How Do People Frame the Social Dilemmas? The Investigation of the Frames Using Text Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the frames for how people interpret real social dilemma situations. The object of the study is an online public good called “Free Tank”. Previous works, especially experimental works, reports that specific type of frames affect cooperation in social dilemmas. However, it is not obvious that what kind of frames people have in real-world social dilemmas, not in laboratories. This paper contributes to explore frames that people have in the real-world by means of computational social science with big data. Based on the comment data from the use of Free Tank, we extracted and classified the frames by text mining, focusing on the use of different words. As a result, three types of frames were extracted: reciprocal, altruistic, and self-interested frames. In addition, the characteristics of these frames are found.