Beyond Surveys: What Games Tell Us About Liberals & Conservatives
(This is a Literature Review article. It includes links to all sources used, but it has not been “peer-reviewed” itself. I am posting it to provoke thought and further research.)
Imagine you’ve agreed to play a game for psychological research. No response is “right” or “wrong.” The experimenter says you’ve been given a fixed amount of money and the option to contribute some or all of that money to a fund that earns interest. The catch is, at the end of the game, all of the money in that fund will distributed equally to all of the players — regardless of whether they contributed to the fund. Would you contribute to the fund? Not everyone gives the same answer. But there are patterns to their answers.
Social groups are composed of individuals. Individuals have psychological differences. Over the past few decades, we’ve learned that those differences include differences in value priorities. Moreover, there are patterns to those differences.
Many political psychologists call these patterns “political orientations.” A lot of their research has relied on surveys that ask participants to report their beliefs, values, attitudes and preferences. I’ve written several articles about their discoveries [such as this one]. But surveys aren’t perfect. Some people might be dishonest. The questions themselves might be biased.
Yet researchers using game experiments appear to be uncovering similar phenomena. And these game experiments don’t have the same issues as surveys: “actions speak louder than words,” as we say. What you do in the game reveals what you really value, and how much. So game experiments give us another way to test relationships between personal value priorities and “political orientations,” such as “Conservative” and “Liberal.”
A variety of these games have been developed by Social Psychologists. Among the most popular are “The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” “The Dictator Game,” “The Ultimatum Game” and “The Public Goods Game.” You can click on their names to get Wikipedia descriptions. I want to focus on what we’ve learned from these experiments.
One lesson has been that different people have different goals when they engage in a social exchange. We often assume that everyone acts on the basis of their self-interest, just concerning themselves with what they will personally gain from an exchange. Game experimenters have found this isn’t true. Some players behave this way. Experimenters have given this type of player labels like “proself,” “self-oriented” and “individualist.” But they’ve also found players who consider the outcomes for other participants in the exchange, players who are sensitive to inequity and seek equality of outcomes. Researchers have given this kind of player labels like “prosocial,” “communally-oriented” and “socially-oriented.” Some experimenters say there’s a third type of player, a “competitor,” one who is “competition-oriented” and “seeks to enhance the difference between outcomes for self and others in favor of the self.” But “competitors” are ultimately a lot like “individualists:” in the end, they are attempting to maximize their personal gain. “Prosocials,” on the other hand, differ from both “competitors” and “individualists” in their concern for the outcomes of other participants.
Game experimenters then discovered that these social value orientations — “individualist” and “prosocial” — were associated with real-world preferences, actions and attitudes:
- “…there is a spontaneous cooperation effect for prosocial but not for proself [‘individualist’] persons.”
- “Participants classified having a prosocial value orientation showed higher voluntary tax compliance compared to participants with a proself [‘individualist’] value orientation..”
- “Relative to individualists and competitors, prosocials reported to engage in a greater number of donations, especially donations to organizations aimed at helping the poor and the ill.”
- [With regard to a proposed program to reduce transportation pollution,] “Proself participants were more likely to send letters opposing the program, whereas prosocial participants were more likely to send letters of support…proself participants reported higher perceptions of personal costs associated with the program.”
- “…prosocials, relative to proselves, exhibited greater preferences for commuting by public transportation, and were more concerned with the collective outcomes (i.e., environment) of their decisions.”
Experimenters decided to check whether there were any links between these social value orientations and the values identified by Shalom Schwartz in his “Theory of Basic Values.” That’s a set of values theoretically held by people everywhere, to different degrees: the values of “universalism,” benevolence, conformity, tradition, security, power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, and self-direction. Schwartz theorizes that “universalism” [concern for all people and for nature] combines with benevolence to form the motivation of “self-transcendence.” Power and achievement combine to form the motivation of “self-enhancement.” I mention these two value combinations, or motivations, because they did pop out in the research on Schwartz values and “Social Value Orientation” [“SVO”]:
- “…we found egoistic concerns to be positively correlated with self-enhancement and negatively with self-transcendence…individualists and competitors (i.e., proselfs) scored significantly higher on egoistic environmental concerns than did people with a pro-social value orientation.”
- “…we expected self-transcendence to be positively associated with more prosocial orientations…Our main result confirmed that self-transcendence was positively correlated with SVO….”
In other words, “proselfs” placed greater value on power and achievement (“self-enhancement”), and “prosocials” placed greater value on univeralism and benevolence (“self-transcendence”). This sounds familiar. In two previous essays [here and here], I wrote about “Social Dominance Orientation” and its links to Schwartz values. “Social Dominance Orientation,” or “SDO,” is described as “…a general attitudinal orientation toward intergroup relations, reflecting whether one generally prefers such relations to be equal, versus hierarchical, that is, ordered along a superior-inferior dimension…people who are more social-dominance oriented will tend to favor hierarchy-enhancing ideologies and policies, whereas those lower on SDO will tend to favor hierarchy-attenuating ideologies and policies.” Psychologist Bob Altemeyer investigated this concept and found that there was a strong association between people who were more social-dominance oriented and greater value for “Power,” as defined by Shalom Schwartz: the value of “Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.”
So it looks like “Social Value Orientation” research is uncovering value associations like those found in surveys of “Social Dominance Orientation.” The “individualists” and “competitors” identified in SVO game experiments are like the subjects who score high for SDO: they are most concerned with getting what they want and coming out on top, so they place a higher value on Power, for the motive of self-enhancement.
Studies have already established that certain Schwartz values are associated with political preferences:
- “Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition.” [italics added]
- “Study 1 showed that a proself orientation was associated to right-wing political orientation through the mediation of RWA [‘Right-Wing Authoritarianism’] and SDO [‘Social Dominance Orientation’]…Study 3 indicated that a proself orientation was related to prejudice through the intervention of social worldviews, RWA and SDO.” [italics added]
The same is true for SVO: “…people with individualistic and competitive orientations are more likely to hold conservative political preferences and to vote for conservative parties than are people with prosocial orientations.” [italics added]
Is this a matter of different reasoning or different impulse? A team of neuroscientists investigated this question, using the “Social Value Orientation” paradigm. First they identified test individuals as “prosocial,” “individualist” or “competitive,” based on a task of money distribution. Then they asked the test individuals to indicate a level of preference for various reward distributions. The neuroscientists then scanned the brains of the test individuals and found that, when there was a big difference in rewards, prosocials showed increased amygdala activity, whereas individualists showed only a slight correlation. The reaction did not involve the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with calculation. The researchers therefore concluded that the prosocial response to large differences in rewards was more of an intuitive response, i.e., more of an impulse.
Why does all this matter? First, the research on Social Value Orientation (SVO) adds to the knowledge we’ve gained from research on Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). We’ve learned a lot about the differences between Conservatives and Liberals in their value priorities and motivations. I hope the scientists investigating these concepts compare notes and share ideas, to expand our knowledge of political psychology even further. Second, the research on SVO research helps to further explain differences in ideologies and policy goals of political parties and factions. For example, I think SVO research helps to explain the Republican Party’s focus on individual, rather than cooperative, responses to social problems. Their “individualist” SVO inclines them against prosocial — “socialist” — government policies.
That second point is the reason I’ve written this essay and posted it now. I’ve been reading the the history of US political parties and trying to identify the value priorities and political orientations of their members over time. As in the case of the Republican Party, the results of SVO research add a helpful dimension. Since I hope to post my findings some day, I thought it best to introduce this research first.
AFTERNOTES:
Based on my reading of the literature on political psychology, I’ve mostly been analyzing political behavior in terms of RWA/SDO inclinations and their associated Schwartz values. Professional treatments of this approach have been presented by Christopher David DeSante, in his “Theory of Values-Based Partisanship,” and John T. Jost et al. in their theory of “Motivated Social Cognition.” They use different terminologies, but I think they’re presenting the same or similar ideas.
I also sense that this is the root of the Optimates-Populares distinction observed by Cicero, Machiavelli and others. That was the thesis of another article I wrote.
