Leiden University Student Repository

Flierman, Vincent (2021)

Building Back Better Together: Cooperation in social dilemmas that simulate linear pay-off crises

Bachelor thesis | Psychologie (BSc)

A lot of crises provide an opportunity to build back better than the situation was beforehand. Studies on social dilemmas generally overlook this opportunity. In an experimental study, we compare a public-good model where participants can turn a negative externality into a positive one with two more traditional models. By increasing the initial negative externality, we assess the effect of increasingly severe crises on cooperation. Our results indicate that participants contribute more in a condition where they can turn a negative situation into a positive one than they do in a condition where they can only reduce the impact of the negative situation. More importantly, increasing the turning point does not impact contributions in such a transformation model while it does in more traditional models. We conclude that cooperation during crises is fundamentally different when people have the opportunity to turn the crises into something positive.

Author

Flierman, Vincent

Faculty

Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences

Supervisors

Molenmaker, W.
Van Dijk, E.

ECTS Credits

15

Evaluation

Recommended

Language

en