Patterns of cooperation during collective emergencies in the help-or-escape social dilemma

TL;DR

This study introduces a new social game to examine cooperation during emergencies, revealing that people tend to help others similarly under emergency and normal conditions, but time pressure and individual differences influence cooperation levels.

Contribution

The paper develops the help-or-escape social dilemma game to experimentally analyze cooperation in emergencies, highlighting how time pressure and personality traits affect helping behaviors.

Findings

Players help others at similar levels during emergencies and normal conditions.

Time pressure reduces the number of people helped during emergencies.

Prosocial individuals become more cooperative, while individualists become more selfish in emergencies.

Abstract

Although cooperation is central to the organisation of many social systems, relatively little is known about cooperation in situations of collective emergency. When groups of people flee from a danger such as a burning building or a terrorist attack, the collective benefit of cooperation is important, but the cost of helping is high and the temptation to defect is strong. To explore the degree of cooperation in emergencies, we develop a new social game, the help-or-escape social dilemma. Under time and monetary pressure, players decide how much risk they are willing to take in order to help others. Results indicated that players took as much risk to help others during emergencies as they did under normal conditions. In both conditions, most players applied an egalitarian heuristic and helped others until their chance of success equalled that of the group. This strategy is less efficient during emergencies, however, because the increased time pressure results in fewer people helped. Furthermore, emergencies tend to amplify participants initial tendency to cooperate, with prosocials becoming even more cooperative and individualists becoming even more selfish. Our framework offers new opportunities to study human cooperation and could help authorities to better manage crowd behaviours during mass emergencies.