Simulating irrational human behavior to prevent resource depletion

PLoS One. 2015 Mar 11;10(3):e0117612. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0117612. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

In a situation with a limited common resource, cooperation between individuals sharing the resource is essential. However, people often act upon self-interest in irrational ways that threaten the long-term survival of the whole group. A lack of sustainable or environmentally responsible behavior is often observed. In this study, we examine how the maximization of benefits principle works in a wider social interactive context of personality preferences in order to gain a more realistic insight into the evolution of cooperation. We used time perspective (TP), a concept reflecting individual differences in orientation towards past, present, or future, and relevant for making sustainable choices. We developed a personality-driven agent-based model that explores the role of personality in the outcomes of social dilemmas and includes multiple facets of diversity: (1) The agents have different behavior strategies: individual differences derived by applying cluster analysis to survey data from 22 countries (N = 10,940) and resulting in 7 cross-cultural profiles of TP; (2) The non-uniform distribution of the types of agents across countries; (3) The diverse interactions between the agents; and (4) diverse responses to those interactions in a well-mixed population. As one of the results, we introduced an index of overall cooperation for each of the 22 countries, which was validated against cultural, economic, and sustainability indicators (HDI, dimensions of national culture, and Environment Performance Index). It was associated with higher human development, higher individualism, lower power distance, and better environmental performance. The findings illustrate how individual differences in TP can be simulated to predict the ways people in different countries solve the personal vs. common gain dilemma in the global limited-resource situation. This interdisciplinary approach to social simulation can be adopted to explain the possible causes of global environmental issues and to predict their possible outcomes.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Cluster Analysis
  • Health Resources
  • Humans
  • Interpersonal Relations*
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Social Environment

Grants and funding

PH was partly supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2013R1A1A2011947), the Swedish Research Council (FK and PH), and the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (ENO). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.