Co-operation Preferred

A key premise of the study is "The uniqueness of human cooperation necessitates investigations that reach beyond the explanations of cooperative behavior of nonhuman animals." This is essentially a veiled way of saying that people are assumed to make voluntary choices, whereas other animals are strongly programmed in their behavior. While voluntary choice can be programmed, the essential difference is the possibility of doing this rather than that depending on unforeseeable circumstances. (That is, people reason about or evaluate the situation in different ways, so come to different decisions.)

The authors' conclusion is,
 

Our results show that the sanctioning institution is the undisputed winner in a "voting-with-one's-feet" competition with a sanction-free institution. The results provide profound empirical evidence for the existence and importance of strong reciprocators, as well as a form of conformist behavior, as described in models of cultural selection. The initial establishment of the "norm to cooperate and punish free-riders" is mainly driven by the steadfastness of the strong reciprocators to punish noncooperative subjects, despite severe individual losses. Although strong reciprocators are a minority, they manage to establish and enforce a cooperative culture that attracts even previously noncooperative individuals and thus resolves the social dilemma. The predominant tendency to punish norm violators after a migration from the noncooperative environment of the sanctioning-free institution to the sanctioning institution provides support for the assumption that humans adapt to the common behavior although it deviates from the payoff-maximizing behavior. This tendency for conformism raises sanctioning activities at a high level such that cooperation can be stabilized.

What this shows is that the Tragedy of the Commons is simply the undesirable result of the lack of management. In the reported experiment, initially more than 1/3 of the participants sign up for the unregulated society, because it is unregulated (lacking sanctions). In the unregulated society, free-riders receive an outsized reward; i.e., there is a huge return on minimal or no investment in the society. Of course, that irks the rest of the participants (co-operators or suckers, depending on your point of view), so they leave the unregulated society and join the regulated one. In the regulated society, free-riders are punished, not rewarded. As the experiment proceeds, there are fewer and fewer rewards for free-riders as more and more participants join the co-operative society. In the end, about 96% of the participants become co-operators.
 

The study shows most people are intolerant of free-riders. They prefer a society in which free-riders are few and far between and severely punished. Eventually, even the free-riders give up their game and join the co-operators. In the co-operative society, everyone gets a moderate, but persistent, reward for their investment. The cost of punishing free-riders goes down as their numbers decrease, so there is a tendency for co-operative societies to improve rewards to the extent that the costs of punishment are reduced.
 

In other words, The Tragedy of the (unregulated) Commons amounts to the Tragedy of Private Property; what happens when property owners are free to do anything they want. While there is a large minority (about 1/3 of the population) that prefers that lack of regulation, as long as it lasts, and as long as it benefits them, most of the population is otherwise inclined.

Applied to modern history, it means that most people probably want Robber Barons to be taxed (punished). They probably wish polluters and others who raid the environment were punished. Changing around a few words, it should be obvious that most people do not prefer free market Capitalism when they are directly confronted with its consequences. They do prefer a regulated, co-operative society - the hallmark of the Welfare State advocated by the Left (as described in GSQ).
 

There is one ominous overtone in this study: people prefer the co-operative society because they are conformists. This is a consequence of Aristotle's saying, 'man is a social animal.' People prefer the safety of the herd to individualism. This fact tends to make co-operative societies authoritarian, which deadens innovation. In the short run of the performed experiment, co-operation seems a better model because "other factors" have not entered the scene. (The test society is a static structure.) We do not know if the conforming society deadens innovation, or turns into some form of zombie-like totalitarianism.
 

This, it seems to me, is the critical problem of the Ideal State: how to encourage sufficient liberty to overcome a tendency to conformism. That liberty should be considered a cost in the sort of study just reported. This poses the problem as 'what is the optimum amount of regulation?' rather than whether or not we have regulation. I hope the authors will do a follow-on study in this direction.