The Effects of the Social Value Orientation and Feedback Formats on Decision Behavior in the Dynamic Public Goods Dilemma

HE Li-Zhou; PAN Ran; CHE Hong-Sheng

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (2) : 446-452.

The Effects of the Social Value Orientation and Feedback Formats on Decision Behavior in the Dynamic Public Goods Dilemma

Li-Zhou HE¹,²,Ran BIANHong-Sheng CHE⁴

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Abstract

A public good (PG) is a commodity or service made available to all members of a group, and its provision depends on the voluntary contribution of its members. Once provided, all members in the group can enjoy the benefits of the PG, regardless of whether they contributed or not. Hence, there is a temptation to “free-ride” in the hope that others will contribute. Considered the influence of both individual factors and situational factors, this study focuses on social value orientation and feedback formats. Specifically, we hypothesized that the social value orientation and feedback formats both had significantly influence on participants’ cooperative behavior and that there would be significant interaction between the two variables. In this study, a public good dilemma (PGD) experiment consisted of 20 rounds of PGD games was conducted to test the hypotheses with a 3 (feedback formats)×2(social value orientation) between-subjects design, where participants needed to make decisions about whether to put their “money” in the group account or their individual accounts each round. The results show: (1) The main effect of social value orientation is significant on the decision behavior of the decision maker in repeated public goods dilemma games. Compared with non-cooperative people, cooperative people are much more inclined to cooperate. (2) The main effect of feedback formats is not significant. (3) The interaction between social value orientation and feedback formats is significant. The cooperation behavior of non-cooperative people is significantly affected by feedback formats, but cooperative people behave consistently no matter what format of feedback they receive. (4) Compared with the non-feedback condition, participants under group feedback condition are more likely to cooperate, while participants under individual feedback condition are inclined to cooperate less. The dynamic adaptive changes resulted from feedback, however, make the relationship of the factors in the experiments more complicated.

Key words

Social dilemma / Public goods dilemma / Social value orientation / Feedback / Cooperation behavior

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Li-Zhou HE Ran BIAN Hong-Sheng CHE. The Effects of the Social Value Orientation and Feedback Formats on Decision Behavior in the Dynamic Public Goods Dilemma[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2013, 36(2): 446-452

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