Abstract
We test how fast and slow thought processes affect cooperation for sustainability by manipulating time pressure in a dynamic common-pool resource experiment. Sustainable management of shared resources critically depends on decisions in the current period to leave enough stock so that future generations are able to draw on the remaining limited natural resources. An intertemporal common-pool resource game represents a typical dynamic for social dilemmas involving natural resources. Using one such game, we analyse decisions throughout time. We find that people in this context deplete the common resource to a greater extent under time pressure, which leads to greater likelihood of stock collapse. Preventing resource collapse while managing natural resources requires actively creating decision environments that facilitate the cognitive capacity needed to support sustainable cooperation. Using experimental behavioural methods, this study shows that time pressure leads to worse decisions over the sustainable management of collectively held natural resources.
Highlights
We test how fast and slow thought processes affect cooperation for sustainability by manipulating time pressure in a dynamic common pool resource experiment
The results suggest that time pressure significantly increases the failure rate of the group account in the intertemporal common pool resource (CPR)
We find in an intertemporal social dilemma game, participants with cognitive scarcities have a propensity to extract more from a shared resource stock
Summary
Our results indicate one domain in which intuitive judgment under limited cognitive resources leads to more myopic behaviour, to the detriment of the individual and group welfare. We find in an intertemporal social dilemma game, participants with cognitive scarcities have a propensity to extract more from a shared resource stock This result provides empirical evidence of when individuals are deliberatively cooperative, which has previously drawn almost exclusively on static social dilemma experiments [5,27,28]. Since many common pool resource situations are intertemporal in nature, our results are more germane to these contexts than those of traditional one-shot games [27,28]. The first possibility is that people make more mistakes when confronted with a difficult problem under time pressure [34, 35] Such stochastic mistakes may increase the variance in play from participants and the group account may be inadvertently exhausted. To evaluate the variation in extraction behaviour we compare the absolute value of the deviation of extraction decisions between rounds (
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