Policy with concentrated costs often faces intense localized opposition. Both private and governmental actors frequently use financial compensation to attempt to overcome this opposition. We measure how effective such compensation is for winning policy support in the arena of housing development. We build a novel survey platform that shows respondents images of their self-reported neighborhood with hypothetical renderings of new housing superimposed on existing structures. Using a sample of nearly 600 Bostonians, we find that compensating residents increases their support for nearby market-rate housing construction. However, compensation does not influence support for affordable housing. We theorize that the inclusion of affordable housing activates symbolic attitudes, decreasing the importance of financial self-interest and thus the effectiveness of compensation. Our findings suggest greater interaction between self-interest and symbolic politics within policy design than previously asserted. Together, this research signals opportunities for coalition building by policy entrepreneurs when facing opposition due to concentrated costs.

How well do existing survey instruments differentiate between opinions that affect individual behavior and opinions that don't? To answer this question, we randomly assigned U.S. respondents to one of three survey instruments: Likert items (Likert), Likert items followed by personal importance items (Likert+) and Quadratic Voting for Survey Research (QVSR), which gives respondents a fixed budget to buy “favor” or “oppose” votes, with the price for each vote increasing quadratically. We find that, relative to Likert, both Likert+ and QVSR better identify people who care enough about an issue to act in opinion-congruent ways, with QVSR offering the most consistent improvement overall. Building on these results, we show how conclusions regarding the relationship between policy opinions and self-interest can differ across measurement strategies.

This study is a reconsideration of a theme, connecting The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, namely the interplay between moral sentiments and self-interest. Two aspects of the theme are examined. The first consists of an interpretation of the so-called ‘das Adam Smith Problem’, an issue originally pointed out by nineteenth-century German scholars. The second, building on the insight of Smith on the association of shame and poverty, reports on recent research that seeks to examine how emotions impact the perception of economic interests and behaviour in marginalized groups.

Unbiased lotteries seem the least unfair and simplest procedures to allocate scarce indivisible resources to those with equal claims. But, when lotteries are repeated, it is not immediately obvious whether prior winners should be included or excluded. As in design questions surrounding single-shot lotteries, considerations of self-interest and distributive social preferences may interact. We investigate preferences for allowing participation of earlier winners in sequential lotteries. We found a strong preference for exclusion, both in settings where subjects were involved, and those where they were not. Subjects who answered questions about both settings did not differ in their tendency to prefer exclusion. Stated rationales significantly predicted choice but did not predict switching of choices between the two settings.

Interventions to increase cooperation in social dilemmas depend on understanding decision makers’ motivations for cooperation or defection. We examined these in five real-world social dilemmas: situations where private interests are at odds with collective ones. An online survey (N = 929) asked respondents whether or not they cooperated in each social dilemma and then elicited both open-ended reports of reasons for their choices and endorsements of a provided list of reasons. The dilemmas chosen were ones that permit individual action rather than voting or advocacy: (1) conserving energy, (2) donating blood, (3) getting a flu vaccination, (4) donating to National Public Radio (NPR), and (5) buying green electricity. Self-reported cooperation is weakly but positively correlated across these dilemmas. Cooperation in each dilemma correlates fairly strongly with self-reported altruism and with punitive attitudes toward defectors. Some strong domain-specific behaviors and beliefs also correlate with cooperation. The strongest example is frequency of listening to NPR, which predicts donation. Socio-demographic variables relate only weakly to cooperation. Respondents who self-report cooperation usually cite social reasons (including reciprocity) for their choice. Defectors often give self-interest reasons but there are also some domain-specific reasons—some report that they are not eligible to donate blood; some cannot buy green electricity because they do not pay their own electric bills. Cooperators generally report that several of the provided reasons match their actual reasons fairly well, but most defectors endorse none or at most one of the provided reasons for defection. In particular, defectors often view cooperation as costly but do not endorse free riding as a reason for defection. We tentatively conclude that cooperation in these settings is based mostly on pro-social norms and defection on a mixture of self-interest and the possibly motivated perception that situational circumstances prevent cooperation in the given situation.

We report on three pre-registered studies testing whether people in the positionof describing a decision problem to decision-makers exploit this opportunity fortheir benefit, by choosing descriptions that may be potentially beneficial forthemselves. In Study 1, recipients of an extreme dictator game (where dictatorscan either take the whole pie for themselves or give it entirely to thereceiver) are asked to choose the instructions used to introduce the game todictators, from six different instructions known from previous research toaffect dictators’ decisions. The results demonstrate that some dictatorgame recipients tend to choose instructions that make them more likely toreceive a higher payoff. Study 2 shows that people who choose descriptions thatmake them more likely to receive a higher payoff indeed believe that they willreceive a higher payoff. Study 3 shows that receivers are more likely thandictators to choose these self-serving descriptions. In sum, our work suggeststhat some people choose descriptions that are beneficial to themselves; we alsofound some evidence that deliberative thinking and young age are associated withthis tendency.

In 1929, Congress passed a law capping the US House of Representatives at 435 seats, delegating the power to reapportion to the Executive Branch, and empowering state legislatures to redistrict with few federal limitations. The 1929 law was a compromise after nearly ten years of squabbling over how to apportion pursuant to the 1920 Census. In this article, we consider the apportionment debates of the 1920s both to better understand the politics of the era and to draw lessons that might apply to a potential reapportionment debate today. Throughout the decade, partisanship and political self-interest structured members’ votes on reapportionment. The legislation that eventually passed resulted from a compromise that greatly empowered state legislatures to redistrict freely by removing federal requirements that had been in effect since the 1870s, effectively shifting the battle over congressional representation from one over reapportionment in Congress to one over redistricting in the states.

G. A. Cohen and David Estlund have recently defended utopophilia against utopophobia. They argue we should not dumb down the requirements of ethics or justice to accommodate people’s motivational failings. The fact that certain people predictably will not do the right thing does not imply they are unable to do so, or that they are not obligated to do so. Utopophiles often defend left-wing ideas; for instance, Cohen argues that people’s unwillingness to do what socialism requires does not imply that socialism is bad, but instead that people are bad. This essay shows that utopophiles must also endorse certain “conservative” conclusions, such as that most poor adults in the developed West are obligated to act more prudently, get jobs, become net taxpayers, avoid having children they cannot afford, and act to avoid needing welfare or assistance.

In the study of human motivations, self-interest is often seen as a determining factor and opposed to other-interest. Recently a new conceptualization has been proposed in which both interests can occur at the same time. In order to measure these constructs, the Self-and Other-Interest Inventory (SOII; Gerbasi & Prentice, 2013) was created, which has one version for adults and one for students. Due to the absence of similar measurement instruments in Spain, the aim of this work is to adapt the SOII to Spanish university students. Several studies were conducted. First, the construct was analyzed through rational-analytical procedures. Second, the items were translated following an iterative forward-translation design. Finally, evidence of validity was obtained through analytical procedures. Specifically, two pilot studies were carried out in which two independent samples of Spanish students participated (N1 = 119; N2 = 165). In both studies descriptive analyzes of the items were performed, reliability was estimated and the factor structure of the SOII was explored from an exploratory factor analysis. The results showed adequate reliability and a two-factor solution consistent with the original.