Whether talking about the office kitchen, hiking trails or ratings on Yelp, there are always people who put in effort to leave those spaces better. There are also those who contribute nothing to that public good.
New research using large-scale online experiments suggests that rewarding people to contribute to a virtual public good, such as a simulated online rating for a ferry system, increased the accuracy of the ratings and improved the overall quality of that resource.
The multidisciplinary team, including researchers from the University of California, Davis; Hunter College, College of New York; the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics; and Princeton University tested ideas about collective action in a simulation incorporating more than 500 people worldwide. Team expertise included communication science, sociology, computer science, psychology and animal behavior.
The study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“When you have a collective action problem, you either want to prevent a bad thing from happening or you want to harness all this energy to make a good thing happen,” said Seth Frey, an assistant professor of communication at UC Davis and co-author of the paper. Frey studies collective action, or the science of creating systems that can maintain shared resources.
2023-11-09 03:41:13
Original from phys.org