Suckers or Saviours? "The role of consistent contributors in social dilemmas and problems of collective action"

The ENV Research Seminar Committee invites you to hear this week’s speaker, Dr. Mark Weber:

All groups, movements and organizations face a fundamental problem: They need cooperation but their members have incentives to free ride. Empirical research on this problem has often been discouraging, and economic models suggest that solutions are unlikely or unstable. In contrast, I will present a model and a series of studies that show that an unwaveringly consistent contributor can effectively catalyze cooperation in social dilemmas. The studies indicate that consistent contributors occur naturally, and their presence in a group causes others to contribute more and cooperate more often, with no apparent cost to the consistent contributor and often gain. These positive effects seem to result from a consistent contributor’s impact on group members’ cooperative inferences about group norms. The importance of the findings to environmental and social challenges will be discussed.

Presenter: Mark Weber

Mark Weber is an Associate Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, and the Director of the University of Waterloo's new Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation. He earned his PhD in Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and also holds a master’s degree in social psychology (McGill) and an MBA (Wilfred Laurier). Mark’s academic research focuses on negotiations, cooperation, decision-making, leadership and trust. His recent work has been published in books and journals like Research in Organizational Behavior, Culture and Negotiation: Integrative Approaches to Theory and Research (Stanford University Press), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Social Psychological and Personality Science, The Drama of the Commons (National Academy Press), Trust and Distrust across Organizational Contexts: Dilemmas and Approaches (Russell Sage Foundation), and Personality and Social Psychology Review.