Having a stake in the future and perceived population density influence intergenerational cooperation

Abstract

Intergenerational common-pool resource games represent a new experimental paradigm in which the current generation's decision to cooperate or defect influences future generations who cannot reciprocate, providing key insights for sustainability science. We combine experimental and theoretical approaches to assess the roles of having a stake in the future (50% chance to pass the resource on to themselves in the next generation) and reminders of the presence of others (exposure to people-chatting sounds) on intergenerational cooperation. We find that, as expected, having a stake in the future increases cooperation with future generations, except when participants are also exposed to people-chatting sounds. We hypothesize that this interaction effect occurs because people-chatting sounds trigger a perception of large group size, which reduces the chance of individuals and their descendants benefiting from the pool in the future, thus reducing cooperation. Our results highlight the context-dependent effect of having a future stake on intergenerational cooperation for resource sustainability, and suggest an area of future work for environmental messaging.

Ancestral social environments plus nonlinear benefits can explain cooperation in human societies

“…The key challenge would have been to overcome kin bias, potentially by developing new cues for cooperation (e.g., sharing a common fate 102,103 ). The exact mechanisms (including cultural 104 ) are outside the scope of our model, but we note that contemporary humans often cooperate with nonkin using cooptations of kin psychology [105][106][107] . For example, socially constructed notions of kinship 61,108 coopt both the kinship framework that coordinates cooperation 109,110 and the kin-psychological impulse to do so 111 .…”