Abstract
To examine whether political orientation is reflected in actual behavior, we applied classical paradigms of behavioral economics, namely the Public-Goods- (PGG) and the Trust-Game (TG) which constitute measures of cooperativeness, interpersonal trust and reciprocity respectively in a large German sample of N = 454. Participants intending to vote for right-of-center-parties showed significantly lower monetary transfers in both games than those intending to vote for left-of-center-parties. Accordingly, both scores were negatively associated with self-assessed conservatism and support for policies advocated by Germany’s right-of-center-parties, while showing positive correlations with the support of policies left-of-center-parties advocate. Interestingly, both measures also show distinct correlational patterns with Right-Wing-Authoritarianism and Social-Dominance-Orientation. None of these patterns applied to the Lottery-Game measuring unspecific risk-tolerance. We conclude by discussing potential psychological mechanisms mediating the relationships between ideology and actual social behavior as well as differences in experimental design to explain the deviant pattern of (null-) results in former studies relating ideology to behavior in game-theoretic paradigms.
Highlights
Psychology is a behavioral science, in the field of political psychology, studies investigating the relationship between political orientation and actual social behavior are relatively scarce unless overtly political behavior is concerned or social behavior is defined very widely to encompass for example reactions to threatening stimuli
A promising approach would be the use of well-validated paradigms informed by game-theory, representing controlled situations in which behavioral decisions directly impact participants outcomes (Fehr and Schmidt 1999). These games may be seen as variations of the classical and well-known Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), because consistently a social dilemma is constructed mainly by preventing communication among the players: The common benefit of players can be maximized by cooperative behavior, while the individual decision of one player is made under uncertainty about how the other(s) will react (Deutsch 1949, 1958)
Apart from the field of political psychology, research using those paradigms is rich and has led to diverse valuable insights regarding for example the development of trust, reciprocity and cooperation (Fehr and Schmidt 1999), potential biological influences on trustbehavior, with a strong focus on the Oxytocin-System (Baumgartner et al 2008; De Dreu et al 2010; Kosfeld et al 2005; Lane et al 2013; Mikolajczak et al 2010; Zak et al 2007; for a critical discussion based on heterogenous findings see Nave et al 2015) or the influence of personality traits as Machiavellianism on decision-making (Gunnthorsdottir et al 2002)
Summary
Psychology is a behavioral science, in the field of political psychology, studies investigating the relationship between political orientation and actual social behavior are relatively scarce unless overtly political behavior is concerned (e.g. voting, protesting, petitions etc.) or social behavior is defined very widely to encompass for example reactions to threatening stimuli This imbalance recently led Jost (2017) to point to the question whether ideological differences could be confined to self-report-measures and of little relevance to actual behavior. A promising approach would be the use of well-validated paradigms informed by game-theory, representing controlled situations in which behavioral decisions directly impact participants (monetary) outcomes (Fehr and Schmidt 1999). Apart from the field of political psychology, research using those paradigms is rich and has led to diverse valuable insights regarding for example the development of trust, reciprocity and cooperation (Fehr and Schmidt 1999), potential biological influences on trustbehavior, with a strong focus on the Oxytocin-System (Baumgartner et al 2008; De Dreu et al 2010; Kosfeld et al 2005; Lane et al 2013; Mikolajczak et al 2010; Zak et al 2007; for a critical discussion based on heterogenous findings see Nave et al 2015) or the influence of personality traits as Machiavellianism on decision-making (Gunnthorsdottir et al 2002). Brocklebank et al (2011) showed, that a game-derived factor of prosocial orientation is predicted by openness, emotional stability and low extraversion and Lönnqvist et al (2011) showed similar correlations between these traits and the transferred amount in a Trust-Game
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