ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Dyn.
Sec. Population, Environment and Development
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fhumd.2025.1613898
This article is part of the Research TopicAdaptive Frontiers in the Anthropocene: Human-Environment Dynamics in the Face of Climate ChangeView all articles
Collectivist values help solve the climate dilemma Authors
Provisionally accepted
- 1Yunnan University of Finance And Economics, Kunming, China
- 2Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Kunming, Yunnan, China
- 3University of Sussex, Brighton, West Sussex, United Kingdom
- 4University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 5Shanghai Lixin University of Accounting and Finance, Shanghai, China
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Theories on evolution of cooperation assume that interacting individuals can change their strategies under different expected payoffs and cultural contexts. The willingness to invest resources into partners and to cooperate may therefore vary in collectivistic Eastern Asia as opposed to more individualistic Western countries partly because of cultural differences. An experiment was implemented examining the willingness of young Chinese subjects to mitigate the consequences of climate change in a country severely affected by air pollution. We set up a public goods game in which groups of six students had to reach a minimum investment threshold to be able to save funds for a reforestation project to curb climate change. Usually, these types ofSuch social dilemmas are hard to output enough investments and coordination could not be solved in the western world. Here, instead, five out of eight Chinese groups cooperate Formatted: Italian (Italy) enough to raise funds for the reforestation goal. An Individualism/Collectivism questionnaire we presented the subjects with established why we are confronted with a variance in cooperation interests across different cultures. In China, in fact, collectivistic values seem to be a key factor for allowing the emergence of this environmentally driven cooperation.
Keywords: cooperation, Climate Change, collectivistic society, Cultural effects, Threshold public goods game, reinforcement learning Cooperation, threshold Public Goods Game, reinforcement learning
Received: 17 Apr 2025; Accepted: 23 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Pansini, Kesberg and Shi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Riccardo Pansini, Yunnan University of Finance And Economics, Kunming, China
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