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Eckel et al. Group-Level PLOS ONE 2016.pdf (817.66 kB)

Group-level selection increases cooperation in the public goods game

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posted on 2019-03-22, 14:13 authored by Catherine C. Eckel, Enrique Fatas, Sara Godoy, Rick K. Wilson
When groups compete for resources, some groups will be more successful than others, forcing out less successful groups. Group-level selection is the most extreme form of group competition, where the weaker group ceases to exist, becoming extinct. We implement group-level selection in a controlled laboratory experiment in order to study its impact on human cooperation. The experiment uses variations on the standard linear public goods game. Group-level selection operates through competition for survival: the least successful, lowest-earning groups become extinct, in the sense that they no longer are able to play the game. Additional control treatments include group comparison without extinction, and extinction of the least successful individuals across groups. We find that group-level extinction produces very high contributions to the provision of the public good, while group comparison alone or individual extinction fail to cause higher contributions. Our results provide stark evidence that group-level selection enhances within-group cooperation.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Economics

Published in

PLOS ONE

Volume

11

Issue

8

Pages

e0157840 - e0157840

Citation

ECKEL, C.C. ... et al, 2016. Group-level selection increases cooperation in the public goods game. PLOS ONE, 11 (8), e0157840.

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Publication date

2016

Notes

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

eISSN

1932-6203

Language

  • en

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