Cognitive and Social Processes of Persons Facing a Socio-ecological Dilemma

This paper describes a planned experiment for investigating the effects of communication on decisions of persons facing a socio-ecological or common-pool resource (CPR) dilemma. The focus is on the psychological processes that mediate the effects that different contents and forms of communication have on the decisions of the subjects. A model of latent psychological constructs and processes is developed, which forms the basis for the experimental design and data analysis. Further, the model will be implemented as agent-based computer simulation for further investigating the cognitive and social processes involved in decision making with and without communication. The experiment is still in the design phase. Thus, the focus of this paper is on the model and the experimental paradigm and possibilities and problems of this new approach are discussed.