The naturalness of (many) social institutions: evolved cognition as their foundation

Boyer, Pascal; Petersen, Michael Bang

doi:10.1017/s1744137411000300

Cited by 53 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 74 publications

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“…Table shows a selection of research on intuitive theories from psychology and cognitive science. Despite this large, interdisciplinary literature bearing on the nature of human cognition, the notion of intuitive theories has rarely been discussed or applied in political psychology or political science (but see Boyer & Petersen, ).…”

Section: Intuitive Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide

DeScioli

Bokemper

2018

Political Psychology

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Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying people's intuitive political theory using scenarios about group decisions, and we begin to apply this approach in three experiments. Participants read scenarios in which individuals in a group have conflicting information (Experiment 1), conflicting interests (Experiment 2), and conflicting interests between a majority and a vulnerable minority who have more at stake (Experiment 3). Participants judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. Overall, we find that participants prefer majority‐rule voting over consensus, leadership, and chance when a group has conflicting interests or information. However, participants' support for voting is considerably diminished when the group includes a vulnerable minority. Hence, participants showed an intuitive understanding of Madison's concerns about tyranny of the majority.

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Section: Intuitive Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide

DeScioli

Bokemper

2018

Political Psychology

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“…One level of explanation addresses properties of populations that individual minds might process-local practices, shared beliefs and ideologies, collective identities, and recent history (2). A second, independent level of explanation asks which specific psychological mechanisms participate in forming the individual's response to a policy-that is, what interpretive, emotional, and motivational systems are activated by external inputs, shaping the response (3,4). Here, we explore this second level of explanation.…”

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confidence: 99%

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Sznycer

Seal

Sell

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems-compassion, self-interest, and envy-guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.[M]ore recently the "Greatest happiness principle" has been brought prominently forward. It is, however, more correct to speak of the latter principle as the standard, and not as the motive of conduct.-Charles Darwin (1) W hy do people support social policies? One level of explanation addresses properties of populations that individual minds might process-local practices, shared beliefs and ideologies, collective identities, and recent history (2). A second, independent level of explanation asks which specific psychological mechanisms participate in forming the individual's response to a policy-that is, what interpretive, emotional, and motivational systems are activated by external inputs, shaping the response (3, 4). Here, we explore this second level of explanation. We investigate several evolved psychological mechanisms to see to what degree they pattern the individual's response to economic redistribution. We also investigate the extent to which a taste for fairness shapes support for redistribution.By economic redistribution, we mean the modification of a distribution of resources across a population as the result of a political process. In the case of progressive redistribution (henceforth, redistribution)-a policy for which there is large worldwide demand (5, 6)-the ostensible group-level goal is to even out a skewed statistical distribution by transferring resources from the better off to the less well off. However, it is possible that the public rationale for supporting a policy is distinct from the private or even nonconscious motives of individuals supporting (or opposing) it. It is important to recognize that such a transformation in the distribution of resources does not necessarily entail conservation of a fixed and ...

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“…Economic institutions, in the form of property rights and contractualisation, are influenced by the characteristics of trade, cultural stereotypes (Boyer & Petersen, 2012) and elements of human behaviour. Furthermore, institutions are shaping each agent's action (Hédoin, 2012).…”

Section: Cultural Background and Transaction Costsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Entrepreneurship, Transaction Costs and Cultural Background

Petrakis¹,

Valsamis²

2013

IBR

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This paper aims to explore the connections between transaction costs and economic institutions on the one hand, and the group of variables describing cultural background on the other. By improving transaction characteristics and economic institutions, we can increase the entrepreneurship rates of the society. The paper tries to explore this relationship. Transaction cost and institutional variables are analysed using a principal component analysis and OLS. The results confirm the original working hypothesis of the existence of a relationship between transaction costs and culture. The component of cultural characteristics having a pro-growth orientation reduces transaction costs and enhances economic institutions, while the component of cultural characteristics that are reflected in the pro-social characteristics of cultural background increase it. A positive relationship between entrepreneurial variable and the transaction and economic institutions is revealed.

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The naturalness of (many) social institutions: evolved cognition as their foundation

Cited by 53 publications

References 74 publications

Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide

Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Entrepreneurship, Transaction Costs and Cultural Background

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