Learning Through Play: Building Cooperative Capacities to Overcome Social Challenges

This study examines whether cooperative perceptions, preferences, skills, and behaviors can be shaped through structured, game-based interventions. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment centered on a cooperative card game, we tested whether game play, paired with reflective learning, can foster both the motivation and the ability to cooperate. We find that while belief change was limited by ceiling effects among participants with strong baseline prosocial views, the intervention significantly increased preferences for cooperation, improved cooperative skills, and led to more cooperative behavior, particularly when a game experience is paired with reflective learning. We also observe variation in treatment effects by socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, with impacts being stronger among participants with higher education and income levels, and among those already concerned with inequality and climate change (examples of cooperative social challenges).Our findings highlight the relevance of understanding cooperation as a learnable practice, and points to the importance of combining both action and reflection in the design of cooperation-building tools.