Cooperation and coordination across cultures and contexts: Individual, sociocultural, and contextual factors jointly influence decision making in the volunteer's dilemma game

Abstract

What factors promote or hinder volunteering within organizations and groups? This paper simultaneously explores the impact of individual, contextual, and sociocultural variables on decision making in a special type of social dilemma: the volunteer's dilemma game (VDG). The VDG provides a controlled experimental method for studying volunteering behaviors in an anonymous interactive environment. We developed six variations of the VDG and administered them to economics students in five different cultures (Ntotal = 603). Among other things, these VDGs varied whether the potential benefits of volunteering were certain or uncertain. Although the overall level of volunteering did not vary substantially across most cultural groups, we found that culture interacted with the size and (un)certainty of the benefits associated with volunteering, to influence volunteering decisions. We also found that religiosity (but not religious affiliation per se) increases volunteering and that men are less likely to volunteer when the returns to doing so are certain. These results extend our knowledge of behaviors in the VDG, and their potential drivers, with clear implications for understanding how culture, individual characteristics, and context jointly influence prosocial behavior and coordination.

The Role of Certainty in a Two-Person Volunteer’s Dilemma

“…To date, there is little relevant research. Using gain frames, Olivola et al (2020) found that male (but not female) participants volunteered more in a risky VoD than in a certain (i.e., standard) VoD. This finding contrasts with prospect theory, which predicts that in a gain frame volunteering is most attractive if it involves certainty.…”

“…For the VoD, this probability is computed as p = 1 2 (T 2 R)/(T 2 P). However, many players volunteer in excess of this probability, which suggests they are either irrational or rational in a way not accounted for by game theory (Kim et al, 2018;Krueger et al, 2016Krueger et al, , 2018Olivola et al, 2020).…”

The effects of trait social anxiety on affective and behavioral reactions to others' resource allocations

“…In fact, social anxiety was a stronger predictor of negative affective reactions to uneven allocations in the dictator game than basic personality traits in both Studies 1 and 2. This suggests that an individual's social anxiety level is an important, yet hitherto scarcely investigated contributor to the interpersonal differences regarding cooperativeness and the affective reactions to it that are observed across manifold studies (Civai et al, 2010; Ma et al, 2017; Mischkowski et al, 2018; Olivola et al, 2020; Pfattheicher & Böhm, 2018). Furthermore, it shows that the effect on negative affective reactions is specific for social anxiety and not an artifact of a generally increased emotionality or altered expectations.…”

Moral disciplining: The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality

“…However, other core aspects of MDT are difficult to reconcile with the evidenceincluding some of the same studies and observations discussed above. First, MDT implies that (more) religious individuals and societies should be more cooperative, yet outside of self-report survey studies (which suffer from major methodological issues; Galen, 2012), the evidence linking religion and/or religiosity to cooperative behaviors is somewhere between mixed and absent (Galen, 2012;Hoffmann, 2013;Olivola et al, 2020;Sablosky, 2014). Thus, there is very little, if any, (quality) evidence that religion promotes cooperation, contrary to the predictions of MDT.…”