Extrinsic Value Orientation and Decreased Sustainability of Shared Resources: The Moderating Role of Situational Characteristics

Abstract

In the present research, we investigated the roles of both personal values and situational characteristics in predicting environmentally irresponsible behavior using the tragedy of commons dilemma. Graduate or undergraduate students (n = 138) visited the laboratory as a group of four and completed measures of personal values and played a commons dilemma game online. Participants were led to believe that they were playing with the other three participants, but they were in fact playing with three bot players that were manipulated to use the shared resources either cooperatively or competitively. It was found that people who put more emphasis on extrinsic values (financial success, appealing appearance, and social recognition) relative to intrinsic values (personal growth, affiliation, and community contribution) consumed more shared resources than their counterparts. However, this link was significant only in the competitive condition, suggesting an interaction between personal and situational factors. Supplementary analyses indicate that financial success and community contribution are particularly important in predicting environmentally irresponsible behavior.

Health factors that influence sustainable behaviour in a single-player resource management game

“…So far as we are aware, the only previous investigations for single-player outcomes show that resource outcomes can be damaged by transient reductions in mood (Knapp & Clark, 1991;Tice et al, 2001). Work with multi-player versions of 'resource dilemma games' have tended to focus on how players' social values affect resource outcomes for groups of individuals (Bogaert et al, 2008;Han et al, 2018;Kimbrough & Vostroknutov, 2015;Koole et al, 2001), ignoring other psychometric and health characteristics. Despite the fact that an important life skill involves learning about the world while trying to avoid paying long-term costs for mistakes, there has been almost no research into the variability of single-player outcomes in the resource management game against individual characteristics.…”