11:30 - 13:00
Location: G07
Chair/s:
Sara Gil Gallen
Submission 159
Individual responsibility and social expectations: The interplay between exploiting and restoring the environment.
P4-G07-03
Presented by: Sara Gil-Gallen
Giulia Andrighetto 1Sara Gil-Gallen 1, Alice Guerra 2, Alessandro Salis 2, Eva Vriens 1
1 Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council, Rome, Italy.
2 Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Italy.
The emergencies of the climate change crisis have encouraged institutions to present policies with joint actions for the prevention and mitigation of damages with the purpose of targeting policies toward ecological restoration. In this paper, we aim to address two main research questions. First, we are interested in testing if the restoring inclination varies when the subjects make the previous extraction of the resources or if they do not. Second, we target to understand the role of the sense of responsibility by checking if the effect of disclosure of individual perception can alienate social expectations. Therefore, we will implement an experimental design that consists of a common pool resources game to a public good game. To respond to the first objective, we will introduce a treatment with and without being the generator of the extraction before restoring. While, in order to test the second research question, we introduce a treatment manipulation where we present the possibility of sending predetermined messages allowing the individual to express their sense of responsibility to reveal social expectations. Based on the existing literature, we hypothesize to confirm a behavioral lock-in in the ecologic restoration when the subjects have generated the damage that they are asked to restore (Manara, Ciscato, Guarnieri, and Spadoni, 2025). This translates, in history matters, since subjects who participate in resource reduction report a different behavior compared who only restore. Moreover, we conjecture that thanks to the disclosure of individual sense of responsibility, the social expectations will be aligned to overcome behavioral lock-in and coordinate subjects towards environmental prosocial behavior. The experimental sessions are planned for March/April of 2025.