Social Dilemma

The study explored whether cooperation could be promoted by identification with an in-group. A game was used to create two groups independent of each other. Thirty-six Japanese undergraduate students participated in the game, followed by a social dilemma game. Analysis revealed a two-factor structure of social identification: identification with the group and identification with its members. As predicted from social identity theory, subjects showed a significantly higher level of cooperation when the dilemma game was played with in-group members than with out-group members. Furthermore, identification with the group affected both in-group bias and cooperative behavior in the social dilemma game, but this effect was not found for identification with members.

ABSTRACT: Previous research has found that high emotional expressivity contributes to interpersonal attraction independently of and on par with the contributions of physical attractiveness. Using an evolutionary perspective, we argue that emotional
expressivity can act as a marker for cooperative behavior or trustworthiness. Theoretical and empirical work from social dilemma research pointing to the advantages of having a signal for cooperation is considered, as well as research from the limited number of studies that have looked at expressive behavior within a social exchange context. We also argue that we need to inject nonverbal emotional behavior into the social dilemma paradigm, which has downplayed or ignored its role in the communication processes associated with cooperation. Finally, we offer an outline for testing our theory and expanding the role of nonverbal emotional processes within research on cooperation and social exchange.

Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms – “strong” and “weak” reciprocity – that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. To support this claim, they have generated a large body of evidence concerning the willingness of experimental subjects to punish uncooperative free- riders at a cost to themselves. In this article, I distinguish between a “narrow” and a “wide” reading of the experimental evidence. Under the narrow reading, punishment experiments are just useful devices to measure psychological propensities in controlled laboratory conditions. Under the wide reading, they replicate a mechanism that supports cooperation also in “real-world” situations outside the laboratory. I argue that the wide interpretation must be tested using a combination of laboratory data and evidence about cooperation “in the wild.” In spite of some often-repeated claims, there is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment. Moreover, studies by economic and social historians show that social dilemmas in the wild are typically solved by institutions that coordinate punishment, reduce its cost, and extend the horizon of cooperation. The lack of field evidence for costly punishment suggests important constraints about what forms of cooperation can or cannot be sustained by means of decentralised policing.

The Greed–Efficiency–Fairness hypothesis (H. A. M. Wilke, In European Review of Social Psychology, Wiley, New York, Vol. 2, pp. 165–187, 1991) states that people in resource dilemmas are greedy and wish to defect, but that greed is constrained by preferences for efficient resource use and fair distributions. This paper reviews research where the GEF hypothesis was generalized to public-goods dilemmas.

Supply chains are beginning to displace firms as the competitive entity in the global marketplace. Managed supply chains offer the promise of added value through proactive cooperative efforts among participating firms. However, as a strategic alliance, managed supply chains represent a form of social dilemma: supply chain alliances may fail because participating firms fear opportunistic behavior on the part of other alliance participants, and as a consequence underinvest their information and resources into the alliance. The interdependence structure of the alliance may contribute to this problem. Viewing managed supply chains as a form of social dilemma also identifies solutions that may be implemented unilaterally by individual firms or jointly by the alliance to maintain the “indispensable virtue” of high trust that allows supply chains to effectively create added value.