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A Research on Consistent Contributor Effect and Its Effect Factors in Social Dilemmas

Author: YuLe
Tutor: Chen
School: Sichuan Normal University
Course: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Keywords: social dilemmas consistent contributor effect Marginal per capita return cooperation
CLC: D632.9
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2012
Downloads: 26
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Abstract

Today, an important question that the human society faced is how to effectively promote the mutual cooperation between people, to maximize the public interests of the society. The study of social dilemmas is the study of the tension between individual and collective rationality. In a social dilemma, individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off. Many of the most challenging problems we face, from the interpersonal to the international, are at their core social dilemmas. Social Dilemmas as an important type of game experiments, represent a very common problem situation that people choose to be competitive or cooperation in conflict. In fact, groups and organizations face a fundamental problem:They need cooperation but their members have incentives to free ride. Empirical research on this problem has often been discouraging, and economic models suggest that solutions are unlikely or unstable. Researching the Social Dilemmas from a psychological perspective, contribute to a better understanding of human decision-making thinking and increase of policy-formulating and problem-solving ability, with a very important and far-reaching significance. Recently, foreign experimental economists have proposed that the presence of consistent contributors could increase people’ contribution and restrain the degressive tendency of their contribution——Consistent Contributor Effect. We suggest that consistent contributors can act as catalysts for cooperation by altering the perceptions and actions of their fellow group members. We define CCs as individuals who always contribute, regardless of others’choices. They are not reciprocators, instead, they initiate cooperation and always contribute. We suggest that one individual’s consistently cooperative actions send a clear, unambiguous signal that cooperation is appropriate, which allows other group members to view their group’s norms as cooperative. In other words, CCs can change other group members’perceptions of their social context, increasing the chances of additional cooperation.The purpose of this study was verifying the existence of Consistent Contributors and Consistent Contributor Effect in the context of national culture, and detecting effect factors of Consistent Contributor Effect:marginal per capita return (MPCR) and Consistent Contributor’s nature. In this study, experimental conditions were designed based on the classical paradigm of Social Dilemmas——public goods dilemma paradigm.240students from Sichuan Normal University participated in the experiment. The4studies that the authors present show that an unwaveringly consistent contributor can effectively catalyze cooperation in social dilemmas. The following conclusions were drawn from the study:(1) based on the adaptive learning from the feedback of previous trials, consistent contributors occur naturally in our country, and there was a gender differences;(2) Consistency Contributor Effects were also exist and reached statistical significant level, consistent contributors presence in a group causes others to contribute more and cooperate more often, with no apparent cost to the consistent contributor and often gain. These positive effects seem to result from a consistent contributor’s impact on group members’cooperative inferences about group norms;(3) The people of prosocial value orientation are much more likely to make contributions behavior, it is also found that consistent contributors can effectively lead other group members of various value orientation to make investment behavior, especially Individual value orientation and competitive value orientation;(4)Marginal per capita return (MPCR) and Consistent Contributor’s nature respectively had a significant influence effect to Consistent Contributor Effect.

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