Using the concepts of framing and loss aversion to answer pertinent questions on cooperative behaviors in social dilemmas

Two hypotheses, formulated using the concept of framing, were proposed in an attempt to understand better the behaviors of cooperators in social dilemmas. The first hypothesis was constructed in response to Schwartz-Shea and Simmon's (1995) criticism on the applicability of the framing concept to explain level of cooperation in public goods and resource dilemmas. It tested the possibility that cooperators may have adopted a different rationality from non-cooperators in a social dilemma situation. The second hypothesis was constructed to explain Cha's (1996) findings. It postulated that penalty sanction has failed to improve cooperation level significantly among the cooperators because cooperators, in contrast to non-cooperators, were not threatened by the sanction. Participants were asked to role-play students in financial difficulty who were offered financial assistance and found themselves in a social dilemma either to accumulate more funds for themselves or to conserve a common fund that was meant to help individuals in similar situations. The task was an iterated social dilemma, structured either as a GS (give-some) game that resembles a public goods dilemma or as a TS (take-some) game that resembles a commons dilemma. Two other factors that were investigated in the study were sanction and social value orientations. Several results inconsistent with previous studies were obtained, the most important of which was the failure to obtain a significant framing effect. Penalty sanction was found to be ineffective for all conditions, while reward sanction was effective only in a TS game but not in a GS game. The inconsistencies in results were traced to the addition of an expenditure factor that was originally intended to only add realism to the task. Implications for the unexpected results were discussed.