Intuitive Political Theory
People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6337521 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Descioli (0000-0001-5915-8564, Stony Brook University, corresponding author), Scott E Bokemper (Yale University), Scott Bokemper (0000-0002-9754-4658, Yale University) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 617-636 |
| Publication date | 2019-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-895X • E-ISSN: 1467-9221 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/pops.12528 |
| OpenAlex | W2898306526 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 13 |
| References cited | 80 |
Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying people's intuitive political theory using scenarios about group decisions, and we begin to apply this approach in three experiments. Participants read scenarios in which individuals in a group have conflicting information (Experiment 1), conflicting interests (Experiment 2), and conflicting interests between a majority and a vulnerable minority who have more at stake (Experiment 3). Participants judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. Overall, we find that participants prefer majority‐rule voting over consensus, leadership, and chance when a group has conflicting interests or information. However, participants' support for voting is considerably diminished when the group includes a vulnerable minority. Hence, participants showed an intuitive understanding of Madison's concerns about tyranny of the majority
Group (periodic table · Group Decision Making · Majority rule · Morality · Political science · Politics · Voting · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Law · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology
Consensus, cooperation and collective intelligence in foraging societies
On the origin of laws by natural selection
When should the majority rule
Culture, Status, and Hypocrisy
Intuitions about the epistemic virtues of majority voting
When Should the Majority Rule? Experimental Evidence for Madisonian Judgments in Five Cultures
Strategic Exploitation by Higher-Status People Incurs Harsher Third-Party Punishment
Degree of group consensus shapes perceived power structures and decision-process evaluations of groups
Input from Whom? Public Reactions to Consultation Measures
Can followers detect political leaders who cheat? Testing an evolutionary position
A Leader Who Sees the World as I Do
Who Should Get a Say? Race, Law Enforcement Guidelines, and Systems of Representation
Deliberation and Human Nature
The territorial foundations of human property
The Essential Child
Mindblindness
Governing the Commons
The Possibility of Social Choice
Social Choice Theory
Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing
Building machines that learn and think like people
Cooperation between non-kin in animal societies
Cognitive Development
The four elementary forms of sociality
The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity
Dynamical evolutionary psychology
How to Grow a Mind
Intention, history, and artifact concepts
Mysteries of morality
Representing causation.
Core knowledge
Universal moral grammar
Folk biology and the anthropology of science
Core systems of number
Origins of knowledge.
On The Language Instinct
Social Choice and Individual Values
The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind
The Theory of Committees and Elections
The Group Engagement Model
The Native Mind
Giving to whom? Altruism in different types of relationships
Where Next? Group Coordination and Collective Decision Making by Primates
Problems of Majority Voting
On the Rationale of Group Decision-making
A Case for Happiness, Cardinalism, and Interpersonal Comparability
Mapping the Mind
Enforcement and Compliance in an Uncertain World
Social Welfare and the Psychology of Food Sharing
Taboo Trade‐offs
Evaluating Online Labor Markets for Experimental Research
The Origin of Politics
Maintaining Allegiance toward Political Authorities
Axiomatic Social Choice Theory
Institutional Sources of Legitimate Authority
Is There a Secret Ballot? Ballot Secrecy Perceptions and Their Implications for Voting Behaviour
The naturalness of (many) social institutions
The Robust Beauty of Majority Rules in Group Decisions
People's Judgments About Classic Property Law Cases
A solution to the mysteries of morality
Acquisition of the algorithms of social life
Understandings of Justice
Politics in the Mind's Eye
Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem
Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions
Process Preferences and American Politics
Cognitive Tracks of Cultural Inheritance
Concepts and Folk Theories
| Unique citing works | 13 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,17 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |