| In many sosical problems, cooperation usutally could bring benefits to the population, but a single person is facing the temptation to betray. "Social dilemma" refers to the situation in which individuals make independent choices in an interdependent situation. In social dilemma, self-interested decisions usually lead to tragedy result of the group, which reflects the conflict between individual rationality and collective rationality. Since social dilemma problem is directly related to small issues like family life as well as significant issues like international war and peace, it has beening a core proposition in economics, political science, psychology, evolutionary biology and other disciplines. Interest about social dilemma also triggers the boom for interdisciplinary research represented Santa Fe School.However, due to the separation between disciplines, although the literature on social dilemma is voluminou, we still can not get a clear panorama about social dilemmas. Many important problems still have not been well answered. Despite the fact that modem human society is still facing war, terrorism, environmental pollution, global warming and other issues, we human beings have created very brilliant civilization with very high cooperative spirit in the past thousands of years. What is the reason for human cooperation? What are still the constraints that stop us to achieve a more harmonious society? In the research on social dilemma, the core proposition is to explore the dynamic mechanism in the evolution of human cooperation, and to look into the origin of the human cooperative spirit. Evolutionary biology, anthropology, economics, as well as other disciplines have proposed a number of different models to explain the evolutionary dynamic of cooperation. However, due to the absence of evidence about early human living conditions, these explanations are largely stuck in the hypothesis level and rely on different assumptions on the initial conditions of human society. It is difficult to reach a consensus.Social dilemma is also a classic proposition in economics, while classical economics usually analyze cooperation from non-cooperative perspective and assume that human beings are homo economicus, which makes social dilemma unsolvable without incentive institutional arrangements. Nevertheless, humans with high cooperative spirit have created brilliant modern civilization, which obviously not entirely rely on external motivations. How to breakthrough the basic assumption of human nature to make more scientific and rational explanation for human behavior has been the core work in the field of behavioral economics and significant progress is reached. However, an array of models in behavioral economics are used to explain different phenomena, the lack of a unified model has been widely criticized. A unified model of behavioral economics is particularly necessary.In addition, although social dilemma is ubiquitous in human society, the present research on social dilemma is still largely abstract research-based, which usually use public goods experiments to simulate the realistic problems, and in reality it usually points to typicial social dilemmas like public resources, global warming, etc. However, although a number of human activities are not typical social dilemma problems, they have the characteristics of social dilemmas and possess unique aspect in different issues. Take criminal activity as an example, it essentially reflects a social dilemma problem, but because of the evil nature of crime, there exists significant difference with free-riding behavior in public goods problems. Therefore, expanding the application of social dilemma theory in significant practical problems is particularly necessary. At the same time, corruption as a widespread social phenomenon with a long history in human society, the traditional view seems to ignore the nature of corruption as a social problem. In-depth study on the social dilemma nature of corruption and investigate important determinants of corruption under this circumstance is important.The purpose of the study, Methods and Key Points:To solve the above proposed issues, this study sought to solve them one by one to a certain extent, aiming to achieve deper understanding for social dilemmas. Because of the complex and multilevel nature of social dilemmas, this study intends to use a variety of tools from multidisciplinary research to investigate it at different levels. Therefore, the full text will appear slightly fragmented and lacking integrity. However, all of the contents of paper focus on the central proposition of social dilemmas.Firstly, multi-disciplinary research in social dilemmas will be comprehensively reviewed and evaluated, intending to find the links and differences between them and attempting to grasp the research frontiers of social dilemmas. These research achievements are mainly from evolutionary theory, economics, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and other related disciplines. This section is different from normal literature review, neither nor a simple accumulation of literature, but in the idea of "literature demonstration method" to demonstrate a number of important conclusions by a large number of literature evidence. The purpose of this section is get more realistic results from the academic research in social dilemmas.Secondly, since a large number of models about human cooperative behaviors in economics, especially in behavioral and experimental economics are decentralized and lack of unitarity, this study will try to bring a variety of behaviors into the framework centred with beliefs and emotional decisions. In particular, this paper use psychological game theory as the core tool and see belief-dependent motivations as the basis of prosocial behaviors. Further, plentiful of literature from experimental economics and neuroscience are used to demonstrate the arguement. "Literature demonstration method" is also used as the main research methods in this section.Thirdly, for the central queation of the evolution of human cooperation, based on the hypothesis of harsh living conditions of hominid, this paper will propose a new model of social dilemma and a new evolutionary dynamic mechanism, which are named "Hero Game" and "species reciprocity" respectively. This paper argues that Hero game can be a good description about the decision-making situations for human beings in the harsh living environment of primitive society. In the condition that all perish if not cooperate, mankind will show the hero spirit of self-sacrificing out of the sentiment of species reciprocity. This section uses the methods and tools from evolutionary game theory and the uses computer simulation model to simulate the evolutionary dynamic process. Through evolutionary analysis and simulation, it is showed that in the hero game, defectors are not necessarily the absolute dominant ones in the evolution, cooperators will survive and even get dominant position. This helps explain why cooperators and cooperative spirit, even the hero spirit of self-sacrifice has not been eliminate in the evolution and has proliferated until now.Finally, the study in-depth investigates one of the important practical social dilemma problems-corruption. Due to the illegal and privacy nature of corruption, the deficiencies of previous empirical research using survey data are obvious. The study investigates the corruption decision-making behavior under real incentive conditions with experimental economics method. It is proposed that corruption as a social dilemma problem for the first time in this paper. Public officials share common interest from acting honest, while corruption harm the whole group of officials with individual corrupt ones get benefit. This dilemma nature of corruption is why every government has made unremitting anti-corruption efforts since ancient times. This argument that corruption is a social dilemma is demonstrated by experiment in this study. It was found that the pursuit of individual benefit led the entire group into the dilemma of "tragedy of corruption". Further, in the framework of a social dilemma, two important determinants of corruption are investigated: group size and the risk of collective failure. A 2 X 2 treatment setting is used to investigate the role of the two factors. The findings support that a small group size and a high risk of collective failure helps to curb the corruption level under conditions of social dilemmas.The innovations:This study was carried out in many aspects of innovation. Firstly, the new research method called "Literature demonstration method" is used to investigate the significant proposition of social dilemmas. The method advocates using the existing literature of micro-perspective research as evidence to form a new perspective on the whole issue. This proposition is different from ordinary literature review and meta-analysis. Take the content in Chapter 3 as example, a large number of fragmented behavioral economics models are used as materials to propose the behavior proposition with beliefs as centre concept. In this paper, enormous multi-disciplinary research literature on social dilemmas are systematicly reviewed and evaluated to form a full understanding in macroscopic perspective.Secondly, this study proposes a new fundamental framework of a social dilemma--the Hero game. This framework is different from classic social dilemma games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Snowdrift game and Stag Hunt game, and is mainly used to capture the decision-making environment of human ancestors in harsh living conditions. In this game model, the new evolutionary dynamic mechanism of species reciprocity is proposed to explain how the human mental structure of self-sacrifice and caring about others is developed in the long process of evolution. This fundamental analytical framework can provide a new perspective and benchmark for deeper analysis on the evolution of cooperation, which advocates using more realistic historical background conditions as benchmark for theoretical analysis and simulation.Thirdly, corruption is firstly proposed as a social dilemma problem in this paper and this proposition is in-depth discussed. Using experimental economics approach, this proposition is tested and several determinants of corruption under this context are investigated. This is a good supplementation and extension for the existing literature in research on the essence and determinants of corruption. At the same time, anti-corruption research and anti-corruption policies should be different with the knowledge that corruption as a social dilemma, which has direct practical significance. |
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