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. 2016 Dec 6:7:1909.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01909. eCollection 2016.

Expectations and Decisions in the Volunteer's Dilemma: Effects of Social Distance and Social Projection

Joachim I Krueger  1 , Johannes Ullrich  2 , Leonard J Chen  3
Affiliations

Expectations and Decisions in the Volunteer's Dilemma: Effects of Social Distance and Social Projection

Joachim I Krueger et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

In a Volunteer's Dilemma (VoD) one individual needs to bear a cost so that a public good can be provided. Expectations regarding what others will do play a critical role because they would ideally be negatively correlated with own decisions; yet, a social-projection heuristic generates positive correlations. In a series of 2-person-dilemma studies with over 1,000 participants, we find that expectations are indeed correlated with own choice, and that people tend to volunteer more than game-theoretic benchmarks and their own expectations would allow. We also find strong evidence for a social-distance heuristic, according to which a person's own probability to volunteer and the expectation that others will volunteer decrease as others become socially more remote. Experimentally induced expectations make opposite behavior more likely, but respondents underweight these expectations. As a result, there is a small but systematic effect of over-volunteering among psychologically close individuals.

Keywords: expectation; prosociality; rationality; social dilemma.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Payoff Matrix of the Volunteer’s Dilemma. Option A is to volunteer; Option B is to abstain.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Distributions of the probability of volunteering across social distance conditions in Study 2 (and 95% confidence intervals for the means). The lower limit of the confidence interval for the second lowest social distance condition (71.84) excludes the equilibrium value (71.43).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Distributions of the expected probability of volunteering across social distance conditions in Study 2 (and 95% confidence intervals for the means). For shortest social distance, the equilibrium value (75) is below the lower limit of the confidence interval (75.19).
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Distributions of volunteering across conditions in Study 3 (and 95% confidence intervals for the means).
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