High stakes and shared awareness do not prevent commons-style collective failures.

Evidence

A first reaction to an analysis of this sort might be to discount the causal potency of these psychological processes. Given the enormous stakes involved, one might presume that groups and agencies composed of intelligent, dedicated individuals who would confront and creatively resolve whatever problems of cooperation and coordination were necessary to get their work done. There were, after all, compelling incentives for getting it all right: nothing less than the security of the homeland was at stake. Unfortunately, neither the extensive commons dilemma research literature nor the long history of examples that motivated it inspires much optimism in this regard. The tragedy of the commons, after all, is a parable about how difficult it is to slow the march of folly even when all of the participants involved are fully cognizant of just where the march is leading them. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2002

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the assumption that rational, well-incentivized experts overcome coordination problems; parallels the Allport reassessment’s claims about good-faith individuals still exhibiting cognitive failure. — connects to: Collective action against inflation fails because individual restraint could serve it equally. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 148
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, counterintuitive claim: awareness of collective doom is not enough to stop collective folly, which has broad implications for how institutions must be designed against well-intentioned human limits.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2002