Stabilizing the earth's climate is not a losing game: supporting evidence from public goods experiments

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Manfred MilinskiJochem Marotzke

Abstract

Maintaining the Earth's climate within habitable boundaries is probably the greatest "public goods game" played by humans. However, with >6 billion "players" taking part, the game seems to rule out individual altruistic behavior. Thus, climate protection is a problem of sustaining a public resource that everybody is free to overuse, a "tragedy of the commons" problem that emerges in many social dilemmas. We perform a previously undescribed type of public goods experiment with human subjects contributing to a public pool. In contrast to the standard protocol, here the common pool is not divided among the participants; instead, it is promised that the pool will be invested to encourage people to reduce their fossil fuel use. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that players can behave altruistically to maintain the Earth's climate given the right set of circumstances. We find a nonzero basic level of altruistic behavior, which is enhanced if the players are provided with expert information describing the state of knowledge in climate research. Furthermore, personal investments in climate protection increase substantially if players can invest publicly, thus gaining social reputation. This increase occurs because subjects reward ...Continue Reading

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Citations

Feb 22, 2008·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Manfred MilinskiJochem Marotzke
Mar 4, 2009·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Nancy R BuchanMargaret Foddy
May 7, 2009·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Joe Yuichiro WakanoChristoph Hauert
Feb 10, 2010·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Arne TraulsenManfred Milinski
Jun 11, 2011·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Francisco C Santos, Jorge M Pacheco
Sep 10, 2011·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Jobst HeitzigYong Zou
Oct 12, 2011·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Bettina Rockenbach, Manfred Milinski
Jul 31, 2008·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·Ralf D SommerfeldManfred Milinski
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