Explaining Public Goods Game Contributions with Rational Ability

Hannes Lang,Gregory Deangelo,Michelle Bongard

doi:10.3390/g9020036

Abstract

As the link between psychology and economics has grown, so too has research on the link between personality traits and economic behavior. We build on this previous work, bringing to light the relationship between personality traits and contributions in a one-shot public goods game. We find that contributions to the public good are smaller for rational participants as measured by the Rational-Experiential Inventory—revised 40 (REI-40) item scale. We find no effect on contributions for the measures of the Big Five personality traits or the remaining measures from the REI-40.

Highlights

The public goods game has become a classic laboratory environment for studying collective group decisions where participants decide how much to contribute to a common pool
In the Big Five personality traits, openness to experience or conscientiousness are not likely to correlate with cooperative behavior as they refer to more risk-related issues
In the ex-ante survey, participant’s rational ability was tested as a factor in the revised 40 (REI-40) [25], and we found that participants whose score showed higher rational ability contributed significantly less to the public good

Summary

Introduction

The public goods game has become a classic laboratory environment for studying collective group decisions where participants decide how much to contribute to a common pool. To further understand the decision-making process of the group, researchers have explored individual behavior in the public goods game more carefully, including the personality or psychological traits of individual participants. These studies, have mostly focused on the Big Five personality traits [11,12], consisting of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. We add to the ongoing interdisciplinary research on the relationship between economic behavior and personality traits by conducting a battery of psychological and rationality tests, including the Big Five, and other relevant measurements, that have the potential to explain behavior in the public goods game. We will conclude with the conclusion and an outlook on future research

Survey

Public Goods Game

Results

Conclusions