Research On The Influence Of Interest Trade-off On Cooperative Behavior Within Groups Under Intergroup Conflicts

Cooperation and conflict are two interconnected facets of human evolution and survival.Inter-group conflict promotes intra-group cooperation,which enhances cohesion and provides individuals with greater security and benefits.However,several factors like reduced external threats or asymmetric information exchange can negatively impact the level and duration of cooperation within a group,leading to behaviors such as"free riding"and balancing of interests.This results in an internal cooperation dilemma that has not been extensively studied by researchers.To address this,we utilized a within-subject design to create a task that presented a dilemma for individuals engaged in social group cooperation and employed limited resource competition to induce inter-group conflict in a group game experiment paradigm.In study 1,a total of 60 participants completed a group game task in ambiguous contexts after establishing emotional connections within the group,with no feedback.The results showed that the escalation of internal conflicts significantly increased the investment endowment and frequency of egoistic options for the participants.After fitting the behavioral response with a logit model,it was found that the individual behavioral pattern changed from pro-group to pro-self after the escalation of internal conflicts.In the ambiguous context with no feedback,the degree of connection between individuals and the group did not significantly change before and after the escalation of interest conflicts,indicating that the participants mainly perceived the competition between groups.However,the binary forced-choice experimental setting and lack of feedback in study 1may have limited the decision-making of the participants.Therefore,study 2 employed a free decision-making and real-time feedback experimental setting to investigate whether individuals exhibit similar behavioral patterns in a dynamic interactive context.In study 2,a total of 60 participants were recruited and were free to decide the amount of investment and received immediate feedback on the results,with other settings the same as in study 1.The results showed that the escalation of internal conflicts significantly increased the investment endowment and frequency of egoistic options for the participants.During this process,the participants significantly reduced the internal connection within the group,perceived the competition mainly from within the group,and significantly increased the investment variability of group members,reducing the correlation coefficient within the group.Therefore,the egoistic decisions made by individuals visible to group members in a dynamic interactive decision-making context led to the decline of cooperation within the group.In addition,game theory results showed that individuals make bounded rational decisions to shape dynamic strategies of"outcome_t group-lose,endowments_t+1 increase,outcome_t group-win,endowments_t+1decrease."In summary,through two behavioral studies,we systematically investigated the trade-off between group cooperative behavior and self-interested behavior that undermines group interests during intergroup conflict.We found that when individuals face escalated intra-group conflict,their self-interested decision-making,which prioritizes personal interests over group goals,is a form of bounded rationality.However,this self-interested behavior is partially concealed in ambiguous decision-making contexts and only fully manifests in dynamic decision-making contexts.Our findings provide a nuanced perspective on cooperative behavior in the context of intergroup conflict.We discovered that the escalation of intra-group interest conflicts is the source of the decline of group cooperation in ambiguous and dynamic decision-making contexts.We combined the harmonious appearance of cooperation with the suppressed inter-member interest conflicts to reveal this phenomenon.This sheds light on the complex interplay between cooperation and conflict in human evolution and survival,and highlights the importance of understanding the dynamics of intra-group conflict in promoting inter-group cooperation.