The Social Dilemma of Self-Reliance

To tackle global challenges like climate change or pandemics, large-scale cooperation is needed.

Cooperation and its maintenance are traditionally seen as a conflict between pro-sociality (dedicating resources towards public goods) and free-riding (taking advantage of the cooperation of others).

Yet, when faced with shared problems that require cooperation, individuals may also have the ability to solve them individually.

Societies often, and increasingly so, provide individuals with means to become independent of public goods through, e.g., private healthcare or retirement planning. How such opportunities of self-reliance influence cooperation and group-living is largely unknown.

SELFRELIANCE fills this void and elucidates the functional and dysfunctional effects of (increasing opportunities for) self-reliance.

Conceptualizing cooperation as a conflict between 'communalism' and 'individualism' reveals a heretofore neglected social dilemma and shows (1) how self-reliance changes the interdependence structure of groups, (2) how such changes influence the ability to solve shared problems, (3) affect norms of trust and responsibility, and (4) give rise to institutions able to solve the dilemma between independence and collective action.

To this end, SELFRELIANCE is built on a new collective action model.

Using this model as the theoretical bedrock, the strengths of three methodological approaches are combined: laboratory experiments (WP1/1PhD), a large-scale cross-cultural study (WP2/1Postdoc), and computer simulations (WP3/1PhD).

In combination, this approach will reveal how self-reliance changes the normative foundation of groups, how cross-cultural differences in interdependence influence cooperation around the globe, and the co-evolution of self-reliance, institutions, and collective action.

Results will advance our theoretical understanding of human cooperation and inform policies for promoting cooperation towards shared socio-economic problems across societies.