Motivating children's cooperation to conserve forests |
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Authors: | Aleah Bowie Wen Zhou Jingzhi Tan Philip White Tara Stoinski Yanjie Su Brian Hare |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA;2. Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands;3. Department of Statistics, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA;4. Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, Atlanta, Georgia, USA;5. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China;6. Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA |
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Abstract: | Forests are essential common-pool resources. Understanding children's and adolescents’ motivations for conservation is critical to improving conservation education. In 2 experiments, we investigated 1086 school-aged children and adolescents (6–16 years old) from the United States, China, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Testing participants in groups, we assessed their motivation for conservation based on collective-risk common-pool goods games in which they were threatened with losing their endowment unless the group donation exceeded a threshold needed to maintain the forest. Extrinsic motivations, rather than intrinsic, tended to lead to successful cooperation to maintain a forest. Certainty of losing individual payoffs significantly boosted successful cooperative conservation efforts across cultures (success rates were 90.63% and 74.19% in the 2 risk-extrinsic conditions, and 43.75% in the control condition). In U.S. participants, 2 extrinsic incentives, priming discussions of the value of forests and delay of payoffs as punishment, also increased success of cooperative conservation (success rates were 97.22% and 76.92% in the 2 extrinsic-incentive conditions, and 29.19% and 30.77% in the 2 control conditions). Conservation simulations, like those we used, may allow educators to encourage forest protection by leading groups to experience successful cooperation and the extrinsic incentives needed to motivate forest conservation. |
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Keywords: | common goods child development cooperation culture motivation bienes comunes cooperación cultura desarrollo infantil motivación 公共物品 儿童发展 合作 文化 动机 |
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