The effect of trusting contexts in social dilemmas with collective and individual solutions

Abstract

Abstract Trust encourages members of communities to cooperate and provide public goods. However, the literature has yet to fully investigate how high and low trusting communities deal with collective action dilemmas with multiple solutions. The latter may raise the risk of coordination failure. Using a preregistered interactive experiment (N participants/groups = 371/70), we investigated people’s decisions when they have three possible choices in confronting a collective action dilemma: investing in an individual solution, investing in a collective solution, and free-riding. We manipulated the incentives for trusting and trustworthy interactions among community members, and, consistent with our expectations, we found that people in high-trust contexts invest more in collective solutions, compared to people in low-trust contexts. In the latter case, participants opted more for individual solutions, using resources less efficiently. However, we found no difference in the prevalence of free-riding in high- compared to low-trust contexts.