Are You a Team Player? Public Goods Game and Cooperation in the Context of Project‐Based Learning.

Cooperation is essential for better institutions, governance, public health and economic growth. Experimental studies have shown both time decay of cooperation in repeated games and stable cooperation over longer time frames based on personality traits. As the long‐term effect of interventions on cooperative behaviour has received less attention, we investigate whether a relatively low‐intensity intervention can change cooperative behaviour over the course of 15 weeks. Specifically, we test experimentally if instruction with collaborative project‐based learning (PBL) can boost cooperative behaviour during a semester as compared to a more traditional instructional approach with individual assignments. Using contributions in a one‐shot public goods game (PGG) and cooperative attitudes from a self‐report scale, we find no evidence that our intervention on average increases cooperation for PBL students compared to non‐PBL students. However, we demonstrate that in this PBL intervention, subjects with lower initial cooperation levels became more cooperative, underscoring the potential of these findings for social and public policies targeted at heterogeneous societies. Interestingly, cooperative attitudes remain consistent over time and have limited correlation with cooperative behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]