Social Norms for Cooperation Under Collective Risk

Human activities have had substantial impact on the earth’s climate and ecosystems, and have the potential to trigger irreversible changes that could be catastrophic for the well-being of humanity.

Managing these global threats requires collective behavioral changes, wherein each individual’s action makes a difference.

This implies solving a collective dilemma: individuals should make efforts not to realize a personal gain but to avoid a collective loss. People do not want to individually afford this cost, and just rely on others’ investments if any. The key question is: How could people be individually motivated to cooperate to reduce the risk of a collective loss?

Norms4Cooperation posits that social norms can play a crucial role. Norms motivate people to engage in actions that are individually costly but socially beneficial.

Past studies have analyzed norms at a given point in time, thus ignoring their dynamic dimension and in particular their feedback loop with risk and behavior.

This represents a major knowledge gap: dealing with collective risk problems requires promoting a long-lasting—not one-shot—cooperation. The project has two main objectives.

The first is to develop a novel theory on social norms to explain how they emerge, spread, and change under collective risks; and to identify the conditions under which they can promote a solution to collective action problems under risk. The second is to understand how norms can be strengthened to be more effective solutions