could be interesting to study the relationship between group size and cooperation in a logarithmic public goods game.
 
2
To be precise, there is also a fifth technique: neurostimulation. Neurostimulation methods come from the idea that high-level, reflective reasoning comes primarily from a specific brain area, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC). Therefore, deactivating this area, using transcranial magnetic stimulation or transcranial direct current stimulation, might make people more likely to follow their heuristics. However, in this article, I decided not to focus on this method because, to the best of my knowledge, there are no studies testing the effect of neurostimulation of the rDLPFC on cooperative behaviour using prisoner’s dilemmas or public goods games. There is only one study, but it uses an asymmetric public goods game (Li et al. 2018). I hope that future work can fill this gap.
 
3
For completeness, I mention that also neurostimulation tools have been criticised, as they are usually applied over the brain area of interest. This implicitly assumes that the stimulus spreads uniformly towards the target area. However, this is generally not true, but depends on the topography of the cortical surface, which, in some cases, can even reverse the polarity of the stimulus (Berker et al., 2013; Rahman et al., 2013).
 
4
I refer to Capraro, Halpern and Perc (in press) for a review article providing many examples of situations in which people’s behaviour cannot be explained using outcome-based utility functions but require language-based utility functions; moral preferences can be seen as particular language-based utility functions, where morally loaded language carries the moral utility of an action.
 
5
There is also one work exploring the effect of moral messages in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Dal Bó and Dal Bó (2014) found that making participants read the Golden Rule increases cooperation in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, although the effect vanishes after a few rounds.
 
6
Internalised moral identity measures the extent to which being moral is important to one’s self-concept, while symbolised moral identity measures the extent to which people care about looking moral (Aquino and Reed 2002).
 
7
The descriptive norm represents what other people actually do (Cialdini et al. 1990).
 
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Metadata
Title
How to Promote Cooperation for the Well-Being of Individuals and Societies
Author
Valerio Capraro
Copyright Year
2023
Book
Ergonomics and Nudging for Health, Safety and Happiness

Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28389-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-28390-1

Copyright Year: 2023

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28390-1_2

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