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Scaling up commons dilemma experiments for research and education

扩大研究和教育领域的公地困境实验

基本信息

批准号：
2049553
负责人：
Marco Janssen
金额：
$ 48.88万
依托单位：
Arizona State University
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Continuing Grant
财政年份：
2021
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2021-01-01 至 2025-12-31
项目状态：
未结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2049553&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Scaling up commons dilemma experiments

项目摘要

Many of the challenges facing contemporary society are collective action problems involving shared resources (known as “commons”). Examples include emission reductions to reduce risks of climate change, and mask-wearing to reduce the spread of COVID-19. In collective action, there is often tension or conflict between the goals of the community and the goals of the individual. Wearing masks and hand washing during the COVID-19 crisis reduces the spread of the virus and flattens the curve, although it might be an inconvenience for the individual. This project investigates three fundamental puzzles in this research area. First, what makes communication so effective at stimulating cooperative outcomes? It is known that communication, even if participants have no ability to enforce promises, has a major positive effect. The goal of the project is to understand what aspects of communication content explains successful cooperation. Second, how does a group’s size impact the ability of its members to cooperate? With smaller groups, it is easier to identify who is free riding. However, small groups may not have sufficient person power to monitor resource appropriation. Third, how do groups that address collective action problems cope with uncertainty and surprises. Various events in 2020, such as the pandemic, are testament to the importance of understanding collective action under uncertainty. Researchers have investigated risk and collective action, with known probabilities of events, but there is a gap in the understanding of how groups cope with unknown unknowns. To address these puzzles, there is a need to scale up controlled behavioral experiments. This project builds a robust platform for “commons” research that also serves as an engaging educational game. The project is mentoring many graduate and undergraduate students, with diverse backgrounds, in research design, data collection, analyses, and programming. Project outcomes include educational resources for college level courses, as well as a special K12 version of the game with accompanying educational material for teachers.The transdisciplinary research team expands a web-based experiment, the Port of Mars, where a group of players make decisions to invest in shared infrastructure and perform actions that benefit themselves and have consequences for the group. The platform enables the conducting of large-scale controlled experiments with in-game chat communication and random events that introduce uncertainty and variance into each play-through. A large number of participants (both college students and members of the general population) take part in a tournament, coined “Mars Madness”, where they compete to become the champion of Port of Mars. Six experimental designs test hypotheses on communication, group size and uncertainty. Data collected during the tournaments is used to train machine-learning models that classify communication data into functional categories which help to better understand how communication among players relate to group performance. In the various tournaments group sizes vary between five and fifty players and they make possible to evaluate the impacts of uncertainty on collective action by controlling players’ knowledge of events and adjusting the thresholds that trigger events. Furthermore, the studies show the extent to which participating in the behavioral experiments improve the understanding of collective action problems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

当代社会面临的许多挑战是涉及共享资源（称为“公地”）的集体行动问题。例子包括减少排放以降低气候变化的风险，以及戴口罩以减少COVID-19的传播。在集体行动中，社区目标和个人目标之间往往存在紧张或冲突。在COVID-19危机期间戴口罩和洗手减少了病毒的传播并缩短了曲线，尽管这可能对个人造成不便。本项目探讨了这一研究领域的三个基本难题。第一，是什么使沟通在促进合作成果方面如此有效？众所周知，即使参与者没有能力执行承诺，沟通也会产生重大的积极影响。该项目的目标是了解沟通内容的哪些方面可以解释成功的合作。第二，群体的规模如何影响其成员的合作能力？在较小的群体中，更容易识别谁是搭便车。不过，小团体未必有足够的人力监察资源的运用。第三，解决集体行动问题的团体如何科普不确定性和意外。2020年发生的各种事件，如大流行，证明了在不确定性下理解集体行动的重要性。研究人员已经研究了风险和集体行动，已知事件的概率，但在理解群体如何科普未知的未知方面存在差距。为了解决这些难题，有必要扩大受控行为实验。这个项目为“公地”研究建立了一个强大的平台，也是一个引人入胜的教育游戏。该项目指导许多研究生和本科生，具有不同的背景，在研究设计，数据收集，分析和编程。项目成果包括大学课程的教育资源，以及一个特殊的K12版本的游戏，附带的教师教育材料。跨学科研究团队扩展了一个基于网络的实验，火星港，一群玩家决定投资共享的基础设施，并执行有利于自己的行动，并对群体产生影响。该平台可以进行大规模的控制实验，包括游戏中的聊天通信和随机事件，这些事件将不确定性和变化引入到每个游戏中。大量的参与者（包括大学生和普通民众）参加一个名为“火星疯狂”的比赛，他们在那里竞争成为火星港的冠军。六项实验设计测试了有关沟通、群体规模和不确定性的假设。比赛期间收集的数据用于训练机器学习模型，将通信数据分类为功能类别，这有助于更好地了解球员之间的通信如何与团队表现相关。在各种比赛中，小组规模在5到50名球员之间变化，他们可以通过控制球员对事件的了解和调整触发事件的阈值来评估不确定性对集体行动的影响。此外，研究表明，在何种程度上参与行为实验提高了对集体行动问题的理解。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。