As governments look to ease general social-distancing measures and instead use more targeted strategies to stop coronavirus transmission, we face a social dilemma about the limits of cooperative behaviour...
Economists define a social dilemma as a situation where individual interests conflict with collective interests. More specifically, it is a situation in which there is a collective benefit from widespread cooperation but individuals have an incentive to “free ride” on the cooperation of others...That is very similar to the point I made last month in relation to the coronavirus lockdown:
These people aren't stupid. They are selfish, and acting in their own self-interest. Which is why we needed to go into full lockdown, and early, if we wanted to curtail the spread of coronavirus. Any voluntary or partial measures would simply be subject to the prisoners' dilemma.Lockdown or contact tracing, both are subject to the prisoners' dilemma. Volk then goes on to make a very interesting point in relation to real-world behaviour in prisoners' dilemma situations:
My research (with behavioural economist Christian Thöni of the University of Lausanne) confirms this.
Based on reviewing 17 social dilemma studies involving more than 7,000 individuals, we estimate no more than 3% of the population can be relied on to act cooperatively out of altruism – independent of what others do.
About 20% can be expected to act selfishly (i.e. free ride).
The majority – about 60% – are “conditional cooperators”. They cooperate if they believe others will cooperate.
Another 10% are so-called “triangle cooperators”. They behave similarly to conditional cooperators, but only to the point where they believe enough people are cooperating. They then reduce their cooperation.
The remainder – about 7% – behave unpredictably.The majority of people are 'conditional cooperators'. In the context of a lockdown, they'll obey the rules if they believe most other people are obeying the rules. In terms of contact tracing, they'll download an app and give it access to their location, if they believe that many others are also doing so. Volk makes the point that this has implications for how the lockdown, or contact tracing, is executed. He notes that:
...we must be assured others aren’t getting away with uncooperative behaviour. In other words, free riding must be swiftly and visible punished.
Without these conditions, an expectation of widespread cooperative behaviour is merely a hope.Punishment of the rule breakers during the lockdown appears to have been swift for some, but not all. And for the most part, New Zealanders appear to have been following the rules. However, it's hard to see how the government would enforce contact tracing - will we be fined for failing to keep a diary of all our daily contacts? It seems unlikely, which means that relying on conditional cooperation is going to be that much more difficult once the lockdown is lifted. That's why it's all the more important that the lockdown has been kept in place until the likelihood of further outbreaks has been reduced to near zero.
[Update: Read this follow-up post]
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