An open code pledge for the neuroscience community

Sharing of research code would greatly benefit neuroscience, but this practice is hampered by a collective action problem. Since the development of the internet, conditional pledge platforms (e.g., Kickstarter) have increasingly been used to solve globally-dispersed collective action problems (Hallam, 2016). However, this strategy has yet to be implemented within academia. In this brief paper, we introduce a general purpose conditional pledge platform for the research community: Project Free Our Knowledge. We highlight a new conditional pledge campaign that was initiated at Brainhack 2021 and aims to motivate a critical mass of neuroscientists to share their research code. Crucially, this commitment activates only when a user-defined threshold of support is reached. We conclude by sharing our vision for how the research community could use collective action campaigns to create a sustained, evidence-based movement for social change in academia.

Norm-Based Governance for Severe Collective Action Problems: Lessons from Climate Change and COVID-19

The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper-partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to 1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, 2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, 3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and 4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policymakers to respond to these and future collective action challenges.

Challenges for Society

The theories laid out step by step in the preceding chapters are not only of intrinsic scientific interest; they are also potentially of great practical use. Using the UK government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic as an example, this chapter begins by exploring various ways in which attention to our three kinds of interacting landscapes might enable us to tackle various collective action problems more effectively. It then considers how insights from the study of imagistic group bonding could be used to prevent or resolve intergroup conflicts, whether by defusing groups bent on violence or by rechannelling their extreme loyalty to the group in more peaceful and consensual ways. Moving from this to the problems posed by populism and polarization in large groups, attention then turns to the role of the doctrinal mode in fuelling dissent and the breakdown of cooperation, but also its potential to help us coordinate positive action on global issues, such as the climate crisis, more effectively than ever before.

A polycentric approach for pandemic governance: nested externalities and co-production challenges

Political economists assume that global externalities, such as pandemics and climate change, require global or multi-national solutions. Yet, many aspects of these externalities can be addressed at the micro-level. As Elinor Ostrom pointed out, what scholars perceive as global externalities are in fact nested externalities that are organized in multiple, overlapping scales. By drawing on Ostrom's oeuvre, we explore the notions of nested externalities, polycentricity, and co-production in the context of pandemic governance. We highlight two crucial features of pandemics: first, preventative measures such as social distancing are co-production processes that cannot be provided by governments alone. Second, pandemics, much like climate change, pose nested externalities problems at different levels. Thus, pandemic externalities are better viewed as collective action problems arranged at multiple, nested, and/or overlapping scales. Finally, we propose an alternative institutional take that considers the nestedness of pandemic externalities and the diversity in institutional conditions across jurisdictions.

Farm Animal Enclosure Requirements, Industry Concentration, and Supply Chain Dynamics

In this paper, we draw on microeconomic theory to show that farm animal enclosure regulations can and have lead to increased farm-level concentration in affected industries in the U.S. The desirability of this increased concentration is a function of modern industry structures. Farm animal enclosure requirements can push traditional “short” supply chains like eggs toward vertical integration. However, vertically integrated systems (e.g., broiler chickens and hogs) may benefit from the induced farm-level concentration by increasing bargaining power among contract farmers. In all systems, the increased farm-level concentration induced by enclosure requirements may lead to greater ability to solve future collective action problems like wastewater pollution and antimicrobial resistance.

Messages that increase COVID-19 vaccine acceptance: Evidence from online experiments in six Latin American countries

As safe and effective vaccines become widely available, attaining herd immunity and limiting the spread of COVID-19 will depend on individuals choosing to vaccinate—and doing so quickly enough to outpace mutations. Using online surveys conducted across six Latin American countries in January 2021, we experimentally assess messages designed to counteract informational deficiencies and collective action problems that may drive hesitancy. We first find that basic vaccine information persuades around 8% of hesitant individuals to become willing to vaccinate, reduces intended wait to vaccinate by 0.4 months, and increases willingness to encourage others to vaccinate. Rather than facilitating free riding, learning, or social conformity, additional information about others’ behavior increases vaccine acceptance when respondents expect herd immunity will be achieved. Finally, priming the social approval benefits of vaccinating also increases vaccine acceptance. These results suggest that providing information and shaping social expectations and incentives could both significantly increase vaccine uptake.

Individualism during Crises

Individualism has long been linked to economic growth. Using the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that such a culture can hamper the economy's response to crises, a period with heightened coordination frictions. Exploiting variation in US counties’ frontier experience, we show that more individualistic counties engage less in social distancing and charitable transfers, and are less willing to receive COVID-19 vaccines. The effect of individualism is stronger where social distancing has higher externality and holds at the individual level when we exploit migrants for identification. Our results suggest that individualism can exacerbate collective action problems during economic downturns.

The Power of Tolerance vs. Unselfishness as a Cultural Determinant of Cooperation

Cooperation in collective action problems and resource dilemmas is often assumed to depend on the values of the individuals involved, such as their degree of unselfishness and tolerance. Societal differences in cooperation and cooperative norms may therefore result from cultural variation in emphasis on these personal values. Here we draw on several cross-national datasets to examine whether society-level emphasis on unselfishness and tolerance and respect for other people predict how societies vary in cooperation [in a continuous prisoner’s dilemma (PD)] and in norms governing cooperation [in a common pool resource dilemma (CPR)]. The results suggest that high levels of cooperation and cooperative norms are promoted specifically by a cultural emphasis on tolerance.

Does Power Always Flow to the Executive? Interbranch Oscillations in Legislative Authority, 1976–2014

Is legislative power flowing to the executive branch over time? Beginning in the 1990s, comparativists began to investigate delegation to the executive under different executive formats. Hypothesized causes include collective action problems due to legislative fractionalization, the presence of a dominant pro-executive faction, preference congruence vis-à-vis the head of government, and challenges posed by economic crises. We test these four hypotheses on a data set containing 2,020 country-year observations of democracies and semi-democracies between 1976 and 2014. Using V-Dem data, we derive annualized measures of shifts in executive–legislative relationships. Contrary to stereotypes of executive dominance, relative gains by legislatures are no less frequent than gains by executives, and economic crises do not advantage political executives in consistent ways. Surprisingly, some of the factors expected to benefit executives seem to enhance assembly authority as well. Robust democracy maintains interbranch power relations in equilibrium, while lower levels of polyarchy are associated with greater ‘noise’ in the relationship.