AI Persuasive Framing in Collective Dilemmas

AI agents are promising tools that can act as flexible behavioral nudges to enhance human cooperation in addressing large-scale societal problems.

However, evidence on whether AI agents can effectively boost cooperation remains mixed.

We recruited 1,283 participants to play iterated Collective Risk Games in small groups, testing whether AI assistants could nudge participants toward cooperation.

By using persuasive framing personalized to each player's Social Value Orientation profile, the AI interventions significantly increased contributions and group success rates.

These cooperative effects were short-lived, however, fading after the first few rounds.

Strikingly, when the AI treatments were reconfigured to promote selfish behavior through exculpatory framing, the negative effects on contributions and group success were larger and substantially more persistent, particularly for personalized interventions.

This asymmetry between prosocial and antisocial persuasion highlights the dual-use risks of AI systems designed to influence group behavior in collective action settings.