What about the others? Conditional cooperation, climate change perception and ecological actions

Abstract

Climate challenge can be modelled as a multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma where ecological action – e.g., purchasing an electric car or adopting sustainable life-styles – is costly in terms of economic resources, time, and effort. The prisoner’s dilemma structure of the game implies that, even though the social benefit is maximized – and every player would be better off – with everyone taking ecological actions, the strategy profile with no player taking action is a Nash equilibrium, assuming players have purely self-regarding preferences. In this paper we analyse how this ecological dilemma is affected by people’s perceptions. Using the European Social Survey, we study how urgent the climate threat is perceived by respondents and their beliefs about other countries’ actions. Theoretical predictions suggest that the former increases, while the latter does not affect individual willingness to act ecologically when introducing heterogeneity about the effect of worry on intrinsic motivations. Our empirical findings however show that both factors positively affect willingness to act. We interpret the positive effect by arguing that intrinsic motivations are also affected by other people action and show that the effect is weaker as social capital increases.