AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF INDIVIDUAL VS. GROUP INTEREST

Societal-level problems often result from many individuals acting in their own self-interest rather than in the interest of the group. This paper describes an experimental game based on continued degradation of the central resource which determines each player's winnings; players elect to allow, to not allow, or to reverse the degradation by spending from their respective scores. The game was begun with either a "pure" or half-degraded central resource and was played with subjects winning amounts based on their personal scores or on the group's combined score. Results under all conditions are examined. The recent United Nations conference brought thousands of people to Stockholm to discuss and debate environmental problems and possible solutions. A continually recurring theme at conferences of this kind is that modern man is being driven to his own destruction by runaway technology; if the beast can be harnessed, man can be saved. This argument, while perhaps appealing in an age of high science, is somewhat superficial. Consider the problem formulated nearly 150 years ago and labeled by Hardin (1968) as "the tragedy of the commons". In this scenario the rational herdsmen each added additional animals to his herd which shared the common pasture. Each herdsman believed that the gain to himself by grazing another cow was far greater than the marginal decline in pasture available to all of the animals. The tragedy, of course, was that any such gain was very short-lived as each herdsman made the same decision, ultimately destroying the resource on which all depended. Air pollution, traffic congestion, and power blackouts can be viewed as the modern-day equivalents of the tragedy of the commons. The individual acts in his own interest with seemingly little awareness or concern of the social costs incurred by his action. For as Kelley and Grzelak (1972) note, "it is largely in their collective consequences that the competitive actions of a large number of persons have marked detrimental implications for the general welfare". It is of course difficult (if not impossible) to describe and measure the