Social Values and Cooperative Response to a Simulated Resource Conservation Crisis

The present study examines the relationship between individuals’ social motives or values and their level of cooperation during a simulated resource conservation crisis. Prior to the resource task, a decomposed game procedure was used to classify subjects as cooperatively or noncooperatively oriented. Subjects, in groups of six, were led to believe they shared access to a replenishing resource pool via a system of linked computer terminals. Across a series of trials, subjects had to choose between maximizing their own short-term gain and exercising personal restraint to preserve the collective resource. False feedback about the group’s use of the resource and the rate at which it replenished itself was varied to indicate either that the resource was being sustained or that collective overuse was rapidly depleting it. As predicted, cooperatively oriented individuals responded to resource depletion with greater self-restraint than did those classified as noncooperators. Analysis of pretrial and posttrial data indicate that social values were also related to individuals’ expectations about the task and perceptions of others.