Abstract

TABERNERO, Carmen; ARENAS, Alicia  and  BRIONES, Elena. Previous experience and group efficacy on social dilemmas. Psicologia [online]. 2007, vol.21, n.1, pp.83-105. ISSN 0874-2049.

Nowadays, organizations create a lot of situations of interdependence in which individuals try to maximize their personal benefit over the benefit of the group they belong to. Contexts that promote competition make people cope with social dilemmas similarly to dilemmas of other sciences such as economy, grow development, population studies, environment, ecology, or urban design. For this reason, the study of this kind of behaviour has been called Sharing Psychology by researchers. When a group of people must share a limited number of resources, there is a trend to behave in a selfish way, even if they know that mutual cooperation might lead to higher benefit for more people. In this study, we intend to analyze some variables involved in the construction of cooperation behaviour in front of social dilemmas. 108 undergraduate students, distributed in thirty six groups, were asked for solving different negotiation and decision­‑making tasks. After several months working in teams, we analyze group self­‑regulatory processes (perceived group efficacy, team goals, group affective state). Later, we asked each group for solving a social dilemma task: the tragedy of the commons. In the first phase, teams must solve the task in a virtual context. In the second phase, each member of the group had to confront his/her individual election opposite to the rest of colleagues during several consecutive decisions. Results show that those participants, who are in groups that develop an initial strategy of cooperation and keep a high level of perceived group efficacy, cope with their decisions in a cooperative way. These results give us a new point of intervention to confront competitive situations and social dilemmas: to create training programs focused on promoting cooperative situations in order to increase group efficacy and to improve performance.

Keywords : perceived group efficacy; social dillemas; competition vs cooperation.

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