ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Alcohol unleashes homo economicus by inhibiting cooperation.PloS one · 2021Trial
- The private solution trap in collective action problems across 34 nations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Social Preferences Toward Humans and Machines: A Systematic Experiment on the Role of Machine Payoffs.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Beyond a binary theorizing of prosociality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Insufficient evidence to conclude that confusion cannot explain cooperative behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Reply to Strømland et al.: Confusion should be minimized rather than used to explain cooperation in public goods game experiments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Confusion remains an important issue in public goods game experiments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Confusion cannot explain cooperative behavior in public goods games.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Variance, norms and cooperative behavior in public goods games.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Modelling the role of environmental circumscription in the evolution of inequality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Trust within human-machine collectives depends on the perceived consensus about cooperative norms.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The restart effect in social dilemmas shows humans are self-interested not altruistic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Ancestral social environments plus nonlinear benefits can explain cooperation in human societies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- Self-interested learning is more important than fair-minded conditional cooperation in public-goods games.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- A preference to learn from successful rather than common behaviours in human social dilemmas.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Payoff-based learning best explains the rate of decline in cooperation across 237 public-goods games.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Ten recent insights for our understanding of cooperation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- The evolution of morality and the role of commitment.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- When face masks signal social identity: Explaining the deep face-mask divide during the COVID-19 pandemic.PloS one · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Economic experiments are often used to study if humans altruistically value the welfare of others. A canonical result from public-good games is that humans vary in how they value the welfare of others, dividing into fair-minded conditional cooperators, who match the cooperation of others, and selfish noncooperators. However, an alternative explanation for the data are that individuals vary in their understanding of how to maximize income, with misunderstanding leading to the appearance of cooperation. We show that (i) individuals divide into the same behavioral types when playing with computers, whom they cannot be concerned with the welfare of; (ii) behavior across games with computers and humans is correlated and can be explained by variation in understanding of how to maximize income; (iii) misunderstanding correlates with higher levels of cooperation; and (iv) standard control questions do not guarantee understanding. These results cast doubt on certain experimental methods and demonstrate that a common assumption in behavioral economics experiments, that choices reveal motivations, will not necessarily hold.
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