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STATEMENT OF PURPOSE The main purpose of our investigation is to discover the effect of effort on one’s behavior in a situation which requires financial cooperation (a public goods dilemma), and more specifically whether making that situation competitive causes a person to cooperate less. We are particularly concerned about the interaction between effort and the asymmetrical distribution of wealth. We believe that those who have more wealth will be less likely to cooperate and that making the situation competitive will amplify this effect. STATEMENT OF RESEARCH METHODOLOGY Participants will be placed into two groups: either a pure effort group or a competitive effort group. Before the study begins, participants will be given the following explanation for how the public goods dilemma game works: “You will be playing in a two person game. Each player will be given an initial endowment determined by performance on a visual-spatial task. You will be given the option of putting points in either a personal account or a joint account. You can put any amount of your points in either account. Any points placed in the personal account are yours to keep. Any points placed in the joint account will be doubled then split between both players. For example, let us say one player receives 100 points and another receives 50 points. Both players put 25 points into the joint account. That adds up to 50 points, which is then doubled to 100 points. Each player then receives 50 points, with one having 75 points and the other having 125 points. ” Participants in the pure effort group will then be told that the maximum number of points either player can earn for their initial endowment is 100 points, and that it is possible for both players to receive this amount. Participants in the competitive effort group will be told that there is a set amount of points, and the individual must perform better than their partner to receive the most points. Both groups will be given a battery of ten questions related to visual-spatial reasoning. The pure effort group will then be randomly assigned to receive either 50 or 100 points, while the competitive effort group will receive points based on their performance on the battery of questions. Participants will be told what amount of points they received, with the competitive effort being informed of how they performed relative to the other player. They will then be asked to play the public goods dilemma game. Points earned in the public goods game will be converted into raffle tickets. The raffle will take place after all data collection. ANTICIPATED RISKS AND BENEFITS Some benefits to this experiment are the participants will learn about public goods and how they are maintained. They will become aware of what a public good is. Some examples would be parks, Pandora Radio, and National Public Radio. They will also be entered into a raffle for a $25 prepaid Visa gift card. A risk to this experiment is we will be lying to the participants about who actually scored the highest on their test. We will randomly give one participant 50 points and the other participant 100 points, but the participants will think that if they got the 100 points they scored the highest on their test. However, during debriefing all deception will be revealed and explained. SUBJECT SELECTION Our participants will be students who will be drawn from the SONA subject pool in the Psychology department. We anticipate using approximately 60 participants in the experiment and 20 for pilot testing. CONFIDENTIALITY Records identifying participants will be kept confidential to the extent permitted by applicable laws and regulations and will not be made publicly available. We are required by University policy to keep a copy of the informed consent sheet. That is the only sheet that participants' names will be on through the duration of the experiment. And the raffle tickets to which participants' names will be on at the end will be destroyed immediately after the raffle has taken place. PRIMARY SUPPORTING DOCUMENT Click for Word Document