Harsh but Expedient: Dominant Leaders Increase Group Cooperation via Threat of Punishment

Dominant leadership is, surprisingly, on the rise globally. Previous studies have found that intergroup conflict increases followers’ support for dominant leaders, but identifying the potential benefits that such leaders can supply is crucial to explaining their rise. We took a behavioral-economics approach in Study 1 ( N = 288 adults), finding that cooperation among followers increases under leaders with a dominant reputation. This pattern held regardless of whether dominant leaders were assigned to groups, elected through a bidding process, or leading under intergroup competition. Moreover, Studies 2a to 2e ( N = 1,022 adults) show that impressions of leader dominance evoked by personality profiles, authoritarian attitudes, or physical formidability similarly increase follower cooperation. We found a weaker but nonsignificant trend when dominance was cued by facial masculinity and no evidence when dominance was cued by aggressive disposition in a decision game. These findings highlight the unexpected benefits that dominant leaders can bestow on group cooperation through threat of punishment.

Supernatural punishment beliefs as manipulated explanations of misfortune

Why do humans develop beliefs apparently well-suited to promote prosociality, such as beliefs in moralistic supernatural punishment? Leading hypotheses regard such beliefs to be group-level cultural adaptations, shaped by intergroup competition to facilitate cooperation. We present a complementary model in which cognitive mechanisms and strategic interactions produce and stabilize such beliefs. People incentivize others’ cooperation through behaviors such as punishment, moralistic narratives, and, we suggest, claims of supernatural punishment. These overcome mechanisms of epistemic vigilance by posing as explanations of misfortune and containing threatening information, as well as potentially appealing to justice intuitions and aligning with signaling incentives. Explaining religious belief requires considering both people’s motivations to invest in the production of supernatural narratives and the reasons others adopt them.

The Role of Culture in Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation

Evolutionarily-minded scholars working on the most puzzling aspects of human cooperation-one-shot, anonymous interactions among non-kin where reputational information is not available-can be roughly divided into two camps. In the first, researchers argue for the existence of evolved capacities for genuinely altruistic human cooperation, and in their models emphasize the role of intergroup competition and selection, as well as group norms and markers of membership that reduce intragroup variability. Researchers in the second camp explain cooperation in terms of individual-level decision-making facilitated by evolved cognitive mechanisms associated with well-established self- and kin-maximization models, as well as by ‘misfires’ that may result from these mechanisms interacting with novel environments. This essay argues that the manner in which culture provides information that de-anonymizes intragroup strangers suggests that neither evolved capacities for genuine altruism nor widespread misfires are necessary to account for anonymous, one-shot cooperation.

Do Voters Respond to Cross-Ethnic Campaigning inDivided Societies?

In order to comply with electoral rules incentivizing cross-ethnic mobilization, candidates in divided societies often campaign in opponents’ strongholds among non-coethnics. In this paper, we show that such cross-ethnic campaign rallies may actually depress outgroup candidates’ support among non-coethnics. We argue that candidates’ holding of campaign rallies in non-coethnic constituencies can inadvertently trigger perceptions of intergroup competition, increase the salience of ethnicity, and depress support for non-coethnic candidates. We leverage a natural experiment that exploits the timing of an unscheduled campaign rally held by a presidential candidate in a non-coethnic county in his opponent’s stronghold during Kenya’s 2017 election. In comparing survey respondents before and after the rally, we find that the candidate’s post-rally favorability significantly decreased among non-coethnic voters, while the proportion of voters identifying in ethnic terms simultaneously increased. These findings have important implications for the efficacy of institutional design to promote cross-ethnic political mobilization in polarized societies.

Intergroup Competition Mitigates Effects of Reward Structure on Preference-Consistency Bias and Group Decision Failure

Group discussion often becomes one-sided and confirmatory, with poor decisions as the unfortunate outcome. Here we examine whether intergroup competition amplifies or mitigates effects of individual versus team reward on information sharing biases and group decision quality. Individuals (N = 309) in 103 interacting groups were given private information on four decision alternatives and discussed a joint decision. Private information was distributed such that groups faced a “hidden profile” in which pushing for initial preferences and commonly held information prohibits the group from finding the best alternative. Group members were rewarded for team or individual performance, and groups faced intergroup competition or not. Whereas intergroup competition did not influence common-information bias, we find that when intergroup competition is absent, groups under individual (versus team) reward have stronger preference-consistency bias and make poorer decisions. When intergroup competition is present, however, groups under individual reward perform as good as groups under team reward. Results resonate with the possibility that intergroup competition overshadows within-group rivalry, and can promote even-handed discussions within small groups of decision-makers.

Who is the “WE” that could include immigrants? Different aspects of common ingroups and intergroup competition

The present experimental study, with Greek participants, investigates whether some common ingroups that potentially can include immigrants, in interaction with intergroup competition present more threat for local populations. Results indicate that when the common ingroup is defined as maintaining different memberships (“inhabitants of the country”), redirecting competition towards other outgroups ( other countries) is beneficial to perceptions of migrants. On the contrary, when the common ingroup is presented as blending memberships and presenting commonalities between groups ( “workers”), redirecting competition towards an outgroup ( employers) could be detrimentaland produce almost similar results with an intergroup situation where common membership is not salient. These findings have implications both in relation to social psychological theory of Common Ingroup Identity but also in relation to immigrants’ requests for identification and integration.