Goal
The current study examines the impact of a prior collaborative but unrelated task on the strength of future cooperative goals, as measured by cooperation in two social dilemmas. This manipulation of goal-strength was prompted by the observation that small cooperative successes often motivate additional sacrifices in the interest of cooperation, for example, the progression of the EU over the past 50 years. Additionally, we sought to determine what aspects of group collaboration in the prior task, such as participatory processes, would affect subsequent cooperation.

Background
Social Dilemmas exist when coordinated strategy choices can benefit every member of a group, but each member has an incentive to defect. Work in economic institutions has attempted to understand the motivations and social goals of players, and how incentives for cooperation can be improved. Increases in cooperation in group conditions have been explained as the conversion of the dilemma into a non-dilemma by external factors that might then be internalized, thus creating a norm of cooperation. A different viewpoint is that cooperation becomes an important goal in-and-of-itself, and thus changes the subjective payoffs, reducing or negating the incentive to defect.

Three conditions were run: collaborative (in which group members first collaborated on an unrelated task), co-activity (in which group members sat at a table and worked independently on all tasks), and individual (in which group members never met each other). The cooperation rates ranged from 53-80%, as determined by the levels of group cooperation in each condition.

Group interactions during the first task were coded by independent coders, and responses to questions, including stream-of-consciousness writing about each decision, were coded as well. These were compared to responses about the investment decisions, demographic and personality information, and other questions about the task and group interaction.

Last Updated: June 1, 2006