Experimental Insights: Testing Climate Change Cooperation in the Lab

Abstract

Scholarly activities around climate change began with the natural sciences, spread to policy, then science communication, and now are expanding into human behavior and decision-making. One of climate change’s biggest challenges is its game theory structure as a threshold, collective risk social dilemma, in which most (if not all) stand to lose by some high probability but no single individual can solve the problem. Scientists have designed new cooperative experiments around climate change to test reactions to scientific information, different levels of collective risk, rich-poor scenarios, and how time discounting affects our ability to cooperate in the face of climate change. This paper provides an overview of these experiments, some policy-relevant findings, and how scientists are looking to improve experimental design in the hopes of learning what might make the sacrifices required to combat climate change easier to achieve.