Cooperation and cognition gaps for salinity: A field experiment of information provision

Salinity along with climate change has devastating effects on people’s life, and thus, adaptation & mitigation strategies are needed to cope with its risks. Literature establishes an existence of cooperation & cognition gaps due to informational and residential differences that make the strategies’ implementation difficult. While little is known about how such gaps can be reduced, we hypothesize that information provision about salinity through some lecture is effective at reducing cooperation gaps among people by influencing their cognition in urban and rural areas. We conduct a survey experiment, collecting data on donations, prosociality, cognitive and sociodemographic factors of 900 subjects from one urban and two rural areas in Bangladesh. A climate donation game is instituted to measure cooperation among people where they are asked to donate to salinity risk reduction with or without the information provision. The analysis shows that people who have prosocial orientation and perception of human-induced climate change donate more than do those who do not, and urban people tend to donate less than do rural people. However, urban people are identified to increase their donations by receiving the information provision much more than do rural people. These results can be interpreted that urban people become more cooperative in response to the lecture than do rural people, and cooperation gaps become smaller due to a change in cognition via information provision. Overall, the results demonstrate that informational and education programs for salinity and climate change shall be effective and prioritized especially in urban areas to enhance cooperation for SDGs through affecting people’s cognition.