The social issue of conservation is conceptualized in terms of a commons dilemma. Both the recent experimental and theoretical literature are briefly reviewed. The author hypothesized that increasing group cohesiveness and exposing subjects to prior sharing would increase cooperative responding in a simulated commons problem. Undergraduate students (n = 60) in groups of three drew quarters from a regenerating resource pool. Groups which had previously shared a monetary reward were able to preserve the resource more effectively and earned more money than groups which had not shared a previous reward. The traditional cohesiveness manipulation was not successful. The results suggest that prior exposure to cooperative alternatives may enhance the cooperative response in later problem situations. The practical and theoretical implications for conservation strategies are mentioned.
When people are given unrestricted access to a common resource under conditions of increasing population, a conflict arises between individual short-term consumption and group long-term conservation. Hardin (1 968) originally conceptualized this dilemma as a "tragedy of the commons." He likened our current conservation problems to those of the New World settlers who followed English custom by designating a common grazing area for their cattle. As each farmer sought to increase his own herd, the common resource was depleted. Similar conflicts arise when any population uses an expendable common resource (e.g., food, shelter, fuel, air, etc.). Platt (1973) has described this situation as one of several "social traps." The term refers to dilemmas in which people get involved that later prove unpleasant and difficult to escape. In certain cases they may result in panic consumptions or "stampedes" (Cross & Guyer, 1980).
Commons behavior has been difficult to modify because personal consumption has immediate reward. The various research efforts to ameliorate commons dilemmas have underscored the complexity of conservation behavior. Specific strategies have increased energy conservation by providing information (Rothstein, 1980), by exposing subjects to "sermonettes" on public morality (Dawes, Shaklee & Talarowski, Note 1) and by providing feedback on consumption (Seligman, Becker, & Darley, 1980). On the other hand, education, as such, has generally been ineffective in producing meaningful savings (Caldwell, 1976; Cass & Edney, 1978; Edney & Harper, 1978a). An annotated bibliography on related projects has been compiled by Unseld, Morrison, Sills, & Wolf (1 979).
Given two basic conditions, it has been possible to simulate the commons dilemma in the psychological laboratory (Dawes, 1975(Dawes, , 1980)). First, the individual response (immediate payoff) must be dominant for each player. As a mathematical property, dominance means that the payoff for an individual who remains a defector is always greater than the payoff for being the first cooperator. Second, the dominating strategies result in an equilibrium that is "deficient," that is less preferred by all of the players. No individual is motivated to cooperate, but players would prefer a result in which all *This research was conducted while the author was on sabbatical leave of absence from Bloomsburg State College. Thanks to Bruce L. Levine for his helpful review of the manuscript.