The Behavioral Logic of Collective Action: Partisans Cooperate and Punish More Than Nonpartisans

Smirnov, Oleg; Dawes, Christopher T.; Fowler, James H.; Johnson, Tim; McElreath, Richard

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9221.2010.00768.x

Cited by 22 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Clearly, party identification helps individuals overcome the disincentive to participate. In fact, party identification increases cooperation in collective action games and even boosts willingness to pay a personal cost to punish free riders (Smirnov, Dawes, Fowler, Johnson, & McElreath, ). But what is it about party identification that makes people think and act this way?…”

Section: Identity Emotion and Cooperationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Rescue: How Affect Helps Partisans Overcome Collective Action Problems

Groenendyk

Banks

2013

Political Psychology

124

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Why does party identification motivate citizens to participate in politics? From a theoretical standpoint, it is in a partisan's self-interest to free ride on the efforts of others. Yet, mere identification with a party is enough to motivate many people to overcome this structural hurdle. We theorize that, by virtue of aligning one's self with a party, individuals become more likely to react to their political environment with anger and enthusiasm rather than fear. Anger and enthusiasm are associated with approach and continuation of current behavior, while fear triggers behavior reconsideration. In short, party identification stimulates participation via anger and enthusiasm. On the other hand, fear produces thought but not much action. We find support for our model using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) and an original laboratory experiment.

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Section: Identity Emotion and Cooperationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Rescue: How Affect Helps Partisans Overcome Collective Action Problems

Groenendyk

Banks

2013

Political Psychology

124

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“…Biologically-informed studies have tested predictions related to the idea that modern humans' representations of political parties are shaped by a psychology of coalitional alliances: decreasing testosterone levels (a correlate of status loss) is observed among individuals who vote for a loosing political party (Apicella & Cesarini, 2011;Stanton et al, 2009), partisanship plays a significant role in assortative mating today (as more classical group identities such as religion and race also do) (Alford et al, 2011), and partisans have been found to be more likely to contribute to public goods and punish in economic games (a correlate of a disposition to engage in collective action; Smirnov et al, 2010). Importantly, for the purpose of the present study, these past studies assume that political affiliations are cognitively represented as alliances and test predictions that only indirectly bear on this claim.…”

Section: The Psychology Of Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

et al. 2015

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!Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (1) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and (2) if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants' categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue (in this case the target's race). Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race-such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support-categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age (neither of which is predicted to be primarily an alliance category). As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind's systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: (1) that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and (2) that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race.!

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“…In conditions without punishment, participants contributed, on average, 3.7 units of a 20-point endowment (18.5%) to the public good, whereas they contributed an average of 11.5 points of their 20point endowment (57.5%) in conditions involving punishment-a 39-percentage-point increase. Subsequent research has explained how decentralized altruistic punishment figures centrally in humanity's large-scale cooperation (Bowles & Gintis, 2011;Fischbacher & Fehr, 2003) and appears prevalent among individuals who participate in collective endeavors that exhibit the social dilemma's incentive structure (Smirnov, Dawes, Fowler, Johnson, & McElreath, 2010). The role of decentralized costly punishment in addressing the social dilemmas involved in the COVID-19 response, however, warrants careful consideration.…”

Section: Bolstering Mandatory Cooperative Measures Via Altruistic Punmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slowing COVID-19 transmission as a social dilemma: Lessons for government officials from interdisciplinary research on cooperation

Johnson

Dawes

Fowler

et al. 2020

JBPA

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To reduce transmission of COVID-19, public officials must help their communities resolve a series of novel social dilemmas. For instance, when social distancing becomes widespread, the likelihood of COVID-19 exposure decreases, thus tempting individuals to leave their homes while others stay sheltered. Yet, if all indulge that temptation, then rates of transmission will increase: everyone would have fared better by cooperatively staying at home. Past research has studied such social dilemmas to understand why cooperation occurs despite incentives that conspire against it. In this narrative review, we select relevant insights from this literature to inform COVID-19 response and we structure those insights around the response stages that government officials face. Together, the measures that we identify can ameliorate the social dilemmas born from the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The Behavioral Logic of Collective Action: Partisans Cooperate and Punish More Than Nonpartisans

Cited by 22 publications

References 40 publications

Emotional Rescue: How Affect Helps Partisans Overcome Collective Action Problems

Emotional Rescue: How Affect Helps Partisans Overcome Collective Action Problems

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

Slowing COVID-19 transmission as a social dilemma: Lessons for government officials from interdisciplinary research on cooperation

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