Stabilizing the earth's climate is not a losing game: supporting evidence from public goods experiments.

ABSTRACT: Maintaining the Earth's climate within habitable boundaries is probably the greatest "public goods game" played by humans. However, with >6 billion "players" taking part, the game seems to rule out individual altruistic behavior. Thus, climate protection is a problem of sustaining a public resource that everybody is free to overuse, a "tragedy of the commons" problem that emerges in many social dilemmas. We perform a previously undescribed type of public goods experiment with human subjects contributing to a public pool. In contrast to the standard protocol, here the common pool is not divided among the participants; instead, it is promised that the pool will be invested to encourage people to reduce their fossil fuel use. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that players can behave altru

SUBMITTER: Milinski M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1449634 | biostudies-literature | 2006 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature