The Hopeless and the Free-riders: Group size and Group Goals Shape Efficacy and Contributions to Collective Tasks

To what extent can ordinary people affect collective outcomes? Although individuals often possess objectively little capacity to change outcomes that are dependent on many individual inputs, subjective beliefs about one’s ability to affect a given collective outcome vary widely. In this dissertation, I examine how variation in efficacy beliefs and subsequent cooperation in collective tasks are shaped by two features inherent to collective tasks: the number of people in the group, and the proportion of the group that needs to contribute for the desired group outcome to occur (the provision point). Collective tasks often take the form of a social dilemma, in which individual interests are in conflict with that of the group. Social dilemma researchers typically assume that individuals are less likely to cooperate in larger groups, but empirical findings are inconsistent. I aim to elucidate the effect of group size on individuals’ collective behavior by focusing on how group size affects perceptions of efficacy. I present four studies in which unacquainted individuals were provided with the opportunity make private contributions toward a group goal. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate that group size is inversely related to two related efficacy constructs: As groups increase in size, perceptions of self-efficacy decrease while perceptions of collective-efficacy increase. I provide evidence that self-efficacy predicts intentions to cooperate to a greater extent than does collective efficacy. I also examine how provision points levels affect efficacy beliefs and identify conditions in which the presence of a provision point can hinder cooperation. In Chapter 3, I use a two-party voting paradigm (which involves a natural provision point) and demonstrate that both group size and perceived distance to the provision point influence self-efficacy and intentions to vote. In Chapter 4, I extend the findings in Chapter 2 to actual contributions in social dilemmas. Furthermore, I demonstrate that perceptions of the provision point as either unrealistically high or excessively low can help to distinguish between two categories of non-cooperators in social dilemmas: (1) people who predict that the group will achieve its goal without them (“free-riders”) and (2) people who expect the group to fail (“hopeless”).

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