Social Dilemmas and Institutional Solutions to Promote Cooperation

Cooperation plays a critical role in enabling human societies to address collective challenges. However, conflicts may arise between individual and collective interests, impeding the success of collaborative efforts and affecting the choice of solutions to these challenges. Researchers across various disciplines have studied institutional solutions to promote cooperation and resolve these recurring conflicts. The present dissertation attempts to contribute to our understanding of the effectiveness of different solutions and the emergence of institutional solutions in situations that exhibit varying patterns of conflicting interests. Chapter 2 utilized a meta-analytic approach to investigate the impact of various institutional rules on cooperation. In Chapter 3, the influence of conflicting interests on cooperation, beliefs, norms, and choice for sanctioning institutions were examined through an online experiment. Finally, Chapter 4 investigated age-related differences in experiencing personal costs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, displaying prosocial COVID-19 responses, and supporting institutional solutions in managing the COVID-19 pandemic, a pressing collective action problem. The current findings suggest that stronger conflicting interests were associated with negative outcomes, such as decreased levels of cooperation, beliefs about others' cooperation, and normative expectations of cooperation. Communication opportunities and sanctioning mechanisms were identified as the most effective and robust solutions for promoting cooperation. However, our findings did not support the idea that conflicting interests influenced the establishment of a sanctioning institution to promote cooperation. Taken together, solving challenges that contain a conflict of interests requires identifying the magnitude of conflict, and applying effective institutional solutions including incentives (for sanctioning) and communication. Future work needs to better model the variation of interdependent situations alongside different dimensions and across ecological conditions, and examine how effective institutional solutions emerge to address challenges across contexts.