ArticlePloS one2015
Group Size Effect on Cooperation in One-Shot Social Dilemmas II: Curvilinear Effect.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- As group size increases, individuals modify their vocal features to signal cooperation while remaining recognizable.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Drivers of cooperation in social dilemmas on higher-order networks.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Analysing public goods games using reinforcement learning: effect of increasing group size on cooperation.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Speakers are more cooperative and less individual when interacting in larger group sizes.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Large-sample-size assessment of socioeconomic predictors of community-level resource management occurrence.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2022Article
- Incidental Emotions and Cooperation in a Public Goods Game.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The dynamics of cooperation, power, and inequality in a group-structured society.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Strike one hundred to educate one: Measuring the efficacy of collective sanctions experimentally.PloS one · 2021Article
- The role of peer reward and punishment for public goods problems in a localized society.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Herd immunity and a vaccination game: An experimental study.PloS one · 2020Article
- Large-scale cooperation driven by reputation, not fear of divine punishment.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Group size effects and critical mass in public goods games.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Humans best judge how much to cooperate when facing hard problems in large groups.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Cooperation in Groups of Different Sizes: The Effects of Punishment and Reputation-Based Partner Choice.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game with probabilistic abstention.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Heterogeneous groups overcome the diffusion of responsibility problem in social norm enforcement.PloS one · 2018Article
- Think global, act local: Preserving the global commons.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Rethinking spontaneous giving: Extreme time pressure and ego-depletion favor self-regarding reactions.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Evolution of conditional cooperation under multilevel selection.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Correction: Group Size Effect on Cooperation in One-Shot Social Dilemmas II: Curvilinear Effect.PloS one · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In a world in which many pressing global issues require large scale cooperation, understanding the group size effect on cooperative behavior is a topic of central importance. Yet, the nature of this effect remains largely unknown, with lab experiments insisting that it is either positive or negative or null, and field experiments suggesting that it is instead curvilinear. Here we shed light on this apparent contradiction by considering a novel class of public goods games inspired to the realistic scenario in which the natural output limits of the public good imply that the benefit of cooperation increases fast for early contributions and then decelerates. We report on a large lab experiment providing evidence that, in this case, group size has a curvilinear effect on cooperation, according to which intermediate-size groups cooperate more than smaller groups and more than larger groups. In doing so, our findings help fill the gap between lab experiments and field experiments and suggest concrete ways to promote large scale cooperation among people.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.