Observational studyNature communications2020
Self-reliance crowds out group cooperation and increases wealth inequality.
Observational study in Nature communications, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Developmental Patterns in Cooperative Contexts: How Children Integrate Social Strategy and Resource Endowment in Third-Party Responses.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- 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
- Comparing AI and human decision-making mechanisms in daily collaborative experiments.iScience · 2025Article
- An outside individual option increases optimism and facilitates collaboration when groups form flexibly.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Efficiency and resilience of cooperation in asymmetric social dilemmas.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Group Formation and the Evolution of Human Social Organization.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Partner choice and cooperation in social dilemmas can increase resource inequality.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The interdependence of relational and material wealth inequality in Pemba, Zanzibar.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The evolution of universal cooperation.Science advances · 2023Article
- The coordination of collective and individual solutions in risk-resistant scenarios.The European physical journal. B · 2023Article
- Authority or Autonomy? Exploring Interactions between Central and Peer Punishments in Risk-Resistant Scenarios.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Environmental stress increases out-group aggression and intergroup conflict in humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Exploring the Relationship Between Learning Goal Orientation and Knowledge-Sharing Among Information Communication Technology Consultants: The Role of Incentive Schemes.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Voluntary restrictions on self-reliance increase cooperation and mitigate wealth inequality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans establish public goods to provide for shared needs like safety or healthcare. Yet, public goods rely on cooperation which can break down because of free-riding incentives. Previous research extensively investigated how groups solve this free-rider problem but ignored another challenge to public goods provision. Namely, some individuals do not need public goods to solve the problems they share with others. We investigate how such self-reliance influences cooperation by confronting groups in a laboratory experiment with a safety problem that could be solved either cooperatively or individually. We show that self-reliance leads to a decline in cooperation. Moreover, asymmetries in self-reliance undermine social welfare and increase wealth inequality between group members. Less dependent group members often choose to solve the shared problem individually, while more dependent members frequently fail to solve the problem, leaving them increasingly poor. While self-reliance circumvents the free-rider problem, it complicates the governing of the commons.
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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.