Differentiated Responsibilities and Prosocial Behavior in Climate Change Mitigation: Behavioral Evidence from the United States and China

61 Pages Posted: 12 Aug 2016 Last revised: 7 Sep 2016

See all articles by Reuben Kline

Reuben Kline

Stony Brook University

Nicholas Seltzer

University of Nevada, Reno

Evgeniya Lukinova

New York University (NYU) - New York University (NYU), Shanghai

Autumn Bynum

Stony Brook University

Date Written: August 11, 2016

Abstract

The recent Paris agreement has increased optimism that climate change might be successfully mitigated through international agreement. However, the commitments of countries are unenforceable. Therefore domestic political will, including on the part of citizens to make regular sacrifices, will be required in order for countries to meet these commitments. Understanding prosocial behavior in climate change mitigation is thus more important than ever. Many behavioral studies model the mitigation dilemma using public goods games: But, because wealth creation in a carbon-based economy inevitably leads to the appropriation of the global climate commons, climate change and its mitigation actually constitute a dual, interdependent social dilemma. Acknowledging the interdependence of this dilemma is necessary to capture "common but differentiated responsibilities,'' the equity principle that underlies international climate negotiations. To do so, we introduce the compound climate dilemma: a new behavioral game that expands the public goods approach to the mitigation dilemma by combining it with a preceding common pool dilemma. To explore the implications of the compound climate dilemma for prosocial behavior, we conduct experiments in the United States and China, the world's two largest emitters of carbon. Though the pattern of prosocial behavior is virtually identical across the two countries, the introduction of differentiated responsibilities nonetheless has a deleterious effect on successful mitigation.

Keywords: climate change, behavioral economics, social dilemmas, common but differentiated responsibilities

JEL Classification: Q54, C92, D03

Suggested Citation

Kline, Reuben and Seltzer, Nicholas and Lukinova, Evgeniya and Bynum, Autumn, Differentiated Responsibilities and Prosocial Behavior in Climate Change Mitigation: Behavioral Evidence from the United States and China (August 11, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2822093 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2822093

Reuben Kline (Contact Author)

Stony Brook University ( email )

Department of Political Science
Center for Behavioral Political Economy
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4392

Nicholas Seltzer

University of Nevada, Reno ( email )

United States

Evgeniya Lukinova

New York University (NYU) - New York University (NYU), Shanghai ( email )

1555 Century Ave
Shanghai, Shanghai 200122
China

Autumn Bynum

Stony Brook University ( email )

Stony Brook, NV
United States

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