“Paradoxical” effects of altruism on efforts to mitigate climate change
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17535-y
By conventional reasoning, individuals that care more about the welfare of others would be expected to alter their behavior in a way to preserve the common good (the Earth’s climate or any other public resource). However, the researchers who wrote this article found that often times inside their societal model, increasing levels of altruism actually altered an individual’s behavior to drive individuals to consume more of the public resource than they needed to.
Specifically, the researchers modeled each individual as aiming to maximize their own social utility, which is a function of their own consumption, the consumption of other individuals with which they serve an altruistic bond multiplied by some altruism factor, and the quality of the public resource that degenerates with increased consumption. The quality of the public resource affects the social utility of every single player. Each player has some available income, which they will partition into their own consumption, the consumption of those who they are altruistically connected to, or save to remain in the public resource. The maximum possible sum of individual social utilities is calculated using the partial derivatives, and referred to as the social optimum. The consumption at the social optimum is compared with the consumption at the Nash equilibrium, where each player acts in their own best interests. This type of analysis is related to our own in class discussions on Nash equilibriums, and specifically I thought it might be similar to the paradox where adding more roads led to more traffic. The ratio between consumption at Nash equilibrium and consumption at social optimum and is referred to as over-consumption, and is used as the outstanding metric for the rest of the article.
The results of the researchers findings were that increased altruism only lead to less over-consumption when the entire network was altruistically connected. In this case, consumption approached that of the social optimum as the altruism factor increased. In other cases where the graph was only partially altruistically connected increased levels of altruism resulted in some critical altruism factor, where further increases past that point only resulted in over-consumption. The payoff from consuming more began to outweigh the payoff of preserving the quality of the public resource. This makes sense in terms of the model used by the paper- the larger altruism factor would begin to overpower the return of saving some of the available income to stay in the public resource. My initial impression upon reading the article was that the altruism factor was misleading, because it did not also affect how connected the graphs were. I had assumed altruism was the likeliness of an individual to help any other person, not just those close to them. And thankfully, increasing levels of altruism do eventually converge the Nash equilibrium consumption with the social optimal consumption when the graph is fully connected, suggesting that there should be greater cooperation between people in the world to produce optimal results when it comes to preserving a shared resource.