Individuals struggle to learn to sustain a common pool resource with conditional cooperators

Objective: Many of humanity’s biggest problems, such as managing our shared resources, are long-term collective action problems, where we must learn to cooperate with each other over time. However, research has found that participants play repeated resource dilemma games less sustainably over time. Improving our understanding of the cause of this is vital to inform policy advocating long-term cooperation. One hypothesis is that increasingly uncooperative behaviour is driven by a few uncooperative actors – if a few act unsustainably then other individuals reciprocate. Alternatively, given the environmental and social uncertainty often found in collective action problems, individuals might struggle to learn to act sustainably even if other uncooperative actors are removed. Here, we experimentally juxtapose these hypotheses. Method: Over two incentive-compatible experiments involving monetary payments (Experiments 1) and earned tickets to a raffle (Experiment 2), 351 participants played three consecutive resource dilemma games with three computer partners who collectively deployed a conditionally cooperative ('tit-for-tat') strategy (i.e. where one cooperates if others cooperate, but defects if others defect). The best strategy for the participant was to learn to sustain the resource, maximizing the long-term gains of each player. Results: By the third game, only 9.12% of participants used the resource sustainably. We demonstrate that this failure is likely due to difficulty learning the social and environmental dynamics at play. Conclusions: These results suggest that most struggle to learn to act sustainably even when interacting with partners who are willing to cooperate, illuminating a systemic difficulty with learning to act sustainably over time.