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Category: Project

Description: When a community faces a collective risk, some individuals may seek to first protect themselves before contributing to efforts to protect the wider community. In the context of global warming, for example, governments may put climate change adaptation before mitigation. The issue with this private approach is that it tends to be less economically efficient than solving shared problems as a group, while also undermining codependency and cooperation within the community. In this study we present participants with a collective risk problem in which they face the prospect of losing their endowment. They can avoid this outcome by solving the problem privately or as a group. We investigate whether individuals who are made richer or poorer (i.e., better able to protect themselves privately) as a result of merit or luck are more likely to solve the problem privately rather than as a group. We test our hypotheses with samples of university students based in the UK, Egypt, France, Japan, Italy, Germany, and the US.