| Summary: | Interventions to
increase cooperation in social dilemmas depend on understanding decision
makers' motivations for cooperation or defection. We examined these in five
real-world social dilemmas: situations where private interests are at odds with
collective ones. An online survey (N = 929) asked respondents whether or not
they cooperated in each social dilemma and then elicited both open-ended
reports of reasons for their choices and endorsements of a provided list of
reasons. The dilemmas chosen were ones that permit individual action rather
than voting or advocacy: (1) conserving energy, (2) donating blood, (3) getting
a flu vaccination, (4) donating to National Public Radio (NPR), and (5) buying
green electricity. Self-reported cooperation is weakly but positively
correlated across these dilemmas. Cooperation in each dilemma correlates fairly
strongly with self-reported altruism and with punitive attitudes toward
defectors. Some strong domain-specific behaviors and beliefs also correlate
with cooperation. The strongest example is frequency of listening to NPR, which
predicts donation. Socio-demographic variables relate only weakly to
cooperation. Respondents who self-report cooperation usually cite social
reasons (including reciprocity) for their choice. Defectors often give
self-interest reasons but there are also some domain-specific reasons---some
report that they are not eligible to donate blood; some cannot buy green
electricity because they do not pay their own electric bills. Cooperators
generally report that several of the provided reasons match their actual
reasons fairly well, but most defectors endorse none or at most one of the
provided reasons for defection. In particular, defectors often view cooperation
as costly but do not endorse free riding as a reason for defection. We
tentatively conclude that cooperation in these settings is based mostly on
pro-social norms and defection on a mixture of self-interest and the possibly
motivated perception that situational circumstances prevent cooperation in the
given situation.
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