Indian and German children’s cooperation in a public goods game

• In Event: Moral development across cultures: from judgment to behavior

Abstract

Cooperation is fundamental to the provisioning of public goods; yet, public goods are at risk from free-riders who benefit without paying the costs to maintain them. To study conditions that hinder or support cooperation in such social dilemmas, public goods games are widely used in experimental studies with adults, but they have been rarely employed with children (e.g., Vogelsang et al., 2014) – likely because they can be cognitively taxing.

Here we investigated children’s cooperation in a novel, child-friendly variant of a public goods game: a water threshold game. Children played the game in groups of three over eight rounds. At the start of each round, each child received a fixed water endowment and had to decide how much water to contribute to a common pool by releasing their water via a tap (within a given time limit). Children kept all water that they did not release into the common pool, collected it in individual tubes and later exchanged it for rewards. In addition, if the group reached a predetermined threshold in the common pool, every group member received additional water to collect. There was thus an incentive to contribute as little water as possible to the common pool to maximize own rewards. Since past work has shown that round-wise feedback about the outcomes of public goods game can influence cooperation (McClintock & Moskowitz, 1976; Hafenbrädl & Woike, 2020), we included two conditions (between-subject): children either received feedback about how much water every group member accumulated from round to round (group feedback) or only received feedback about their own water accumulation (individual feedback). Furthermore, to test the influence of cultural context on children’s cooperation (House et al., 2013, 2020), we conducted this study in schools in India and Germany. Children aged six to ten (Ni = 237) took part in the study in groups of three (Ng = 79 groups).

We found that the majority of groups cooperated in all eight rounds of the game, but that cooperation rates declined across rounds. Condition had an effect on cooperation rates in Indian children: cooperation in the group feedback declined consistently across rounds, but remained at high levels in the individual feedback condition. We found no condition effects for German children: there was a general decline in cooperation across both conditions. Analyses of children’s utterances during the game are currently ongoing to get insight into their cooperative strategies. This study shows that both situational (i.e., feedback) and larger contextual factors influence children’s cooperation in public good games. Our new paradigm offers children the opportunity to experience social dilemmas in a very enactive way, which opens up exciting avenues for future studies on cooperation and for developing educational tools.

Authors

• Patricia Kanngiesser, University of Plymouth
  Presenting Author

• Sebastian Hafenbrädl, IESE Business School
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jan Woike, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
  Non-Presenting Author