Collaborative Research: Testing Models of Cooperation in a Large-scale Communal Project

人类的合作是广泛的，尽管个人不付出任何代价就能从合作中获益的风险不断存在。本研究旨在通过检验合作行为的进化、经济和博弈论解释模型，了解大规模合作的动因。鉴于之前的研究通常依赖于实验方法来测试假设，这项研究将实验室带到现场，在现实世界中利用实验的解释力。研究人员将为一个小社区提供建造校舍所需的资源。现场行为实验将衡量个人对项目的贡献，并分析这些贡献如何与实验室条件下做出的决定以及社区合作的声誉联系起来。此外，博士后学者将获得重要的STEM研究经验。该研究将测试合作的间接互惠模型（IRM），该模型表明，个体因其亲社会行为而获得声誉，这些声誉广为人知，并且这些声誉被潜在的合作者用来决定如何互动，防止不那么亲社会的个体搭便车。该研究扩展了IRM的两两合作模型，以询问该模型是否也解释了现实环境中对公共产品的贡献。为了检验声誉管理对实验室之外集体行动的影响，调查人员将提供学校建设所需的所有材料，并观察从规划阶段到完成的过程。在施工过程中，研究人员将通过直接观察、个人报告和基于心率测量的能量消耗估计来获取个人对项目的贡献。调查人员还将进行有关建设过程的半结构化访谈，以及结构化二元交换访谈，声誉同行排名和实验性经济游戏。这些方法将使他们能够从民族志上捕捉到一个社区完成大规模合作项目的过程，并测试1)集体行动的声誉是否准确地捕捉到对项目贡献的变化，2)项目贡献反过来影响声誉，3)声誉是否以及如何影响日常生活中的双元互动，以及4)经济实验中的决策如何反映现实世界中的模式。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Human cooperation is extensive, despite constant risks of freeriding by individuals who stand to benefit from cooperation without paying associated costs. This study aims to understand the factors motivating large-scale cooperation by testing evolutionary, economic, and game-theoretic explanatory models of cooperative behavior. Whereas prior research has often relied on experimental approaches to testing hypotheses, this study brings the lab to the field, leveraging the explanatory power of experiments in a real-world context. The researchers will provide a small community with the resources necessary to construct a school building. The in situ behavioral experiment will measure individual contributions to the project and analyze how such contributions associate with decisions made under laboratory conditions and with community-wide reputations for cooperating. Furthermore, a postdoctoral scholar will gain important STEM research experience.The study will test the Indirect Reciprocity Model (IRM) of cooperation, which suggests that individuals earn reputations for their prosocial acts, that these reputations are widely known, and that they are used by potential cooperators to determine how to interact, preventing freeloading by less prosocial individuals. The research extends pairwise cooperation models of IRM to ask whether the model also explains contributions to public goods in real-world settings. In order to examine the impact of reputation management on collective action outside the laboratory, investigators will provide all of the materials needed for the construction of a school and observe the process from the planning phase to its completion. During the construction, the investigators will capture individual contributions to the project using direct observation, individual reports, and estimates of energy expenditure based on heart rate measurements. The investigators will also conduct semi-structured interviews about the construction process, as well as structured dyadic exchange interviews, reputational peer rankings, and experimental economic games. These methods will allow them to ethnographically capture the process by which a community completes a large-scale cooperative project and to test whether 1) reputations for collective action accurately capture variation in contributions to the project, 2) project contributions, in turn, influence reputations, 3) whether and how reputations influence dyadic interactions in day-to-day life, and 4) how decisions in economic experiments reflect patterns in real world situations.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.