Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The world is grappling with emerging, urgent, large-scale problems, such as climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and pandemics, which demand immediate and coordinated action. Social processes like conformity and social norms can either help maintain behaviors (e.g. cooperation in groups) or drive rapid societal change (e.g. rapid rooftop solar uptake), even without comprehensive policy measures. While the role of individual heterogeneity in such processes is well studied, there is limited work on the expression of individuals' preferences and the role of anticonformists—individuals who value acting differently from others—especially in dynamic environments. We introduce anticonformists into a game-theoretical collective decision-making framework that includes a complex network of agents with heterogeneous preferences about two alternative options. We study how anticonformists' presence changes the population's ability to express evolving personal preferences. We find that anticonformists facilitate the expression of preferences, even when they diverge from prevailing norms, breaking the "spiral of silence" whereby individuals do not act on their preferences when they believe others disapprove. Centrally placed anticonformists reduce by five-fold the number of anticonformists needed for a population to express its preferences. In dynamic environments where a previously unpopular choice becomes preferred, anticonformists catalyze social tipping and reduce the "cultural lag," even beyond the role of committed minorities—that is, individuals with a commitment to a specific cause. This research highlights the role of dissenting voices in shaping collective behavior, including their potential to catalyze the adoption of new technologies as they become favorable and to enrich democracy by facilitating the expression of views.

While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges, ranging from local fisheries to global climate change. In the real world, such cooperative dilemmas occur in multiple interactions with complex strategic interests and frequently without full information. We argue that voluntary cooperation enabled across overlapping coalitions (akin to polycentricity) not only facilitates a higher generation of non-excludable public goods, but it may also allow evolution toward a more cooperative, stable, and inclusive approach to governance. Contrary to any previous study, we show that these merits of multi-coalition governance are far more general than the singular examples occurring in the literature, and they are robust under diverse conditions of excludability, congestion of the non-excludable public good, and arbitrary shapes of the return-to-contribution function. We first confirm the intuition that a single coalition without enforcement and with players pursuing their self-interest without knowledge of returns to contribution is prone to cooperative failure. Next, we demonstrate that the same pessimistic model but with a multi-coalition structure of governance experiences relatively higher cooperation by enabling recognition of marginal gains of cooperation in the game at stake. In the absence of enforcement, public-goods regimes that evolve through a proliferation of voluntary cooperative forums can maintain and increase cooperation more successfully than singular, inclusive regimes.

Polarization on various issues has increased in many Western democracies over the last decades, leading to divergent beliefs, preferences, and behaviors within societies. We develop a model to investigate the effects of polarization on the likelihood that a society will coordinate on a welfare-improving action in a context in which collective benefits are acquired only if enough individuals take that action. We examine the impacts of different manifestations of polarization: heterogeneity of preferences, segregation of the social network, and the interaction between the two. In this context, heterogeneity captures differential perceived benefits from coordinating, which can lead to different intentions and sensitivity regarding the intentions of others. Segregation of the social network can create a bottleneck in information flows about others' preferences, as individuals may base their decisions only on their close neighbors. Additionally, heterogeneous preferences can be evenly distributed in the population or clustered in the local network, respectively reflecting or systematically departing from the views of the broader society. The model predicts that heterogeneity of preferences alone is innocuous and it can even be beneficial, while segregation can hamper coordination, mainly when local networks distort the distribution of valuations. We base these results on a multimethod approach including an online group experiment with 750 individuals. We randomize the range of valuations associated with different choice options and the information respondents have about others. The experimental results reinforce the idea that, even in a situation in which all could stand to gain from coordination, polarization can impede social progress.