"Conditional Altruists"
Assurance game, by Daniel Little: How does a group of people succeed in coming together to contribute to a collective project over an extended period of time? [...]Purely self-interested egoists won't make it -- that is the message of Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods
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As Amartya Sen observes in "Rational Fools" (link), "The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron." [...] But we know that this conclusion does a bad job of describing real social life. People in villages, communities, political parties, religious organizations, public television audiences, and ethnic groups do in fact often succeed in getting themselves organized and mobilized in pursuit of a public good for the group.
As Amartya Sen observes in "Rational Fools" (link), "The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron." [...] But we know that this conclusion does a bad job of describing real social life. People in villages, communities, political parties, religious organizations, public television audiences, and ethnic groups do in fact often succeed in getting themselves organized and mobilized in pursuit of a public good for the group.
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Many theories can be articulated in order to account for the spontaneous occurrence of collective action.
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Many real social actors seem to be what might be called "conditional altruists": they are willing to contribute some effort or personal resource to a collective project if they have grounds for confidence that a reasonable number of other members of the group will contribute as well. (Jon Elster explores the idea in The Cement of Society: A Survey of Social Order.)
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Conditional altruism thus attributes a common moral psychology to social actors, which we might refer to as the "fairness factor." Individuals are willing to factor collective goods into their calculation of the costs and benefits of action, and they have some degree of motivation to act in accordance with a proposed collective action that would benefit them even if they could evade participation. They are disposed to act fairly: "If I benefit from the action, I should take my fair share of creating the benefit." (Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment
offers an effort to bring together the evolutionary history of the species with a philosopher's analysis of moral reasoning.)
offers an effort to bring together the evolutionary history of the species with a philosopher's analysis of moral reasoning.)
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If fairness or conditional altruism are real components of human agency (for all or many human beings), then we can identify a few factors that are likely to increase the likelihood of cooperation and collective action. Measures that increase the actor's assurance of the behavior of others will have the effect of eliciting higher levels of collective action. And it is possible to think of quite a few social circumstances that have this effect. A shared history of success in collective action is clearly relevant to current actors' level of assurance about future cooperation.
If fairness or conditional altruism are real components of human agency (for all or many human beings), then we can identify a few factors that are likely to increase the likelihood of cooperation and collective action. Measures that increase the actor's assurance of the behavior of others will have the effect of eliciting higher levels of collective action. And it is possible to think of quite a few social circumstances that have this effect. A shared history of success in collective action is clearly relevant to current actors' level of assurance about future cooperation.
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(Robert Netting, Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture
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So no single answer to the question of collective action seems to work: "people are rational egoists," "people are altruists," or "people are conditional altruists." Rather, a given opportunity for collective action seems to display a mix of all these styles of reasoning. These variations could be the result of several independent factors: differences in the formation of individuals' moral psychology (emphasizing individualism or community from infancy); differences in current institutional settings (arrangements that make future interactions seem more likely to each participant); even potentially differences in personality or the genetic basis of decision-making across individuals.
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Ordinary social experience informs us that people have different levels of willingness to undertake sacrifice for a group's projects.
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Here is an interesting paper by Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt titled "The Economics of Fairness, Reciprocity and Altruism – Experimental Evidence and New Theories."
Via Economist's View: "Conditional Altruists"
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