SOCIAL DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES AND THE EQUAL PARTITIONMENT OF SHARED RESOURCES

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that group members will be more likely to use the prominent social decision making rule of "divide equally" when they share resources that are partitioned into equal units than when they share nonpartitioned resources. In Experiment 1, subjects were either the first of 3 or the first of 12 group members to draw from a shared resource that was either partitioned or nonpartitioned. The results showed that subjects were most likely to violate the equal division rule when they were members of 12-person groups drawing from a nonpartitioned resource. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that this result was due to the greater size of the nonpartitioned resource for large groups. Experiment 3 examined the idea that people's ability to divide a nonpartitioned resource equally decreases as the number of members in their group increases. The results showed that although there is some evidence for an inverse relationship between this ability and group size, there is stronger evidence that members of large groups are simply less motivated to divide equally than are members of small groups. These data suggest that a partitioned arrangement of a shared resource may inhibit its overconsumption. © 1992.