Communication and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: A Meta-Analytic Review

By Daniel Balliet. 2010

528 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Among the most researched solutions to social dilemmas is communication. Since the late 1950s, it has been well known that communication enhances cooperation in social dilemmas. This article reports a meta-analysis of this literature (forty-five effect sizes) and finds a large positive effect of communication on cooperation in social dilemmas (d = 1.01). This effect is moderated by the type of communication, with a stronger effect of face-to-face discussion ( d = 1.21) compared to written messages (d = 0.46). The communication-cooperation relationship is also stronger in larger, compared to smaller, group social dilemmas. Whether communication occurred before or during iterated dilemmas did not statistically affect the communication-cooperation effect size. Results are discussed according to theory and research on communication in social dilemmas.

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03446382e91605d3cfe49ee3bc3f04c3e150de91

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Citations in the corpus

How perpetrators and targets construe knowledge hiding in organizations (2015, background): “Interestingly, a metaanalysis by Baillet (2010) suggests that increased communication is a solution to social dilemmas; communication is said to reduce the likelihood that people will respond in self-interested ways.”
Charisma as signal: An evolutionary perspective on charismatic leadership (2017, background): “This shared knowledge makes it easier for followers to coordinate, as it increases trust and the perceived likelihood that others will respond similarly (Henrich et al., 2015; Balliet, 2010; Dirks & Ferrin, 2002).”
The Psychology of Environmental Decisions (2014, background): “Situational influences include structural features of the dilemma itself (125), group size, opportunities to communicate with other group members prior to individual decision making (131), and the potential for sanctions in the form of rewards for cooperation or punishment for noncooperation (132).”
The challenge of understanding decisions in experimental studies of common pool resource governance (2011, background): “When participants are allowed to talk about the experiment face-to-face under a non-binding setting of open talk (cheap talk), the harvesting effort declines toward the cooperative equilibrium (see Ostrom and Walker, 1991; Sally, 1995; Balliet, 2010; Ahn et al. this volume).”
Trust and Wellbeing (2010, unknown): “Meta-analyses of these results from Sally (1958) to Balliet (2010) show that subjects who have communicated with each other are far more likely to display trust in subsequent experiments, with face-to-face communications having effect sizes twice as large as written or electronic communications.”
Assessing the risks of ‘infodemics’ in response to COVID-19 epidemics (2020, background): “In large, complex societies, an important mediator of large-scale cooperation is communication ( 14 ) , which may be crucial to coordinate individual perceptions and behaviors in the pursuit of the common interest ( 15 ) .”