About the saliency of fear and greed in social dilemmas

Simmons, Dawes and Orbell (1984) suggested that greed provides a more important motive for non-cooperation in a social dilemma than fear. However, there are at least three reasons to reinvestigate the relative impact of fear and greed on cooperation in social dilemmas. First, the Simmons et al. results were not replicated in a recent study (Van Avermaet and Van Nieuwkerke, in press). Second in the two forementioned studies a step-level public good game was employed, a game which does not meet the formal requirements of social dilemmas as they were defined by Dawes (1980). Third, in contrast to previous research, we employed a complete experimental design to investigate the effect of the saliency of the two motives. In the present study, 128 subjects were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2 (saliency of fear: high, low) × 2 (saliency of greed: high, low) factorial design. First of all it appeared that our fear and greed manipulation was successful. In addition the results indicated a significant interaction effect: cooperation was highest when both motives had a low saliency.