Dataset: Sanctions and international interaction improve cooperation to avert climate change

Imposing sanctions on non-compliant parties to international agreements is
advocated as a remedy for international cooperation failure. Nevertheless,
sanctions are costly, and rational choice theory predicts their
ineffectiveness in improving cooperation. We test sanctions effectiveness
experimentally in international collective-risk social dilemmas simulating
efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change. We involve individuals from
countries where sanctions were shown to be effective (Germany) or
ineffective (Russia) in increasing cooperation. Here we show that, while
this result still holds nationally, international interaction backed by
sanctions is beneficial. Cooperation by low cooperator groups increases
relative to national cooperation and converges to the levels of high
cooperators. This result holds regardless of revealing other group
members' nationality, suggesting that participants' specific
attitudes or stereotypes over the other country were irrelevant. Groups
interacting under sanctions contribute more to catastrophe prevention than
what would maximise expected group payoffs. This behaviour signals a
strong propensity for protection against collective risks.