Community Aspirations and Cooperation: Prescriptive vs.Descriptive Role Models

Marcela Ibanez Diaz,  Menusch Khadjavi and Christina Martini,

This paper examines the hypothesis that cooperation depends on individuals' aspirations for their community welfare. We test whether videos depicting successful examples of collective action or improved living conditions in rural areas can shape community aspirations and increase cooperation among rural communities in Zambia. The results of a lab in the field experiment indicate that compared with the no video condition, unconditional contributions are higher in the video that presents village life while the collective action video does not affect cooperation. When both contributors watch the village life video, conditional contributions are also higher than the control treatment. This result points to the importance of social norms in the evolution of collective action. We find that individual aspirations are significantly negatively related to the unconditional contribution decision, while community aspirations do not correlate with contribution levels.