DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Human competition, policing and the tragedy of the commons

社会群体中的人类面临着一个困境：一个人自己的资源有多少应该被合作地捐赠给一个共同的池子，一个公共物品？如何确保其他国家的合作？个人应该收回多少共享资源？如何限制其他群体成员的自私？人类和其他动物一样，在进化过程中表现得最好的是自私。许多当前的问题，如气候变化和过度收获（公地悲剧），都是由于人类在共享资源（如清洁空气和种植作物的土地）方面缺乏合作而产生的。因此，维持社会群体中的合作不仅是行为生态学和许多其他学科的核心问题，而且具有重要的环境意义。公共产品游戏是研究人类合作的标准实验室技术，但这些游戏并不广泛适用于现实世界。研究人员已经表明，当参与者被允许在实验室条件下进行的公共物品游戏中竞争共享资源时（就像他们在实验室之外的许多共享资源上所做的那样），他们的合作程度明显降低。该项目以这项工作为基础，并将调查强制公平分配公共物品的机制如何影响合作（例如，人们是否更倾向于在不同的资源分配和监测其保护的方法下保护环境资源）。特别是，该项目调查了监管（即，抑制竞争和根据贡献分配公共产品的份额）是否促进了合作。该项目包括向初中生开展外展活动。

Humans in social groups face a dilemma: how much of an individual's own resources should be cooperatively donated to a common pool, a public good? How can the cooperation of others be ensured? How much of the shared resources should an individual reclaim and how can the selfishness of other group members be limited? Humans, like other animals, do best evolutionarily by being selfish. Many current issues such as climate change and over-harvesting (tragedies of the commons) have arisen from a lack of cooperation by humans over shared resources such as clean air and land for growing crops. The maintenance of cooperation in social groups is therefore not only a core question in behavioral ecology and many other academic disciplines, but also one of great environmental significance. Public Goods Games are a standard laboratory technique for investigating human cooperation, but these games are not widely applicable to real-world situations. The investigators have shown that when players are allowed to compete for shared resources in a public goods game conducted under laboratory conditions (as they do over many shared resources outside the laboratory) they are significantly less cooperative. The project builds on this work and will investigate how mechanisms of enforcing fair division of a public good affect cooperation (e.g., whether people are more inclined to conserve environmental resources under different methods of allocating such resources and monitoring their conservation). In particular, the project investigates whether Policing (i.e., whether repression of competition and assigning shares of a public good based on contribution) promotes cooperation. The project involves outreach activities to junior high school students.