Stage 1 Registered Report: Collective Decision-Making Under Extinction Risk

Humanity faces several risks, such as extreme climate change, that could lead to human extinction or societal collapse. However, there is little research on how people make decisions in the face of these risks. We introduce a paradigm for studying both individual and collective decision-making under extinction risk. Specifically, we compare responses in an individual task to a public goods game version of the task and assess the extent to which risk-taking is driven by cooperation failures versus limitations in individual-level understanding of risks. We additionally test interventions analogous to individual-level education versus institutional solutions to risk management: (1) improving understanding of the optimal strategies and (2) within-group coordination through voting. Our findings will have implications for why collectives often fail to manage extreme risks and the extent to which individual-level reasoning limitations versus cooperation problems play a role in neglecting societal problems.