Interspecies cooperation by Barry Rogge. License: 
For those interested in some of my previous writings on intrinsic motivation, this survey paper by Simon Gächter may be of interest.
Key sentence:
[W]e find strong evidence that many people’s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is conditional on other people’s cooperation… Moreover, the fact that many people contribute more the more others contribute also speaks against pure altruism explanations, because they predict that people reduce their own contributions when informed that others already contribute to the public good.
Basically, the paper argues (and justifies through a survey of experimental evidence) that a majority of people are ‘conditional cooperators’ who cooperate in community projects (voting, paying taxes, charity work, etc.) if and only if other people cooperate. If they think others are ‘defecting’ (i.e., not cooperating) then they will stop cooperating as well.
The paper also has some more detailed observations that come out of the experimental work; among them that voluntary cooperation is fragile; group composition matters (i.e., groups with more conditional cooperators will be healthier); and that ‘belief management’ maters- i.e., if people think that they are in a group with more conditional cooperators, that group will be more robust. None of these will come as a huge surprise to anyone who has been involved with volunteer communities, but still interesting to see it experimentally confirmed.
I’ve always suspected that something like this is the case, and that it explains in part why the GPL is so successful, since it uses copyright to force cooperation and penalize defection, and (importantly) makes a clear public statement that that is the case, which serves a signaling function (everyone in the community knows these are the ground rules) and a filtering function (people who aren’t interested in collaborating don’t join as much as they join other groups.)
The paper is only 25 pages and fairly readable; if you’re interested in the dynamics of volunteerism I recommend it.
Those of you who aren’t into economists and their fancy ‘measurements’ may also want to look at this related early paper, which is somewhat dated (the concept of low and high authoritarians is sort of discredited at this point) but still possibly of interest in explaining some of the psychological mechanisms at work here.
(Came to this by way of this paper on tax evasion, which looks to have many other interesting citations that I should investigate once exams are done. Only Telecoms left…)
Very interesting paper. Note that the parallels aren’t just to volunteerism, but critical to corporate culture/all large group activities. I.e., a group effort (building a better mousetrap) will be far more successful when you’re following the tenants above of clearly communicating the success/activity of the individuals on the team, to reinforce that “above and beyond” activism. Very good stuff.
[…] points to an interesting paper on the fragility of intrinsic motivation in volunteer efforts. Luis […]
I find your use of “voluntary” to describe taxes fascinating. :)
I do understand your point, though.
Yeah, I probably should have been more explicit about that ;) Income taxes are in some sense voluntary, inasmuch as you can lie with some impunity about how much you made in many places. So a lot of the research in this area is about how much ‘voluntary’ compliance with tax law you get. (It is a lot more than the pure economists think it should be, hence the interest.)
The only problem I see with this picture is if someone says “walkies”
The same goes for conference attendance, party-going, and a whole host of activities. People decide whether something is worthy of their attention, in part, by seeing whether it is worthy of the attention of others.
Dave.
[…] that part of the question should be: Which license will lead to the widest possible use of my work? Conditional cooperation theory, the overall vitality and productivity of the community, gains in personal reputation — all […]
Thanks for the pointer. There’s also a study (one of those college psychology studies) that shows that people will punish someone they don’t think is cooperating enough or playing by social rules – even if it costs them to punish the offender.
I don’t see that as an example of “voluntary” income taxes. However, I do agree with the original point here: to the minimal extent people have any influence over their government’s taxation, the attitude often amounts to “I don’t want to pay them, but if I have to pay them then so do you”.
[…] that part of the question should be: Which license will lead to the widest possible use of my work? Conditional cooperation theory, the overall vitality and productivity of the community, gains in personal reputation — all […]
[…] that part of the question should be: Which license will lead to the widest possible use of my work? Conditional cooperation theory, the overall vitality and productivity of the community, gains in personal reputation — all […]
[…] suggest that a… papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ … 2012-4-15 – 百度快照 interesting research on ‘conditional cooperation’ Luis Vi… [W]e find strong evidence that many people’s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is […]
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