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Altruism and Spite in Politics: How the Mind Makes Welfare Tradeoffs About Political Parties

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Abstract

How much will people sacrifice to support or oppose political parties? Extending previous work on the psychology of interpersonal cooperation, we propose that people’s minds compute a distinct cost–benefit ratio—a welfare tradeoff ratio—that regulates their choices to help or hurt political parties. In two experiments, participants decide whether to financially help and hurt the inparty and outparty. The results show that participants were extremely consistent (> 90%) while making dozens of decisions in a randomized order, providing evidence for tradeoff ratios toward parties. Moreover, participants’ ratios correlated in the expected directions with partisanship, political ideology, and feelings of enthusiasm and anger toward each party, corroborating that these ratios are politically meaningful. Generally, most participants were willing to sacrifice at least some money to help their inparty and hurt the outparty. At the same time, a sizable minority hurt their inparty and helped their outparty. Welfare tradeoff ratios push our understanding of partisanship beyond the classic debate about whether voters are rational or irrational. Underneath the turbulent surface of partisan passions hide precise calculations that proportion our altruism and spite toward parties.

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Notes

  1. The WTR formula generalizes a functional form from theories of social interaction in evolutionary biology. The most well-known is Hamilton’s Rule, which holds that organisms help kin when r * b > c, where r is the degree of genetic relatedness (Hamilton, 1964). Another example is reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971) in which individuals cooperate when w * b > c, where w is the probability of interacting with the individual again in future periods (Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981).

  2. Based on the following age brackets: 18–24; 25–34; 35–44; 45–54; 55–64; 65+ .

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Ben Carter for excellent research assistance. We also thank Howie Lavine and John Ryan for their feedback in the early stages of this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Global Asia Institute, National University of Singapore, 10 Lower Kent Ridge Rd, Singapore, 119076, Singapore

    Alessandro Del Ponte

  2. Department of Political Science & Center for Behavioral Political Economy, Stony Brook University, 100 Nicolls Rd, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA

    Andrew W. Delton & Peter DeScioli

  3. College of Business, Stony Brook University, 100 Nicolls Rd, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA

    Andrew W. Delton

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  1. Alessandro Del Ponte
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Del Ponte, A., Delton, A.W. & DeScioli, P. Altruism and Spite in Politics: How the Mind Makes Welfare Tradeoffs About Political Parties. Polit Behav 43, 1289–1310 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09660-z

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