Sustainable behaviour in a single-player resource management game varies with psychological distress, hazardous alcohol use, and impulsivity

Encouraging sustainable use of limited natural, social, and economic resources requires understanding the variety of ways in which people think about how resources work and how they adjust their behaviour (or not) as available resources fluctuate. Previous investigations which have focused on understanding how individuals navigate erodible resources, have tended to use group-based, common pool games. However, such social games make it difficult to disentangle whether resource erosion is linked to difficulty navigating the dynamics of the resource or caused by social factors. Here, in two experiments, we invited 781 participants to play a single-player resource management game in which individuals were invited to harvest monetary rewards from a fully depletable but stochastically replenishing resource over time. We find that the ability to sustain a resource over successive harvesting opportunities (in order to maximise the total harvested rewards) is reliably worse in individuals reporting elevated psychological distress and the often co-occurring hazardous alcohol use. These associations remained substantial once we had accounted for elevated delay discounting rates (as a form of impulsivity and a strong risk factor for alcohol misuse and other health problems). By contrast, individuals who reported higher levels of financial literacy and general well-being achieved better resource outcomes. Since our single-player game did not involve any of the interpersonal processes intrinsic to group-based common pool games, our observations demonstrate that the capacity to respond effectively to the dynamics of a resource are compromised in individuals at risk of psychological and alcohol-related disorders.