Xp. Chen et al., SEQUENTIAL CHOICE IN A STEP-LEVEL PUBLIC-GOODS DILEMMA - THE EFFECTS OF CRITICALITY AND UNCERTAINTY, Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 65(1), 1996, pp. 37-47
Citations number
23
Categorie Soggetti
Psychology, Applied",Management,"Psychology, Social
A social dilemma is a situation in which members of a group or organiz
ation are faced with a conflict between two choices: maximize personal
interests (defection) or maximize collective interests (cooperation).
It is generally more profitable to defect, but if all do so, all are
worse off than if all choose to cooperate. Previous research indicate
that criticality and uncertainty affect the likelihood of cooperation.
The more a member perceives that her choice is critical (has a signif
icant impact on the outcome), the greater the likelihood of cooperatio
n; conversely, the greater the uncertainty about the outcome, the lowe
r the likelihood of cooperation. A sequential social dilemma paradigm
was developed to manipulate criticality and uncertainty systematically
. Using college students as subjects, two experiments were conducted.
In both experiments (based on four- and six-person groups), criticalit
y interacted with uncertainty: When criticality was high, cooperation
decreased with uncertainty; but when criticality was low, there was a
slight increase of cooperation rates with uncertainty. Several hypothe
ses are proposed to explain these results. (C) 1996 Academic Press, In
c.