=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1627/paper1
|storemode=property
|title=Choice of the Group Increases Intra-Cooperation
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1627/paper1.pdf
|volume=Vol-1627
|authors=Tatiana Babkina,Mikhail Myagkov,Evgeniya Lukinova,Anastasiya Peshkovskaya,Olga Menshikova,Elliot Berkman
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/cla/BabkinaMLPMB16
}}
==Choice of the Group Increases Intra-Cooperation==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1627/paper1.pdf
Choice of the Group Increases Intra-Cooperation
Tatiana Babkina1 , Mikhail Myagkov2 , Evgeniya Lukinova3 , Anastasiya
Peshkovskaya4 , Olga Menshikova5 , and Elliot T. Berkman6
1
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Novaya, d.100, Karakorum Building,
4th floor, Skolkovo, 143025, Russian Federation,
t.babkina@skoltech.ru,
2
Department of Political Science, University of Oregon, 1585 E. 13th Avenue,
Eugene, Oregon, 97403, United States
3
New York University Shanghai, 1555 Century Ave, Pudong, Shanghai, China
200122
4
Laboratory of Experimental Methods in Cognitive and Social Sciences, Tomsk
State University, 36, Lenina Avenue, Tomsk, 634050, Russian Federation
5
Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration
(RANEPA), Prospect Vernadskogo, 82, Moscow, 119571, Russian Federation
6
Department of Psychology and Center for Translational Neuroscience, University of
Oregon, 1227 University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, 97403, United States
Abstract. This research investigates how variation in sociality, or the
degree to which one feels belonging to a group, affects the propensity
for participation in collective action. By bringing together rich models of
social behavior from social psychology with decision modeling techniques
from economics, these mechanisms can ultimately foster cooperation in
human societies. While variation in the level of sociality surely exists
across groups, little is known about whether and how it changes behav-
ior in the context of various economic games. Specifically, we found some
socialization task makes minimal group members behavior resemble that
of an established group. Consistent with social identity theory, we dis-
covered that inducing this type of minimal sociality among participants
who were previously unfamiliar with each other increased social identity,
and sustained cooperation rates in the newly formed groups to the point
that they were comparable to those in the already established groups.
Our results demonstrate that there are relatively simple ways for indi-
viduals in a group to agree about appropriate social behavior, delineate
new shared norms and identities.
Keywords: collective action, group formation, cooperation
1 Introduction
Humans as “social animals” like to be around each other. More than mere lik-
ing, it has been proposed that social affiliation, specifically feeling a sense of
belonging in a social group, is a basic human need [4]. Given the fundamen-
tal importance of social belongingness to survival, it follows that humans have
14 Tatiana Babkina et al.
evolved specialized affective and cognitive tendencies related to group member-
ship. This can be seen both in the extreme suffering caused by social isolation
and loneliness and also in the feelings of affiliation and acts of commitment as-
sociated with group membership. The focus of our program of research is on
the influence of group membership on cognitive processes and their attendant
behavioral outcomes such as economic decisions.
Definition 1. Sociality, even in a very minimal form, serves as a natural mech-
anism to promote sustainable cooperation among group members.
Definition 2. Sociality, or social utility, is defined here as an additional com-
ponent of the subjective utility function that reflects the value of contributing to
group outcomes and cohesion, and is derived at least in part from a sense of
social identity.
A recent study from our group found that socialization in the form of brief group-
based social interactions prior to a Prisoners Dilemma or Ultimatum Game
added social utility to choices that punished group members who did not co-
operate (e.g., free-riders), but not to choices that punished the group as a whole
[5]. A current research goal is to find an effective mechanism of sociality induc-
tion that allows members of a minimal group to mimic the economic behavior
of those from the established group.
Our laboratory model of sociality [13] combines the classic “minimal group”
paradigm from social psychology [20] with group-based manipulations that in-
duce a sense of social connectedness in humans to allow us to measure the degree
of utility conferred by sociality that otherwise has no economic utility. Testing
this model would enable social psychology and economics to make a connection,
such that the former can represent group membership in terms of a value cal-
culation and the latter can inform its decision making models with empirical
insights into the factors that guide human behavior in a social environment.
Traditional economic analysis generally makes the simplifying assumption that
people are exclusively utility-maximizing and self-regarding. However, the break-
down point of economic models is in explaining behaviors that are altruistic, fair
and trusting [11]. Such behaviors are inseparably linked with social context.
Factors such as group membership, social identity and affiliation motives induce
prosocial behaviors through additional utility that is rarely included in formal
models of economic behavior. There are many ways of manipulating sociality
for the purpose of testing its effect on economic decisions. To our knowledge, a
formal typology of the various kinds of sociality is not currently available, even
though such a typology would be quite useful for the present line of research and
related efforts. A key contribution of this paper is to use various manipulations
of sociality, to compare their effects on human choice behavior, and select an
effective one that boosts sociality of strangers in a group to the level of behav-
ior seen within established groups. Comparing these manipulations will have a
broad impact on the field because researchers are in need of procedures that can
reliably manipulate sociality. Individuals that identify with certain social groups
Choice of the Group Increases Intra-Cooperation 15
are often involved in power struggles in that they try to establish, change, or de-
fend a power structure. Sociality in the minimal form is a way to make struggles
and protests lead to pro-social outcomes.
2 Economic Decisions in a Group Context
Prosocial behaviors are innate to humans because our survival individually and
as a species depends on collective action and achievement of common goals [1, 6].
Since [8] researchers argued that distinctive features of human sociality resulted
from selection among individuals who live in groups. Voluntary social integra-
tion of people into groups occur for the reasons of need for affiliation (inclusion)
[4], need for power dependence (control), need for intimacy (affection) [18], need
for achievement [14], proximity in distance and in social self (attachment), and
making sense of the world (principle of “social proof” to validate your own ex-
isting beliefs).
Groups, in turn, are complex adaptive systems, they are “entities that emerge
from the purposive, interdependent actions of individuals” [15]. In fact, observa-
tion of naturally occurring groups in public places reveal that dyads are common
and few groups contain more than five or six people [7, 16], this justifies our deci-
sion to divide participants in groups of six people. In small self-organized groups
norms emerge that guide coordinated action, including cooperation [2, 4]. Pre-
vious evidence suggests that endogenously formed groups, unlike exogenously
formed alliances, lead to the creation of social ties and trust that favorably af-
fect cooperation in economic games such as the Prisoners Dilemma (PD; [10, 21].
Moreover, autonomy in group membership can transform competition of individ-
ual outcomes to be a competition of generosity and other prosocial traits. It has
been proposed that choosing a group in animal and human societies can reflect
your willingness to follow the leaders of a group; in this case, group members
will endorse the norms of the leader and the leader will influence the members
to achieve efficacy in a task performance. We compared the economic behavior
of players under variations of sociality in an experimental setting. Specifically,
our central comparison is between the cooperative behavior of people in groups
formed around minimal social characteristics and people in already-established
groups that were based on relatively longstanding and salient identity features.
3 Current Study
This paper reports on the results of a series of laboratory experiments that
systematically varied the type of sociality induction and measured economic de-
cisions as participants interacted anonymously with others in their in-group or
in an out-group. In particular, experiments with different social group composi-
tion were considered: participants in the Assigned condition (number of subjects:
N =108) were randomly assigned to a group to socialize and play with; partici-
pants in the Established condition (number of subjects: N =60) were invited as
16 Tatiana Babkina et al.
a part of established group (group formed long before the experiment) to so-
cialize and play with; participants in the Choice condition (number of subjects:
N =108) were randomly assigned to choose a group with whom they socialized
and played.
In our previous study [5], we coupled a classic “minimal group” paradigm from
social psychology with group interaction-based manipulations to induce a sense
of social connectedness in our participants. This experiment allowed us to mea-
sure the degree of utility conferred by sociality that otherwise has no economic
utility. We found that socialization, or group interactions immediately prior to
the focal economic games, created and sustained fairness during the economic
games even though this social interaction was logically irrelevant to the games.
In this study, we changed the socialization pattern and altered a second dimen-
sion of sociality, i.e. the manner in which the group was assembled. By making
only one change in our socialization task we kept sociality in a relatively minimal
form: strangers are allowed to interact for 15 mins and form groups endogenously.
Our desire is to find a group-based manipulation that causes economic decisions
made under minimal sociality resemble those of established and real life cultural
groups under strong sociality.
4 Materials and Methods
The study procedures involving human participants were approved by the Skolkovo
Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) Human Subjects Committee.
Written informed consents were obtained from participants. Experimental data
are readily available on Dropbox.7
Subjects (total number of subjects: N = 276, 174 males) for this set of experi-
ments were recruited from the students at the Moscow Institute of Physics and
Technology (MIPT). The MIPT Experimental Economics laboratory was used
to carry out all experiments. Each experiment (total number of experiments:
23) consisted of a different set of 12 students, pre-selected before the experi-
ment to be unfamiliar with one another (except for the Established condition).
We acknowledge that some of the pre-selected students might know each other,
however, we tried to avoid it by selecting distant year students from different
departments, distinct science orientation within one department (linked to a par-
ticular research institution) and by checking their Vkontakte.ru (biggest Russian
social network) profile and friend circles. In the Established condition we pur-
posefully invited groups of 6 people that know each other and share an affiliation
of some sport club or a hobby. In order to carry out experiments in this condi-
tion an advertisement recruiting participants in Vkontakte specifically requested
established groups of 6 formed around hobby or sport to sign up. In particular,
one of the group members was asked to enter 6 names of participants including
himself and the meaningful condition around which the group was formed.
Each experiment lasted a bit longer than 1 hour and was divided into 3 consec-
7
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7646503/ChoosingYourTeammatesdata.zip
Choice of the Group Increases Intra-Cooperation 17
utive phases (Fig.1) that occurred in a fixed order.
Fig. 1. Phases of the experiment depending on types of the groups.
1. Anonymous Game phase, where participants played the two-person one-
shot Prisoners Dilemma (PD) (the parametres of the PD game are shown in
Fig.2). Participants were randomly paired with an anonymous partner each pe-
riod of the game (economists refer to this as one-shot games) and alternated
roles on subsequent trials between column chooser and row chooser for the PD
for the dynamic of the experiment. This game phase is repeated for 15 periods,
though this number was not known to participants at the start of the phase.
Each period participants were given information only about their profit for that
period.
2. Socialization (10-15 minutes). Experiments were randomly assigned to their
sociality manipulation condition. Critically, participants were socialized with ei-
ther assigned others (i.e., chosen by the experimenter) or chosen others (i.e.,
chosen by the participants). For the Established condition participants were
pre-selected to be familiar with each other in a meaningful social group of 6.
Assigned: All 12 participants completed the Sociality induction, an icebreaker
called “Snowball”: First participant said his/her name and an adjective that
started from the same letter, second subject repeated first subjects name and
adjective and said his/her own name and adjective, and so on till the last par-
ticipant said all names and adjectives in order. Then, in a reverse order each
participant shared his/her life facts, including major, year, and hobby. Par-
ticipants formed a circle during this task. Finally, participants were randomly
divided into two groups of 6 and each group completed the task of identifying
18 Tatiana Babkina et al.
Fig. 2. Economic games to be played against anonymous partners from the socialized
and non-socialized groups. Participants will be row and column chooser in the Prisoners
Dilemma (left), and the offerer and responder in the Ultimatum Game (right).
five characteristics that everyone in their group shares, and then selected one of
those characteristics as their groups name. The group then provided to the exper-
imenter a list with the characteristics written down and the groups name circled.
Established: Participants in this condition completed a sociality “reminder”
whereby they were divided into established groups that matched pre-selected
meaningful social groups (e.g., members of aerobics team, dorm neighbors, foot-
ball team fans, etc.) of 6 people, named their group, and in 3 mins shared the
group name with the experimenter.
Choice: All 12 subjects participated in the same Sociality induction from
Assigned condition, an icebreaker in which the participants in a sequence told
their names and adjectives that started from the same letter and in a reverse
order shared their life facts. After that participants were asked to raise their
hands if they volunteer to be a leader. Participants did not know from instruc-
tions what responsibilities of a leader will entail. The first two participants with
hands raised automatically become group leaders (rules of becoming a leader
and rules of group formation are given in the Supporting Information). Players
that were not leaders were asked to decide which leader they want to join on
a piece of paper. The participants get to choose a group, which easily satisfies
the minimal group requirement [19] and social identity theory [20]. Finally, as
in Assigned condition each group selected their groups name based on identified
Choice of the Group Increases Intra-Cooperation 19
common characteristics and passed it to the experimenter.
3. Socialized Game phase, where participants played the PD with a ran-
dom human partner from their socialized group of 6. Their anonymous partner
changed each round of the game, making it a one-shot game. The participants
switched roles on alternating trials: column chooser and row chooser for PD.
There was total of 20 periods in this game phase. Number of periods was not
known to participants. Each period participants were given information only
about their profit for that period.
Our main hypothesis is that participants will behave more cooperatively, and do
so in a more sustained way, in the Choice condition compared to the Assigned
condition. This is due to the group-based social factors suggested by evolutionary
and social psychologists (e.g., autonomy) that alter the expected patterns of eco-
nomic behavior based solely on a motive to maximize ones own immediate utility.
The Established condition was included as a solid test of the strength of this
manipulation. This condition allowed us to compare cooperation rates among
strangers who underwent a sociality induction in the laboratory (Assigned and
Choice conditions) to those of people in established groups who underwent a
similar procedure in the field.
5 Results
Result 1. Various types of socialization activate sociality and facilitate
collective action.
Across all variations of sociality a cooperative equilibrium was created. Fig.
3 portrays the average mean cooperation rate across three variations of so-
ciality. In each of the sociality manipulations, displayed on the x-axis, there
was an increase in the cooperation rate from the Anonymous Game phase (the
first stage of each experiment), when subjects played anonymously with other
people who were strangers, to the Socialized Game phase (the third stage of
each experiment), when the same subjects played anonymously with people who
were part of the subjects socialized group. There was a significant elevation
of group cooperation rates from the game phase before socialization to the
game phase after socialization (Anonymous M = 0.21, SD = 0.06, Socialized
M = 0.53, SD = 0.12; t(20) = −5.49, p < .05; Table 1). Each data point is the
rate of cooperation (proportion of cooperative choices) averaged across all sub-
jects and all periods within Anonymous and Socialized games in one experiment.
Result 2. Stability of cooperation in the newly formed groups with
socialization is comparable to that in the established groups.
Fig. 4 shows the sustainability of cooperation across sociality manipulations
in Socialized game phase. The closer the blue bar height (mean cooperation for
the first 5 periods) is to the red bar height (mean cooperation for the last 5
periods), the more sustainability there is. It is apparent that there is an increase
20 Tatiana Babkina et al.
Fig. 3. Cooperation level of socialized group members, Socialized Game, (red) and
non-socialized group members, Anonymous Game, (blue) across three types of sociality
manipulations. Each bar represents the mean of the cooperation rate for all experiments
of a certain condition. Error bars are SE.
from early to late cooperation in the Established group, there is only some de-
cline in the Choice group, and there is a stark discrepancy between the two
time intervals in the Assigned group. The average cooperation rates in the So-
cialized game phase significantly declined in the Assigned group (proportion of
cooperative choices for the first 5 periods M = .46, SD = 0.41; last 5 periods
M = 0.26, SD = 0.35; t(47) = 3.37, p < .01; see Table 1), whereas there is no
significant decline for Choice socialization (average cooperation for the first 5
periods M = .59, SD = 0.42; last 5 periods M = 0.53, SD = 0.41; t(59) = 1.53,
p = 0.13; see Table 1). Taking into consideration quartile of experiment dura-
tion (4 on 5 periods), there are significant main effects of condition as well as a
Table 1. Cooperation rates
Types Assigned Established Choice
Anonymous Game 22% 20% 20%
Socialized Game 36% 69% 54%
Socialized Game (first 5 periods) 46% 64% 59%
Socialized Game (last 5 periods) 26% 72% 53%
Choice of the Group Increases Intra-Cooperation 21
condition-by-time interaction on cooperation, but not of time period, (two-way
factorial ANOVA; D.V.: proportion of cooperative choices averaged across all
subjects within one experiment; condition: F (2, 59) = 107.13, p < .01; quartile:
F (3, 59) = 1.81, p = 0.16; condition on time: F (6, 59) = 3.21, p < .01).
Fig. 4. Cooperation level during first five periods of the Socialized Game Phase (blue)
and the last five periods of the Socialized Game Phase (red) across three types of
sociality manipulations. Each bar represents the mean rate of cooperation for 5 periods
for all experiments of a certain condition. Error bars are SE.
6 Discussion
A persistent and curious feature of human behavior in social environments is
“prosocial” actions such as fairness, cooperation, and the provision of collective
good even at the cost of individual gain. Thus, identifying the mechanisms of
collective action in different circumstances is a major puzzle for social science.
This paper integrates theories and decision models from economics, social psy-
chology, and neighboring fields, makes them comprehensible for a broad general
science audience, and provides insight into the mechanisms of human sociality
in the context of during economic choice.
In this paper, we tested predictions from social psychological theory that sug-
gested ways to increase cooperation. In doing so, we identified a promising way to
22 Tatiana Babkina et al.
increase a sense of sociality in a group of relative strangers. We compared differ-
ent types of sociality manipulations and concluded that each of them facilitated
collective action through increasing cooperation among individuals. Through one
of the minimal sociality manipulations, i.e. voluntary group choice, group mem-
bers, who were strangers before experiment, were able to achieve and sustain
cooperation comparable to that of the meaningful social groups.
Our research team started with the idea that individual will economically value
the outcomes of others in a group to a greater extent when that individual
strongly identifies with the group. This idea has been extensively developed by
psychologists and suggest that prosocial behaviors are driven not by miscalcu-
lations of utility but instead by social factors (which are not mutually exclusive
with each other) such as the salience of social identity, the presence of in-group
favoritism and group norms, and evolutionary adaptations to foster group suc-
cess. Economists have only recently begun to incorporate these insights from
psychology into their models and studies of decision-making and choice, but at
this point several groups are converging on the parsimonious explanation that
aspects of the social world impart subjective utility to individual choices that
favor group outcomes. Of course, the links between minimal group, social iden-
tity, and expected utility theories on the one hand, and the recent developments
in the life sciences and neuro disciplines on the other are still tenuous at best.
In this paper we have obtained strong evidence to support the idea that “social-
ity,” or an individuals sense of belonging and connectedness to a group, holds
positive subjective utility and thereby can influence economic decisions when
they take place in a social context. We conclude that choosing ones group and
interacting with your group for a small period of time achieves the level of in-
group favoritism of already established groups and believe that our results will
encourage other researchers to explore this potentially very profitable domain.
Acknowledgements. We thank Rinat Yaminov for writing the programming
code for experiments, Aleksander Chaban for technical help in conducting ex-
periments at MIPT, and Ivan Menshikov for useful suggestions in data analysis.
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