When Does Reputation Help the Future? Audience Presence and Identity Disclosure in Intergenerational Resource Dilemmas

Many environmental problems, from climate change to resource depletion, are intergenerational dilemmas: the present generation bears conservation costs, whereas the benefits go to future generations, who can neither observe nor reciprocate. Reputation reliably sustains cooperation among contemporaries, but whether it works across generations remains unclear. In two experiments using an intergenerational goods game, we examined how the audience of disclosure and the type of information disclosed affect contributions to a resource passed from one generation to the next, and whether social value orientation (SVO) moderates these effects. In Experiment 1, disclosing to the next generation what participants had contributed increased the rate of sustained generations but did not reliably increase individual contributions or narrow the gap between prosocial and proself individuals. In Experiment 2, disclosing the same information to present peers increased both individual contributions and the rate of sustained generations. Adding names and faces was tentatively associated with a further increase in contributions, although this condition was recruited in a separate wave. These gains came mainly from proself individuals, whose contributions no longer differed from those of prosocial individuals when names and faces were disclosed. The findings suggest that disclosure promotes intergenerational cooperation chiefly when it reaches an audience present at the time of decision, and that identifiability matters most for those least motivated to cooperate. Making conservation visible to future generations may not be enough; it may also need to be visible to someone now, suggesting a potentially low-cost approach to promoting environmental cooperation.