The importance of cognitive diversity for sustaining the commons

Abstract

Cognitive abilities underpin the capacity of individuals to build models of their environment and make decisions about how to govern resources. Here, we test the functional intelligences proposition that functionally diverse cognitive abilities within a group are critical to govern common pool resources. We assess the effect of two cognitive abilities, social and general intelligence, on group performance on a resource harvesting and management game involving either a negative or a positive disturbance to the resource base. Our results indicate that under improving conditions (positive disturbance) groups with higher general intelligence perform better. However, when conditions deteriorate (negative disturbance) groups with high competency in both general and social intelligence are less likely to deplete resources and harvest more. Thus, we propose that a functional diversity of cognitive abilities improves how effectively social groups govern common pool resources, especially when conditions deteriorate and groups need to re-evaluate and change their behaviors.

Social and general intelligence improves collective action in a common pool resource system

“…Groups lower in one cognitive ability or the other will display lower and less consistent performance due to misunderstanding either the ecological patterns or social situations that arise in a system. Elsewhere, we have called this hypothesis the functional intelligences proposition (FIP) (10,11).…”

“…First, evidence suggests that g and ToM measure distinct processes. For instance, measures of g and ToM share very little variance among research participants tested for both abilities (10,(15)(16)(17). Similarly, autistic individuals with high g show a deficit in ToM (18), and when such individuals attempt to model others' attention, brain regions associated with ToM remain inactive (18).…”

“…Second, proxy data for g and ToM strongly predict the performance of US state governments at providing public goods, which requires sustained collective action (11). Finally, in a limited set of common pool resource experiments, groups high in both g and ToM display the most effective collective action to sustain resources despite unexpected negative changes to an ecological system (10). While these studies hint that levels of g and ToM are partly independent abilities important for groups to solve collective action problems, the above studies ignore critical dimensions of social change, including learning by doing and changes in group size.…”

“…Similarly, stakeholders must model how other stakeholders will act and their intentions to form a joint harvest goal that avoids overfishing. Our basic proposition is that effective cooperation to sustainably manage natural resources improves when groups are configured with high levels of two distinct cognitive abilities: general intelligence and social intelligence, theory of mind in particular (10,11). These cognitive abilities fundamentally affect the ability of groups to understand the ecological and the social dimensions of sustainability challenges and should, thus, affect the performance of groups in solving such challenges.…”

Resilience as pathway diversity: linking systems, individual, and temporal perspectives on resilience

“…Furthermore, in the example applications we present below, we consider only the diversity of pathways associated with the decisions of a single actor. In the case of multiple actors, the diversity of these actors' attributes could play a key role, for example, a diversity of problem solving methods (Hong andPage 2004, Page 2007), diverse knowledge or perspectives of system properties or dynamics (Arlinghaus and Krause 2013, Cronin and Weingart 2019), functionally diverse cognitive abilities (Baggio et al 2019), or diverse behavior (Schill et al 2019).…”