Social dynamics interfere with learning how to manage resources

Managing our shared resources often requires learning through experience about the dynamics of a resource, such as how it replenishes and reacts to harvesting behaviour. Learning how a resource behaves can help individuals harvest sustainably, increasing long-term rewards by avoiding resource exhaustion. However, little is known about how the harvesting behaviour of others who share a resource affect our ability to learn about a resource. We hypothesize that individuals' capacity to learn from experience will depend on how others harvest from the resource as we gain experience. 320 participants each played a four-player resource management game with three computer partners. To evaluate how different group dynamics impact a participant’s ability to learn about the resource, the harvesting strategies of the computer partners were experimentally manipulated. Participants were placed in one of three experimental conditions, and interacted with partners who all acted either sustainably, unsustainably, or conditionally cooperatively. Participants’ ability to learn the underlying resource dynamics was then assessed in a subsequent single-player resource management game, where the social dynamics were removed and the participants’ understanding of the resource could be evaluated in isolation. Compared to controls with no prior experience, performance on the single-player game improved after experience with sustainable and unsustainable partners, but not after experience with conditionally cooperative partners. However, experience with a single-player game (rather than a group game) outperformed all experimental conditions. These findings suggest that the presence of others can hinder learning in resource management contexts and that various group dynamics impact learning differently.