Search Results

The generation of new knowledge is crucial for a firm's competitive advantage. This chapter analyses explorative knowledge production in teams as a social dilemma. Such social dilemmas can to some extent be solved by transactional solutions, such as activating the shadow of the future or selective incentives. But transformational solutions are more important. Employee's intrinsic initiative to participate in knowledge exploration is crowded-out by certain high-powered incentives and unfriendly monitoring. It is crowded-in by low-powered incentives, friendly monitoring, communication, and institutional framing. The chapter concludes that there exist convincing ideas of how to govern explorative knowledge production which should be tested empirically.

This chapter reviews theoretical and empirical work on self-regulation at the group level of analysis. We examine how groups exert control over their members and how members respond to these control efforts. The first section of the chapter focuses on groups as agents of control. Following a discussion of the functions that groups serve, we examine how groups use norms and roles to control their members. The second section of the chapter focuses on individuals as targets of control. Here we examine two opposing ways in which individuals respond to perceived group pressure: capitulation and resistance. We conclude by examining two implicit assumptions underlying our analysis of group control—that groups initiate control for their own ends and that members view such control as an unwelcome constraint. Using the example of social support groups, we discuss the relationship between self- and group-control when individuals seek group help in regulating their behavior.

The global community faces several very pressing environmental challenges such as climate change, depletion of the high-sea fisheries, and unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss. Governments are in the process of designing environmental policies to address these problems unilaterally, but also collectively (in the form of international agreements). Meanwhile, private citizens and firms are observed to voluntarily take protective action. Whereas standard game theory would predict that formal government intervention can only provide an extra stimulus for protective action, there are many examples of external interventions decreasing agents' propensity to undertake socially desired activities. This chapter provides an overview of the literature on the circumstances under which formal interventions can crowd out voluntary contributions to the common good. Furthermore, it is discussed how the effectiveness of government intervention may be improved by preserving the agents' intrinsic motivation to contribute to the common good.

This chapter focuses on the evolution of altruism in humans. Following William Hamilton, it uses the term “helping” to describe behaviors that confer benefits on others and reserves the term “altruism” for helping in situations where the helper would benefit in fitness or other material ways by withholding help. The discussion begins with an analysis of the proximal influences on an individual action such as helping using the beliefs, preferences, and constraints approach common to economics and decision theory. According to this approach, what individuals do when restricted to a specific set of feasible actions depends on their desires and goals on the one hand, and their beliefs on the other. The chapter also considers the link between social preferences and social dilemmas before concluding with an overview of a gene-culture coevolution model of group-structured populations, one assumption of which is: an explanation of the evolution of human cooperation must be contingent upon the empirical evidence.

This chapter considers the liabilities of empathy-induced altruism following roughly the same sequence as in Chapter 7—first, liabilities for individuals in need, then for groups in need, and finally, for the person experiencing altruistic motivation. The potential liabilities are: empathy-induced altruism can hurt those in need, especially when the helper needs a cool head; it may also produce maternalism and paternalism; empathy-induced altruism can be overridden by self-concern; it can produce empathy avoidance; empathy-induced altruism is less likely to be evoked by non-personal, abstract, and chronic needs; empathy-induced altruism can be a source of immoral action; it can also pose a threat to the common good in social dilemmas. Finally, empathy-induced altruism can pose a threat to the mental and physical health—and even to the life—of the altruistically motivated individual.

While the social dilemma literature has addressed reward and punishment (or sanctioning) for several decades, we have witnessed an enormous growth in research on reward and punishment in social dilemmas in the past 10 to 15 years. Many intriguing questions were asked and addressed by researchers working in various disciplines. A final emerging theme is how rewards and punishment are used in society, what form they might take, how these acts might in turn be rewarded, and whether reward and punishment may be accompanied or preceded by other tools such as gossip. Such questions are getting at the functions of reward and punishment in society.

Prior research finds that both rewards and punishment promote cooperation in social dilemmas. The chapter discusses an interdependence theoretical perspective on understanding the proximate psychological mechanisms that underlie how incentives work to promote cooperation. Specifically, it discusses how understanding the specific incentive structure of interdependent social interactions may lead to greater insight into both (a) the use and (b) the effectiveness of incentives in promoting cooperation. It also discusses important implications from understanding various social motives and the perceived motives of others that affect how incentives influence cooperation. Applying an interdependence perspective, it offers several new promising directions for future research on incentives and cooperation.

Previous research examining the effects of sanctioning in social dilemmas have found that while they are effective in inducing individual cooperation in the short term, their long-term effects could be detrimental (e.g., Chen, Pillutla, & Yao, 2009). While researchers have identified both structural and motivational reasons for this, the structural and motivational approaches have been examined in isolation from one another. In addition, most sanctioning research has focused on monetary, short-term, and individual-based ways to induce cooperation. In this chapter structural and motivational approaches are integrated to examine how sanctions may better induce cooperation. The chapter proposes the further exploration of long-term cooperation through the usage of sanctions that are: non-monetary, group-based, centralized, and not focused on immediate reinforcement strategies.

The current ecological crisis is of enormous relevance to psychology teaching, as it is essentially a problem of human behaviour. Despite this, psychology has been slow to contribute. As a result, our environmental problems deepen, while our knowledge, skills and values as teachers of psychology remain largely untapped. This chapter urges psychology educators to consider how they can nurture the psychologically literate citizen through a focus on ecological sustainability. We present four case studies from New Zealand psychology departments. Two are laboratory exercises, one based on a social dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commons, and the other on perceptions of animal cognition. The third is a fourth year class that is open to students from different disciplines. The final case study is an action research and teaching project designed to create a sustainable school. Participating in these experiences highlights for students the ecological issues faced by people everywhere, how to cooperate in the sustainable and equitable use of resources, how cognitions and moral reasoning are affected by culture and how to use one’s psychological literacy to effect social change.

Upon thinking deeply about Kenneth Arrow's ‘Impossibility Theorem’, Amartya Sen advises scholars not to despair, but to engage seriously the impossibility result so that we understand it better and know how to cope with the problems identified. This chapter follows Sen's advice. It engages another impossibility result — that of Garrett Hardin who convinced many economists and policy analysts that it was impossible for those harvesting from a resource to self-organize to sustain that resource over time. The chapter briefly reviews evidence from field and experimental research that challenge the generalizability of Hardin's result. It then presents a theoretical argument for the factors affecting the likelihood that the users of common-pool resource will self-organized to develop new rules restrict how a common-pool resource should be used.

Not all approaches to liberalism are equally so insistent about avoiding comprehensive foundations. This chapter examines two prominent examples: Gerald Gaus and Steven Darwall. Their chief problem is the direct politicization of ethics. Where with Nussbaum, Rawls, and Sen the tendency was to lose ethics in liberalism, here there is a tendency to lose liberalism in ethics. The result is the same, but it is necessary to do battle in both directions. Overall, the argument is that foundations matter, and Den Uyl and Rasmussen are working from, and offering one, that provides a viable alternative to standard models employed by Gaus and Darwall and others. Individualistic perfectionism is an alternative that does not require sacrificing either liberalism or ethics.

Casual observation and controlled experiments show that humans display great heterogeneity in their tendency to exploit others or invest in mutual cooperation. This chapter reviews models in the economics literature that can explain the coexistence of free riders (exploiters) and cooperators (investors). A distinction is made between models of full and bounded rationality. Although some models provide tentative explanations, there is a large gap between the empirical and theoretical literature, and there has been little effort to integrate long- and short-run models.

This chapter provides a brief review of the conceptual and empirical development of the concept of trust. In doing so, it briefly discusses some historical writings of trust, along with some clear trends toward an integrative, interdisciplinary science of trust. Trust and social dilemmas are close partners, in that trust is often a necessary but not a sufficient condition for establishing and maintaining cooperation in social dilemmas. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the book, providing a brief discussion of the sections dealing with (a) the biology and development of trust; (b) trust in dyads, groups, and organizations; and (c) trust in different cultures.

This chapter examines how collaboratory participation gives rise to a “public goods” problem. It focuses on data contributions to one kind of collaboratory, namely community data systems (CDSs), which have some similarities with traditional public goods experimental tasks. The chapter examines how these projects find solutions to the problem of the “social dilemma” of motivating data contributions on the basis of data derived from a survey of several CDS administrators and public reports from other projects. The projects also compare these real-world solutions with those that are extensively investigated in laboratory research on public goods. Public goods involve the study of how groups cooperate among each other for the greater good among self-interested people.

This book analyzes the cultural dynamics and social dilemmas that informed the construction of the American sexual character after the close of World War II. It was originally spurred by the author's curiosity as to why sex surveys repeatedly cropped up in discussions of topics that they apparently had nothing to do with. The book examines the process by which Kinsey's statistical data became cultural narrative. It maps the broader field of American sexual character by looking at themes and tensions in social scientists' and cultural critics' writings about sex in the United States. The book observes the ways in which normative categories such as heterosexuality, masculinity, femininity, and Americanness itself were constructed and questioned. The process chronicles some of the microstruggles that constituted the meaning of sex, including popular responses to the two Kinsey Reports, the changing legal meanings of obscenity, and homosexual activists' negotiation of scientific categories of normalcy and deviance.

Rules about punishment dictate how one must behave to ensure that one’s punishment behavior is not met with social disapproval. These rules can be both prescriptive and restrictive. This chapter investigates the general features of these rules, focusing on punishment of norm violations in social dilemmas. Researchers have often viewed the provision of punishment as a costly public good that must itself be enforced, creating a second order social dilemma that requires prescriptive norms for people to “cooperate”, i.e., to punish. The chapter argues that this is a misunderstanding of the nature of punishment and considers theoretical reasons for why prescriptive rules about punishment might not be important. It discusses the reasons that restrictive norms could benefit the group and reviews experiments where this is shown to be the case. Finally it reports the results of four surveys that use real world situations to assess people’s views about punishment in several countries.

One of the core assumptions of the proposition that moral punishment is an instinct is that punishment stimulates cooperation among group members. This chapter starts with supernatural punishment, illuminating that whereas belief in heaven has no effect on national crime rates, belief in hell reduces crime rates. Also, in economic games, the possibility to punish increases the cooperation that people display. These effects emerge because punishment increases deterrence, communicates moral norms, and instills trust. The chapter then notes that punishment has facilitated cooperation among strangers as people started forming large states, and that people become more punitive in situations that required unconditional cooperation and self-sacrifice for the group (i.e., war). These findings suggest that punishment indeed stimulates cooperation in social groups.

This chapter opens with a simple diagram capturing the tension that all social creatures face between self interest and the social good. It then reviews two famous devices for alleviating the tension, Hamilton’s kin selection and Trivers’s bilateral reciprocity, and demonstrates their isomorphism. Next it reviews the “kaleidoscope” niches that our ancestors inhabited in Pleistocene times, emphasizing the intense selection for flexible forms of cooperation within stable groups of individuals. It then presents humans’ novel coping device, the moral system, which builds on but goes well beyond the earlier devices. It shows how the content of the moral code evolves on short timescales to adapt to novel environments, and concludes with a short discussion of new adaptations (e.g., egalitarian to hierarchical) to accommodate pastoral life styles 10 thousand years ago.