The Impact of Collective Risk on Social Norms and Cooperation

Post by Leanna Kalinowski

What's the science?

Collective action problems exist where groups benefit from cooperating to achieve a shared outcome, but personal incentives drive individuals to instead rely on others’ efforts. Examples of this can be seen in reducing infectious disease spread and climate change action among many other societal challenges. Laws to foster cooperation to address these global issues are often unavailable, unenforceable, or insufficient, leading society to rely on social norms to encourage compliance. However, it is not fully understood how social norms shape cooperation among strangers and whether the level of threat faced by a society plays a role in the norms that evolve. This week in Nature Communications, Szekely and colleagues used a 30-day collective-risk social dilemma to measure how social norms change in response to varying levels of risk.

How did they do it?

Participants first completed personality trait tests and a demographic questionnaire to determine individual-level factors that may lead an individual to follow social norms. Then, they were separated into groups of six and interacted through 28 daily rounds of the collective-risk social dilemma, with the groups being shuffled daily. At the beginning of each round, each participant was allocated 100 points and asked to decide how many of those points to contribute to the group’s collective pool. If a threshold number of points (300) was met, the collective risk was averted, and all participants got to keep their unspent points. If the threshold was not met, participants risked losing their points determined by a pre-set probability (p).

To determine whether higher risk environments led to stronger social norms, the probability of losing points was manipulated. Half of the participants experienced a low-risk environment for days 1-14 followed by a high-risk environment for days 15-28, while the other half of the participants experienced the risk environments in the opposite order. Following each round, participants’ personal normative beliefs and societal expectations were measured. Following the 28th round, participants were asked to determine their level of punishment for individuals who did not contribute at least 50 points.

What did they find?

First, the researchers found that societal expectations and personal normative beliefs have strong and positive associations with cooperative behaviors (i.e., number of points contributed). They then assessed whether cooperative behaviors are impacted by risk level, finding that there were stronger social norms in the high-risk environment compared to the low-risk environment. They also found that groups with stronger social norms are more likely to contribute more points and reach the collective threshold level compared to those with weaker social norms.

Next, they found that participants in the low-risk environment experienced a rapid strengthening of social norms upon entering the high-risk environment. Conversely, participants in the high-risk environment experienced a slow deterioration of social norms upon entering the low-risk environment. The presence of social norms was further indicated by punishment levels. Regardless of risk, low contributors (< 50 points) are punished with a higher intensity than high contributors (> 50 points).

What's the impact?

Taken together, these findings show that high risk of collective loss increases the strength of social norms, reduces tolerance of those who deviate from social norms, and increases cooperation. Understanding how social norms emerge during high-risk situations is imperative for developing policies to foster cooperation in the face of future global crises.

Szekely et al. Evidence from a long-term experiment that collective risks change social norms and promote cooperation. Nature Communications (2021). Access the original scientific publication here.