Abstract
Common-pool resources require a dose of self-restraint to ensure sustainable exploitation, but this has often proven elusive in practice. To understand why, and characterize behaviours towards ecological systems in general, we devised a social dilemma experiment in which participants gain profit from harvesting a virtual forest vulnerable to overexploitation. Out of 16 Chinese and 15 Spanish player groups, only one group from each country converged to the forest’s maximum sustainable yield. All other groups were overzealous, with about half of them surpassing or on the way to surpass a no-recovery threshold. Computational–statistical analyses attribute such outcomes to an interplay between three prominent player behaviours, two of which are subject to decision-making ‘inertia’ that causes near blindness to the resource state. These behaviours, being equally pervasive among players from both nations, imply that the commons fall victim to behavioural patterns robust to confounding factors such as age, education and culture.
Highlights
Instances of overused common-pool resources abound in human history
The number of trees in the virtual forest corresponding to maximum sustainable yield (MSY) (≈151 trees) gave us a natural performance classifier for 16 Chinese and 15 Spanish player groups
Having worked with two geo-socially distant populations, and in a novel and relatively complex context, our results go a long way in fortifying the conclusions of the cited studies that human behaviours in social dilemmas are divisible into a small number of stable phenotypes
Summary
Instances of overused common-pool resources abound in human history. Among the more famous are the crash of the Peruvian anchoveta fishery in the early 1970s [1] and the overfishinginduced ecosystem regime shift off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 1990s [2]. E.g. fishers or loggers, are free from surveillance, they face a dilemma to either exploit the resource sustainably as a form of cooperation or overuse the resource for immediate profit as a form of defection. This social dilemma is not without successful resolutions [10,11], there are no panaceas either [12]. We assumed effort to be costly, meaning that excessive logging in a heavily exploited forest could have generated losses Using this setup, we gathered a rich dataset of 9300 decisions from 96 undergraduate students in Xi’an, China and 90 individuals from the general population in Zaragoza, Spain (electronic supplementary material, table S1). The resulting payouts amounted to an average of ¥62.6 in China and €15.1 in Spain
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