Yong Jose C, Choy Bryan K C
Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore.
Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 16;12:646892. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.646892. eCollection 2021.
Evolutionary game theory and public goods games offer an important framework to understand cooperation during pandemics. From this perspective, the COVID-19 situation can be conceptualized as a dilemma where people who neglect safety precautions act as free riders, because they get to enjoy the benefits of decreased health risk from others' compliance with policies despite not contributing to or even undermining public safety themselves. At the same time, humans appear to carry a suite of evolved psychological mechanisms aimed at curbing free riding in order to ensure the continued provision of public goods, which can be leveraged to develop more effective measures to promote compliance with regulations. We also highlight factors beyond free riding that reduce compliance rates, such as the emergence of conspiratorial thinking, which seriously undermine the effectiveness of measures to suppress free riding. Together, the current paper outlines the social dynamics that occur in public goods dilemmas involving the spread of infectious disease, highlights the utility and limits of evolutionary game-theoretic approaches for COVID-19 management, and suggests novel directions based on emerging challenges to cooperation.
进化博弈论和公共物品博弈为理解疫情期间的合作提供了一个重要框架。从这个角度来看，新冠疫情的情况可以被概念化为一种困境，即忽视安全预防措施的人充当搭便车者，因为尽管他们自己没有为公共安全做出贡献甚至破坏公共安全，但却能从他人遵守政策所降低的健康风险中受益。与此同时，人类似乎拥有一系列进化而来的心理机制，旨在遏制搭便车行为，以确保公共物品的持续供应，这些机制可被用来制定更有效的措施以促进对规定的遵守。我们还强调了除搭便车之外降低遵守率的因素，比如阴谋论思维的出现，这严重削弱了抑制搭便车措施的有效性。总之，本文概述了在涉及传染病传播的公共物品困境中发生的社会动态，强调了进化博弈论方法在新冠疫情管理中的效用和局限性，并基于合作面临的新挑战提出了新的方向。
