An Intercultural Examination of Cooperation in the Commons

We design a real-time, intercultural common pool resource experiment using participants from cultures that derive different benefits from a global public good (extraction vs. conservation of biodiversity resources) to analyze the effect of group affiliation on cooperative behavior. We also collect survey attitudes toward conservation to augment our experimental results. We find that when participants interact interculturally, extraction choices change significantly and that these changes can be attributed to an amplification of the relationship between attitudes and choices cued by the intercultural treatment.