A behavioral experimental approach to understanding coupled human-water systems

Keywords: behavioral experiment, human-water interactions, collective action, resilience
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 9

Abstract

Economic behavioral experiments are increasingly used to study human interactions with the environment. A key advantage of such controlled behavioral experiments is their procedural control that creates a quintessential “micro society” participated by real human-subjects, through which detailed observations of individual decisions under various contexts become possible. This enables precise hypothesis-testing about how individual and collective human behavioral responses unfold under various physical, social, or policy conditions. At the same time, a content analysis and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) can be performed on group chat or communication data among human-subjects that spontaneously arise during experimental sessions, enabling discovery of new hypotheses and qualitative insights. In this presentation, we report a set of interactive behavioral experiments that we have worked on to study human-water interactions. These experiments are designed to study the sustainability and resilience of infrastructure-dependent systems in the face of internal social dilemmas or external environmental variability. Multiple experimental studies have been carried out to date that are framed as irrigation infrastructure and public water supply system. For each study, we report key hypotheses tested, experimental design, and the results of data collected from running the experiment with human-subjects, including those based on a content analysis of group chat data. We conclude by discussing the potential of and various ways that economic behavioral experiments can be used to further the study of coupled human-water systems.