The collective-risk social dilemma and the prevention of simulated dangerous climate change

TLDR

The collective‑risk social dilemma occurs when individuals must sacrifice to reach a shared target, yet each faces personal loss if the target is missed, a situation that mirrors the global challenge of preventing dangerous climate change. The study introduces and simulates this dilemma by asking groups to achieve a fixed monetary target through successive contributions while knowing that failure would trigger a loss of all remaining funds with a certain probability. The authors carried out a controlled experiment in which groups made successive monetary contributions toward a fixed target, with the knowledge that missing the target would result in losing all remaining money according to a specified risk probability. The findings indicate that at high risk, roughly half of the groups succeed while the rest only marginally fail, whereas at lower risk groups generally fail, suggesting that highlighting the high likelihood of severe individual loss can help alleviate the dilemma.

Abstract

Will a group of people reach a collective target through individual contributions when everyone suffers individually if the target is missed? This “collective-risk social dilemma” exists in various social scenarios, the globally most challenging one being the prevention of dangerous climate change. Reaching the collective target requires individual sacrifice, with benefits to all but no guarantee that others will also contribute. It even seems tempting to contribute less and save money to induce others to contribute more, hence the dilemma and the risk of failure. Here, we introduce the collective-risk social dilemma and simulate it in a controlled experiment: Will a group of people reach a fixed target sum through successive monetary contributions, when they know they will lose all their remaining money with a certain probability if they fail to reach the target sum? We find that, under high risk of simulated dangerous climate change, half of the groups succeed in reaching the target sum, whereas the others only marginally fail. When the risk of loss is only as high as the necessary average investment or even lower, the groups generally fail to reach the target sum. We conclude that one possible strategy to relieve the collective-risk dilemma in high-risk situations is to convince people that failure to invest enough is very likely to cause grave financial loss to the individual. Our analysis describes the social window humankind has to prevent dangerous climate change.