Cognitive foundations of behavior in symmetrical and asymmetrical cooperations games: An economic and psychological approach
Economic Theory
Final Report Abstract
Understanding economic behavior of individuals and collectives is at the core of economic research. Both motivational as well as strategic elements of human social behavior have been thoroughly investigated in experimental economics. Within the last decades, social cognition research has developed methods and gathered the knowledge that human behavior can only be properly understood if information processes that underlie such behavior are clear. Despite the importance of this psychological research with respect to economic topics, this knowledge has widely been ignored by economic research and related applications in organization and societies. The present research was directed to contribute to the investigation of cognitive foundations of economic behavior. By an interdisciplinary approach with methods from social psychology and experimental economics, the research addressed cognitive underpinnings of human cooperative behavior. First, I could show intuitive mental processing - induced by conceptual priming - promotes cooperation even in a social dilemma that does not allocate the gains from cooperation equally among the participants. Thus the results advance our understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of cooperation in games where participants benefit unequally from contributions to the public good. Many real-life decisions involve asymmetric gains from joint cooperation, yet the effect of intuition on these types of dilemmas has thus far been neglected in research. The present research was designed to fill that gap in the literature. The results deserve some discussion and the intuition-cooperation link deserves much more research attention. Second, we investigated an application of cooperation in real-life, i.e., people’s sustainable behavior. We conducted a randomized-controlled trial in Germany that tested the impact of default rules (i.e., a type of “nudging”) on voluntary purchases of “green” energy contracts that entirely stem from renewable resources. The decision asymmetry was implemented as follows: Setting the default choice to more expensive “green” energy (i.e., where consumers have to actively opt-out if they do not want it) increased purchases of such nearly tenfold Summarizing, the research provided an example of using behavioral science for climate change mitigation and shows alternatives to the use of subsidies or other economic incentives to secure cooperative solutions in societies.
Publications
- (2015). Domestic uptake of green energy promoted by opt-out tariffs. Nature Climate Change 5, 868-871
Ebeling, F. & Lotz, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1038/NCLIMATE2681) - (2015). The effect of communication channels on dishonest behavior. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 58, 88-93
Conrads, J., & Lotz, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2015.06.006) - . (2015). Spontaneous giving under structural inequality: Intuition promotes cooperation in an asymmetric social dilemma. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0131562
Lotz, S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131562)
