What About the Others? Conditional Cooperation, Climate Change Perception and Ecological Actions

Climate challenge can be modelled as a multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma where ecological action – e.g., house retrofit, purchase of a lower emission car or adoption of sustainable life-styles – is costly in terms of economic resources, time, and effort. The prisoner’s dilemma structure of the game implies that, even though the social benefit is maximised (and every player would be better off) with everyone taking ecological actions, the strategy of not taking action pursued by all players is a Nash equilibrium assuming players have purely self-regarding preferences. In this paper we analyse how this ecological dilemma is affected by people’s perceptions. Using the European Social Survey, we focus on how urgent the climate threat is perceived by respondents and respondents beliefs about other countries’ actions. Theoretical predictions suggest that the first factor increases, while the second does not affect individual willingness to act ecologically. Our empirical findings however show that both factors positively affect willingness to act. We interpret the positive effect of country action on the respondent’s responsibility to act as conditional cooperation and show that the effect is weaker for higher levels of respondent’s social capital