Data and experiment files from: Payoff-based learning best explains the rate of decline in cooperation across 237 public-goods games

What motivates human behaviour in social dilemmas? The results of public goods games are commonly interpreted as showing that humans are altruistically motivated to benefit others. However, there is a competing 'confused learners' hypothesis: that individuals start the game either uncertain or mistaken (confused), and then learn from experience how to improve their payoff (payoff-based learning). We: (1) show that these competing hypotheses can be differentiated by how they predict contributions should decline over time; and (2) use meta-data from 237 published public-goods games to test between these competing hypotheses. We find, as predicted by the confused learners hypothesis, that contributions declined faster when individuals have more influence over their own payoffs. This prediction arises because more influence leads to a greater correlation between contributions and payoffs, facilitating learning. Our results suggest that humans, in general, are not altruistically motivated to benefit others, but instead learn to help themselves.