COMMUNICATION, COMMITMENT, AND COOPERATION IN SOCIAL DILEMMAS

Intragroup communication promotes cooperation in social dilemmas. Two explanations are plausible: Discussion may (a) enhance feelings of gro up identity or (b) induce commitments to cooperate. Some remedies for social dilemmas (like group communication) may be subclassified as pub lic-welfare remedies (of which enhanced group identity is an example) versus cooperation-contingent remedies (of which commitment is an exam ple). The efficacy of a cooperative act for enhancing the collective w elfare should moderate remedies of the former but not the latter type. An experiment is reported in which group communication and the effica cy of cooperation were manipulated. As expected if communication induc ed commitments, but contrary to the group identity explanation, effica cy did not moderate the effect of group discussion. Other analyses pro vided more direct evidence that group members made and honored commitm ents to cooperate.