Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, 14195, Berlin, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2016 Sep 15;6:33417. doi: 10.1038/srep33417.
Although cooperation is central to the organisation of many social systems, relatively little is known about cooperation in situations of collective emergency. When groups of people flee from a danger such as a burning building or a terrorist attack, the collective benefit of cooperation is important, but the cost of helping is high and the temptation to defect is strong. To explore the degree of cooperation in emergencies, we develop a new social game, the help-or-escape social dilemma. Under time and monetary pressure, players decide how much risk they are willing to take in order to help others. Results indicated that players took as much risk to help others during emergencies as they did under normal conditions. In both conditions, most players applied an egalitarian heuristic and helped others until their chance of success equalled that of the group. This strategy is less efficient during emergencies, however, because the increased time pressure results in fewer people helped. Furthermore, emergencies tend to amplify participants' initial tendency to cooperate, with prosocials becoming even more cooperative and individualists becoming even more selfish. Our framework offers new opportunities to study human cooperation and could help authorities to better manage crowd behaviours during mass emergencies.
尽管合作是许多社会系统组织的核心，但对于集体紧急情况下的合作相对知之甚少。当一群人逃离危险，如燃烧的建筑物或恐怖袭击时，合作的集体利益很重要，但帮助的代价很高，背叛的诱惑很强。为了探索紧急情况下的合作程度，我们开发了一种新的社交游戏，即帮助或逃避社交困境。在时间和金钱压力下，玩家决定他们愿意承担多大的风险来帮助他人。结果表明，玩家在紧急情况下帮助他人的风险与正常情况下相同。在这两种情况下，大多数玩家都采用了平等主义启发式策略，在成功机会等同于群体的情况下帮助他人。然而，这种策略在紧急情况下效率较低，因为增加的时间压力导致帮助的人数减少。此外，紧急情况往往会放大参与者最初的合作倾向，使亲社会者变得更加合作，而个人主义者变得更加自私。我们的框架为研究人类合作提供了新的机会，并可以帮助当局更好地管理大规模紧急情况下的人群行为。
