Ideological Motives and Group Decision-Making

Abstract

This paper studies experimentally when and how ideological motives shape group decision-making outcomes. Groups repeatedly decide between a monetarily preferred outcome that generates a high payoff but also an ideologically undesirable externality, or an ideologically preferred outcome that generates a low payoff and no externality. Groups that disagree forgo all payoffs. We find that groups which disagree initially are more likely to end up agreeing on the ideologically preferred outcome. We classify participants into ideologically motivated and payoff motivated types and show that this effect stems from the fact that ideologically motivated types are less likely to give in after disagreements. Heterogeneous groups disagree more often and, thus, foster agreements on the ideologically preferred outcome. Our treatments show that, due to this mechanism, large groups are more likely to implement the ideologically preferred outcome than small groups. Furthermore, an additional treatment provides a rationale for why and evidence that it matters for individual ideological commitment and its influence on group outcomes whether the externality is ideologically undesirable or desirable. Theoretically, we show that our results are best explained by the predictions of a model of fixed ideological preferences.