ArticleNature communications2016
Humans choose representatives who enforce cooperation in social dilemmas through extortion.
Article in Nature communications, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Coevolutionary dynamics of cooperation, risk, and cost in collective risk games.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Humans program artificial delegates to accurately solve collective-risk dilemmas but lack precision.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Outlearning extortioners: unbending strategies can foster reciprocal fairness and cooperation.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Is a Rational Politics of Disaster Possible? Making Useful Decisions for Others in an Experimental Disaster Game.Political behavior · 2023Article
- Economic experiments support Ostrom's polycentric approach to mitigating climate change.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2022Article
- Self-reliance crowds out group cooperation and increases wealth inequality.Nature communications · 2020Observational
- Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response.Nature human behaviour · 2020Review
- Benefits of asynchronous exclusion for the evolution of cooperation in stochastic evolutionary optional public goods games.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Extortion strategies resist disciplining when higher competitiveness is rewarded with extra gain.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Coping with noise in social dilemmas: Group representatives fare worse than individuals because they lack trust in others' benign intentions.Group processes & intergroup relations : GPIR · 2019Article
- Climate Change: What Psychology Can Offer in Terms of Insights and Solutions.Current directions in psychological science · 2018Article
- Resource heterogeneity leads to unjust effort distribution in climate change mitigation.PloS one · 2018Article
- The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Rethinking spontaneous giving: Extreme time pressure and ego-depletion favor self-regarding reactions.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Asymmetric Power Boosts Extortion in an Economic Experiment.PloS one · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social dilemmas force players to balance between personal and collective gain. In many dilemmas, such as elected governments negotiating climate-change mitigation measures, the decisions are made not by individual players but by their representatives. However, the behaviour of representatives in social dilemmas has not been investigated experimentally. Here inspired by the negotiations for greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, we experimentally study a collective-risk social dilemma that involves representatives deciding on behalf of their fellow group members. Representatives can be re-elected or voted out after each consecutive collective-risk game. Selfish players are preferentially elected and are hence found most frequently in the 'representatives' treatment. Across all treatments, we identify the selfish players as extortioners. As predicted by our mathematical model, their steadfast strategies enforce cooperation from fair players who finally compensate almost completely the deficit caused by the extortionate co-players. Everybody gains, but the extortionate representatives and their groups gain the most.
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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.