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Research

Research

Research

Summary

To promote effective collaborative management, it is critical to develop interventions that promote empathy, which is a precursor to cooperative behavior, and to understand the contextual factors that may prevent empathy from resulting in collaborative action. Collaborative approaches to natural resource management have had their share of success and failure. The latter is often driven by the inability or unwillingness of interest groups to collaborate over the provision of public goods. Collaboration sometimes require actors to forego selfish behaviors in favor of more prosocial behavior. Therefore, understanding the role of empathy and how to promote it becomes a necessary component of successful collaborative decision making.

The research team uses a multi-method, multi-disciplinary approach that includes a cross-sectional public survey that will be used to test a model of the relationships between perspective taking and prosocial behavior and identify the key individual and contextual predictors and barriers to perspective taking and prosocial action in resource management contexts. Further, the projects tests multiple hypotheses about why preliminary experiments using computer-mediated communications resulted in egoistic behavior, a counterintuitive result. Finally, the research teams uses their theoretical and experimental results to develop and test a series of experiments using computer-mediated scenarios to mimic real-world collaborative management decisions. The work enhances understanding of the causal connections between perspective taking and prosocial action, identifies the contextual and individual barriers to perspective taking and prosocial behavior, and develops reliable and valid instruments and strategies to promote prosocial action within a computer mediated situation. As a result, the work contributes to existing models of social cooperation, proenvironmental behavior and collaborative management. Moreover, this research makes the multidimensional relationships between perspective taking and prosocial action visible, testable, and ultimately instrumental. This study also improves teaching by using interactive scenarios to educate students across multiple disciplines to promote collaborative behavior and cooperation through complex decision-making scenarios.

Funding

National Science Foundation, Division of Social and Economic Sciences

Timeline

July 2015 — June 2018