Promoting Empathy and Collaborative Decision Making for Natural Resource Management using a Computer Mediated Scenario

为了促进有效的协作管理，至关重要的是制定促进移情的干预措施，这是合作行为的先兆，并了解可能阻止移情导致协作行动的背景因素。自然资源管理的合作方法有成功也有失败。后者的驱动因素往往是利益集团无法或不愿在提供公共产品方面进行合作。合作有时需要参与者放弃自私的行为，转而支持更亲社会的行为。因此，理解移情的作用以及如何促进移情成为成功协作决策的必要组成部分。研究小组使用了多方法、多学科的方法，其中包括一项横断面公共调查，该调查将用于测试观点采取和亲社会行为之间的关系模型，并确定在资源管理背景下采取观点和亲社会行动的关键个人和背景预测因素以及障碍。此外，这些项目测试了多个假设，以解释为什么使用计算机中介交流的初步实验会导致利己主义行为，这是一个违反直觉的结果。最后，研究团队使用他们的理论和实验结果来开发和测试一系列实验，使用计算机中介的场景来模拟现实世界的协作管理决策。这项工作加强了对观点采取和亲社会行为之间因果关系的理解，确定了采取观点和亲社会行为的背景和个体障碍，并开发了可靠和有效的工具和策略来促进计算机中介情景中的亲社会行动。因此，这项工作有助于现有的社会合作、环保行为和协作管理模式。此外，本研究使视角采取和亲社会行为之间的多维关系变得可见、可检验，并最终成为工具。这项研究还通过使用互动情景来教育跨多学科的学生，通过复杂的决策情景来促进协作行为和合作，从而改善了教学。

To promote effective collaborative management, it is critical to develop interventions that promote empathy, which is a precursor to cooperative behavior, and to understand the contextual factors that may prevent empathy from resulting in collaborative action. Collaborative approaches to natural resource management have had their share of success and failure. The latter is often driven by the inability or unwillingness of interest groups to collaborate over the provision of public goods. Collaboration sometimes require actors to forego selfish behaviors in favor of more prosocial behavior. Therefore, understanding the role of empathy and how to promote it becomes a necessary component of successful collaborative decision making. The research team uses a multi-method, multi-disciplinary approach that includes a cross-sectional public survey that will be used to test a model of the relationships between perspective taking and prosocial behavior and identify the key individual and contextual predictors and barriers to perspective taking and prosocial action in resource management contexts. Further, the projects tests multiple hypotheses about why preliminary experiments using computer-mediated communications resulted in egoistic behavior, a counterintuitive result. Finally, the research teams uses their theoretical and experimental results to develop and test a series of experiments using computer-mediated scenarios to mimic real-world collaborative management decisions. The work enhances understanding of the causal connections between perspective taking and prosocial action, identifies the contextual and individual barriers to perspective taking and prosocial behavior, and develops reliable and valid instruments and strategies to promote prosocial action within a computer mediated situation. As a result, the work contributes to existing models of social cooperation, proenvironmental behavior and collaborative management. Moreover, this research makes the multidimensional relationships between perspective taking and prosocial action visible, testable, and ultimately instrumental. This study also improves teaching by using interactive scenarios to educate students across multiple disciplines to promote collaborative behavior and cooperation through complex decision-making scenarios.