Cooperation underlies the ability of groups to realize collective benefits (e.g., creation of public goods). Yet, cooperation can be difficult to achieve when people face situations with conflicting interests between what is best for individuals versus the collective (i.e., social dilemmas). To address this challenge, groups can implement rules about structural changes in a situation. But what institutional rules can best facilitate cooperation? Theoretically, rules can be made to affect structural features of a social dilemma, such as the possible actions, outcomes, and people involved. We derived 13 preregistered hypotheses from existing work and collected 6 decades of empirical research to test how nine structural features influence cooperation within prisoner's dilemmas and public goods dilemmas. We do this by meta-analyzing mean levels of cooperation across studies (Study 1, k = 2,340, N = 229,528), and also examining how manipulations of these structural features in social dilemmas affect cooperation within studies (Study 2, k = 909). Results indicated that lower conflict of interests was associated with higher cooperation and that (a) the implementation of sanctions (i.e., reward and punishment of behaviors) and (b) allowing for communication most strongly enhanced cooperation. However, we found inconsistent support for the hypotheses that group size and matching design affect cooperation. Other structural features (e.g., symmetry of dilemmas, sequential decision making, payment) were not associated with cooperation. Overall, these findings inform institutions that can (or not) facilitate cooperation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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制度与合作：社会困境中结构特征的荟萃分析。


合作是群体实现集体利益（例如，创造公共产品）的能力的基础。然而，当人们面临对个人和集体最好的利益冲突（即社会困境）之间存在利益冲突的情况时，合作可能很难实现。为了应对这一挑战，团体可以在某种情况下实施有关结构性变化的规则。但是，哪些制度规则最能促进合作呢？从理论上讲，可以制定规则来影响社会困境的结构特征，例如可能的行动、结果和所涉及的人员。我们从现有工作中得出了 13 个预先注册的假设，并收集了 6 年的实证研究，以检验 9 个结构特征如何影响囚犯困境和公共产品困境中的合作。我们通过荟萃分析研究之间的平均合作水平（研究 1，k = 2,340，N = 229,528），并研究在社会困境中操纵这些结构特征如何影响研究内的合作（研究 2，k = 909）。结果表明，较低的利益冲突与较高的合作相关，并且 （a） 制裁的实施（即对行为的奖励和惩罚）和 （b） 允许沟通最强烈地增强了合作。然而，我们发现对群体规模和匹配设计影响合作的假设的支持不一致。其他结构特征 （例如，困境的对称性、顺序决策、付款） 与合作无关。总体而言，这些发现为能够（或不能）促进合作的机构提供了信息。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。