Promoting cooperation by facilitating collective action control

It is widely acknowledged that human-beings can be motivated to cooperate. However, people often regulate cooperative behavior in terms of their own individual benefit, which causes cooperation to rapidly unravel when individual outcomes become less obvious. Here I propose that cooperation can be sustained when people are implicitly motivated to regulate their behavior towards the collective outcome. Building on recent advances into research on action-outcome learning and reward signal processing, I investigate how collective outcome representations can be created in memory, and causes people to remain more cooperative over time. Therefore, two experiments test a paradigm that simulates the process by which people learn to represent their behavior in terms of collective outcomes and to associate them with positive rewards. The first experiment explores whether this paradigm induces participants to contribute more to the common good in a one-shot public goods game even when they have enough time to deliberate about individual benefits. The second experiment tests the persistence of cooperation motivation in repeated public goods games by assessing the magnitude of the endgame effect. Taken together, this project combines recent insights in experimental psychology and economics to provide a new perspective on the emergence of human cooperation.