Caring for the future can turn tragedy into comedy for long-term collective action under risk of collapse
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We will need collective action to avoid catastrophic climate change, and this will require valuing the long term as well as the short term. Shortsightedness and uncertainty have hindered progress in resolving this collective action problem and have been recognized as important barriers to cooperation among humans. Here, we propose a coupled social–ecological dilemma to investigate the interdependence of three well-identified components of this cooperation problem: 1) timescales of collapse and recovery in relation to time preferences regarding future outcomes, 2) the magnitude of the impact of collapse, and 3) the number of actors in the collective. We find that, under a sufficiently severe and time-distant collapse, how much the actors care for the future can transform the game from a tragedy of the commons into one of coordination, and even into a comedy of the commons in which cooperation dominates. Conversely, we also find conditions under which even strong concern for the future still does not transform the problem from tragedy to comedy. For a large number of participating actors, we find that the critical collapse impact, at which these game regime changes happen, converges to a fixed value of collapse impact per actor that is independent of the enhancement factor of the public good, which is usually regarded as the driver of the dilemma. Our results not only call for experimental testing but also help explain why polarization in beliefs about human-caused climate change can threaten global cooperation agreements.
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Simply caring more for future rewards in sequential social dilemmas or certain 'intrinsic motivations' in MARL - such as inequity aversion, social influence, or inefficiency penalties - have been shown to improve cooperation in sequential social dilemmas.
“simply caring more for future rewards in sequential social dilemmas (Barfuss et al., 2020) or certain 'intrinsic motivations' in MARL - such as inequity aversion (Hughes et al., 2018), social influence (Jaques et al., 2019), or inefficiency penalties (Gemp et al., 2022) - have been shown to improve cooperation in sequential social dilemmas (Leibo et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2019a).”
From Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI (2025) · cites this paper as Barfuss et al., 2020
Human collective dynamics are critical to the wellbeing of people and ecosystems in the present and will set the stage for how we face global challenges with impacts that will last centuries.
“Human collective dynamics are critical to the wellbeing of people and ecosystems in the present and will set the stage for how we face global challenges with impacts that will last centuries (14, 15, 64).”
From Stewardship of global collective behavior (2021) · cites this paper as [64]
Conservation biology adopts the approach of identifying common classes of problems and associated solutions, where crises observed across multiple contexts lead to an understanding of multiscaled dynamics yielding solutions that can be tailored to given sociological and ecological contexts.
“This is the approach adopted in conservation biology, where crises observed across multiple contexts (e.g., ecosystem collapse, mismanaged commons) lead to an understanding of multiscaled dynamics yielding solutions that can be tailored to given sociological and ecological contexts (8, 47, 64).”
From Stewardship of global collective behavior (2021) · cites this paper as [64]
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Barfuss, W., Donges, J. F., Vasconcelos, V. V., Kurths, J., & Levin, S. A.
- Affiliations
- Leibniz Association (DE)
- Stockholm Resilience Centre (SE)
- Princeton University (US)
- Saratov State University (RU)
- Corresponding author
- Barfuss, Wolfram
- Levin, Simon A.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2020-05-20
- Volume
- 117
- Issue
- 23
- Pages
- 12915-12922
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC7293627
- OpenAlex
- W3028473954
- Cited by
- 87
- References
- 78
- Citations by year
- 2026: 12 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 4
- FWCI
- 17.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Publication Database PIK (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Scholarship)
- European Research Council (advanced grant project ERA (Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene))
- Earth League (EarthDoc program)
- Leibniz-Gemeinschaft (project DOMINOES)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Game Theory and Applications
- Keywords
- tragedy of the commons, collective action, climate change mitigation, long-term thinking, time preference, collapse risk, social-ecological systems, game theory, public goods, tipping points, international cooperation
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