New Model Tests Strategies to Boost Community Cooperation

How do you keep people from being total jerks? When communities have a problem to solve — sharing limited resources (like toilet paper), or dealing with a crisis (like a government shutdown) — they fare better when more people make decisions contributing to the common good. People don’t always do that.

New research from Stefani Crabtree from the Department of Environment and Society sought to answer that using simulations to mathematically explore strategies to keep people from acting in selfish ways.

Crises tend to boost good behavior in the short term, Crabtree said. Events like earthquakes and floods tend to spur people to offer up their limited resources to support those in need, even at a personal cost. But when a crisis stretches on, people tend to return to selfishness.

“Selfishness looks better,” Crabtree said. “People see immediate gains, and when others notice the results of those actions, it breeds more selfishness.”

Societies have ways to set limits on bad behavior — from friendly neighborhood encouragement to strict, despotic oversight. The research team mathematically tested the effectiveness of three of scenarios — strict, top-down leadership with rules about good behavior; a system with neighbors spying on and punishing each other for anti-social actions; and one in which peers influence each other to adopt generous attitudes.

The team created a model for a “common-pool resource game” — built something like an ongoing pizza party where actors were encouraged to attend and encouraged to donate a dollar. If individuals chose to donate, the whole group benefitted (sharing pizza). If they chose to act selfishly (eat pizza with no voluntary payment), the party ran out of cash and collapsed.

The team created three types of “people” for the model: those who always cooperated, another group who always acted selfishly, and a third who acted generously only when they were held accountable. They then tested how long the “pizza party” would last under each scenario. When the average wealth (pizza) of generous actors was higher than the average wealth of the selfish ones, the system knew it had a winning strategy.

In every scenario the model confirmed that accountability is critical — unless people are called out on selfish choices, societies eventually collapse. Other results of the model all hinged on how the accountability-contingent group decided to act.

The neighbors-reporting-and-punishing scenario did not perform well. It could maintain itself only when detection of misbehavior was near perfect, and punishments were very severe. As time went on and as the size of the community increased, it grew increasingly costly for the system to root out bad behavior.

The scenario of despotic leadership worked well, mathematically. The strict, top-down rules resulted in high cooperation and high rewards (more pizza, more donations). But this would likely occur at the cost of personal wellbeing in reality — though the model didn’t account for that, Crabtree said. Forcing cooperation tends to breed resentment, she said. Effective, but not sustainable.

The model uncovered a surprising result: when the actors were tasked with exerting positive influence over their neighbors, convincing them to act unselfishly and showing off the long-term benefits of the generous actions, the community performed just as effectively and generously as under top-down coercion.

“The actors who demonstrated to their neighbors how they could benefit in the long-term by sharing resources had an enormous impact on community fitness,” Crabtree said, “just as much as strict leadership.”

What application might this have to real life? Programs like Social Security are an example of top-down programs that benefit a group. Other social programs allow people to opt in — churches and civic organizations, for example. You “pay” a little bit today to participate and support the group, and have a safety net for the future. And you try to convince others to do the same. This increases the chance for a safety net over time and everyone does better, Crabtree said — but only when someone is influential enough to convince people that this generosity is worth it.

The bottom-up strategy can be successful even at large scales, according to the research. If real-life leaders have to decide between the community carrot or the regulation stick, the model indicates that the carrot may be just as effective over time, she said.