Social dynamics interfere with learning how to manage resources

Managing our natural resources often involves learning about the dynamics of the resource while society simultaneously harvests from the resource. However, little is known about how society’s actions affect our ability to learn about a vulnerable resource. Here, we investigate how experience managing a shared resource impacts one’s ability to learn about the underlying dynamics of a resource. We hypothesised that participants' capacity to learn from experience would depend on the behaviour of other group members. 320 participants played a four-player resource management game with computer partners who acted sustainably, unsustainably, or conditionally cooperatively. Participants’ ability to learn the underlying resource dynamics was then assessed in a subsequent single-player resource management game, where the social dynamics were removed and the participants’ understanding of the resource could be evaluated in isolation. Compared to controls with no prior experience, performance on the single-player game improved after experience with sustainable and unsustainable partners, but not after experience with conditionally cooperative partners. However, experience with a single-player game (rather than a group game) outperformed all other experimental conditions; thus individual experience improved performance more than experience in any group dynamic tested. These findings suggest that the presence of others generally hinders learning in resource management contexts, though how much this learning is hindered depends on the behaviour of others.