Advertising cooperative phenotype through costly signals facilitates collective action.

ABSTRACT: Around the world, people engage in practices that involve self-inflicted pain and apparently wasted resources. Researchers theorized that these practices help stabilize within-group cooperation by assorting individuals committed to collective action. While this proposition was previously studied using existing religious practices, we provide a controlled framework for an experimental investigation of various predictions derived from this theory. We recruited 372 university students in the Czech Republic who were randomly assigned into either a high-cost or low-cost condition and then chose to play a public goods game (PGG) either in a group that wastes money to signal commitment to high contributions in the game or to play in the group without such signals. We predicted that cooperators wo

SUBMITTER: Lang M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9128853 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature