Historical Institutionalism the Cognitive Foundations of Cooperation

Abstract

This essay argues that in order to understand how institutions shape political choices and history we should go further toward understanding the interactive relationships between institutions and the cognitive mind. The article explores the significant body of research and literature developing in social and evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and decision theory. This literature has gone beyond the observation humans are not the individual utility maximizers stylized in early institutionalist theorizing. A massive body of experimental and empirical research clearly demonstrates, for example, that a) individuals only rarely have stable and hierarchical preferences, b) are generally quite unlikely to go through the cognitive effort implied in a ‘rational’ choice decision matrix, c) humans are efficient decision makers, but we have remarkable capacities to post-hoc justify choices and restructure our memories so that we can view our decisions as coherent. In the end the paper argues that public administration scholars need to adopt a non-reductionist approach to studying human motivation.

Keywords:

• Cognitive mind
• cooperation
• institutionalism
• pluralistic methods
• rational choice

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the generous funding for this research by The Danish Research Council project, “Mind the Gaps” research grant, 4003-00026B; and the European Research Council grant, “Willing to Pay,” research grant, Project No: 295675.

Notes

1 Foundational examples include (Pierson, 2000, 2004; Steinmo, Thelen, & Longstreth, 1992; Streeck & Thelen, 2005a; Thelen, 2004).

2 This position mirrors the minority view in evolutionary biology articulated by (Gould, 1989).

3 See, for example, (Dichter, 1971; Sherif, 1936; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959).

4 Participating. Recently I conducted a large experimental tax compliance study with over 3,000 subjects in five countries. My team and I discovered that one of the best predictors of a subject’s willingness to contribute to the public good (called the ‘general fund’) was their beliefs about how others in their group would behave. See “Willing to Pay: Testing Institutionalist Theories with Experiments” ERC, “Frontier Grant” www.willingtopay.eu. For more information on the experimental methods and some findings see also: (Andrighetto et al., 2017; Bruner et al., 2017; D’Attoma et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2016).

5 It is widely recognized that the most effective punishment one can apply in the modern prison is to isolate the prisoner preventing him or her from having contact with other individuals. Some consider this punishment “inhumane.”

6 The starting point for social identity research was set by Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, and Flament (1971). Henri Tajfel et al., “Social categorization and intergroup behavior,” European journal of social psychology 1, no. 2 (1971). Henri Tajfel et al., “Social categorization and intergroup behavior,” European journal of social psychology 1, no. 2 (1971) ‘minimal group paradigm’, a series of experiments showing that individuals tend to favor their own ‘in-group’ at the detriment of an ‘out-group’ – even if the groups consist of unknown others and membership to groups is randomly assigned.

7 As Darwin himself noted in The Descent of Man, (see quote at opening of this chapter), undoubtedly, there were some groups or populations in which members pursue their self-interest beyond and in advance of their societies to the point at which these populations must have been eventually outcompeted by those societies which developed a more stable balance between the individual and the group.

8 Of course, norms are not always generalized throughout a whole society, however, see, for example, Traxler (2010). Indeed, there can be many, even competing norms within a society or social group. For example, there can be strong expectations that an individual should behave one way to some members of the group, and quite differently to other members or the group and/or non-group members. This suggests that the influence of a norm is crucially related to the degree to which individuals' attention is focused on that norm in the particular context (Bicchieri, 2006; Cialdini, Kallgren & Reno, 1991). A strong personal commitment to a general norm does not necessarily predict behavior in a particular case if that norm or expectation is not activated in the situation at hand.

9 Andrighetto et al., (2013) argue that the salience of a particular norm is key to understanding behavior in specific cases. Whether a particular norm is salient, though, depends on “several contextual and social factors. For example, the amount of compliance, the intensity and frequency of norm enforcement, the enforcement typology, the credibility and legitimacy of the normative source and of the punishing actor are all acts through which it is possible to infer how salient a norm is in a certain community.”

10 See also, (Rothstein, 1998, 2011).

11 See for example, (Pfarr & Putnam, 2000; Putnam, Leonardi, & Nanetti, 1993).

12 For more information about this research and its findings - including a list of publications resulting from the project, see: http://willingtopay.eu/

13 In recent years, rational choice scholars have also moved substantially in their attempts to understand the ways in which norms, ideas and “mental maps” affect individual’s choices.

14 (Rothstein, 1998). See also, (Rothstein, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sven Steinmo

Professor Steinmo has just returned to the University of Colorado where he began his academic career. He now teaches political economy, comparative politics and American government. In recent years he has also been the Robert Schuman Professor at the European University in Florence, Italy, as well as a senior fellow at Oxford University in England and a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Steinmo has received numerous awards for both his teaching and his writing including the “Gunnar Myrdal Award for the Best Book in Evolutionary Economics,” and the “Riker Award for the Best Book in Political Economy.” In 2012 he was awarded the European Research Council “Frontier Grant,” for his project “Willing to Pay? Testing Institutionalist Theories with Experiments.”