To be successful and sustainable, social impact programs require individuals and groups to change aspects of their behavior. As blockchain-based tokens are increasingly adopted to target social outcomes, it is important to properly define these activities as “behavior change interventions” and assess their design and management as such—otherwise, there is significant risk of possible unintended consequences. Designing tokens as behavior change interventions requires new constructs beyond those currently in use to model the interdependence of digital and social ecosystems, and integration of token engineering, cryptoeconomics, and behavioral skill sets to test token designs within various ecosystems. New token design and testing protocols that integrate behavior measures around the targeted social outcomes are needed, to fill a critical gap in current practice. Hence, new standards, operational frameworks, and ethics are needed to guide the use of tokens at scale, as tools to achieve social impacts such as attaining the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Meeting these needs requires a collaborative approach between token design actors (computer scientists, cryptoeconomists, token engineers, etc.) and social impact practitioners who will be increasingly called upon to use tokens as behavior change tools. This paper begins to identify common ground and address areas to further develop research and practice of tokens being used for social impact.

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Many practitioners as well as researchers explore promoting environmentally conscious behavior in the context of public goods systems. Numerous experimental studies revealed various types of incentives to increase cooperation on public goods. There is ample evidence that monetary and non-monetary incentives, such as donations, have a positive effect on cooperation in public goods games that exceeds fully rational and optimal economic decision making. Despite an accumulation of these studies, in the typical setting of these experiments participants decide on an allocation of resources to a public pool, but they never exert actual effort. However, in reality, we often observe that players’ real effort is required in these public goods game situations. Therefore, more analysis is needed to draw conclusions for a wider set of incentive possibilities in situations similar to yet deviating from resource allocation games. Here we construct a real effort public goods game in an online experiment and statistically analyze the effect different types of incentives have on cooperation. In our experiment, we examine combinations of monetary and social incentives in a setting aimed closer to practical realities, such as financial costs and real effort forming part of the decision to cooperate on a public good. In our real effort public goods game participants cooperate and defect on image-scoring tasks. We find that in our setting economic and social incentives produce an asymmetric effect. Interestingly economic incentives decreased the share of highly uncooperative participants, while social incentives raised the share of highly cooperative participants.

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