The bedrock of democracy is collective decisionmaking and majority rule—but does voting always lead to the best outcomes?
A recent paper in the European Economic Review suggests that when we vote, we may be more inclined to act out of envy than when we make decisions individually.
A team of scientists from Linköping University in Sweden decided to test people individually and in groups at two established experimental games: the Envy Game and the Costly (But Cheap) Envy Game. In the first game, study subjects had to decide whether to split money equally with an unknown peer 40-40, or distribute the proceeds unevenly 40-50 in favor of an anonymous peer. In the second game, they could choose between an even split or a 41-50 split in favor of the other person. In other words, opting to give the other person more didn’t come at any immediate monetary disadvantage in the first game and offered a slight advantage in the second game.
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What they found is that significantly more people opted not to give the other person more when voting in a group (68 percent) than when choosing as an individual (57 percent). The study also included a third arm, where subjects were placed in groups and asked to vote, but were told that one of them would be randomly chosen as a dictator, who would make the final decision. This removed the majority rule from the equation: The group scored midway between the other two.
The new research builds on work on markets and morals by the late economist Nora Szech, who found that when people make decisions in groups, their feelings of responsibility for the outcome declines. They’re more willing to make a selfish choice, such as to sacrifice the life of a mouse for monetary gain. The new paper appeared in the European Economic Review dedicated to Szech, who died in 2023 at the age of 43.
I spoke with study author Gustav Tinghög, professor of economics at the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University, about how the lab-based voting exercises might differ from real-life ballot-box scenarios, how women compared to men on envy, and what people living in democracies should take away from the findings.
Why did you want to study this question of what influence voting has on envy?
This was actually a project that started many years ago. There was this literature suggesting that markets make people less moral in their decision-making. One of the mechanisms proposed was a diffusion of responsibility—that people feel less responsible for their decisions when more people are involved. There]s this idea that democracy and voting promote the positive side of decision-making. I wanted to test whether diffusion of responsibility was also at work in democratic decision-making. That was where it started.
You found that people were less willing to give someone else a windfall when voting collectively by majority rule, as opposed to when they were making the call alone. And you decided this was about envy. Were there any other psychological factors you considered?
Yes. We did two studies. With the first study, we had two different hypotheses. It could be that diffusion of responsibility would make people more selfish, immoral, or envious when voting. But we also had another hypothesis, which was that because it’s cheaper to signal that you’re a good person when you’re in a collective position, it could go in the other direction. We found that people didn’t become more generous in groups. They didn’t become more selfish either. But they did become more envious. That is, they were willing to burn another person’s money without gaining any advantage, money, or resources themselves. The second study was much larger, and we replicated the earlier result.
Can you tell me about the random dictator condition?
We added that in so that we could determine whether it was majority rule voting or just being in a group that was causing people to behave more enviously. This was a valid point from one of the reviewers—that we should add this extra condition where we have the random dictator. In the random dictator condition, people were still lumped together in groups of 49 people, but here they all knew that one of the group members would be randomly chosen to make the final decision. We found there’s this envy effect that’s above and beyond the effect of just making decisions in a group.
In this study, the participants didn’t have any sense that the others they might give the extra money to needed it, right? There was no narrative that these other people have suffered and really need this extra little push to get back on their feet?
No, it was very context free. The assumption was that the person is similar to you because they participated in this experiment along with you.
Do you think that having that kind of information about the other person in the group would have changed the outcome?
It’s a funny thing. I’ve been doing experiments for many years now, but I’m the worst at guessing what will happen. I’m sure it would change the outcome. But in what way, I’m not sure. It could go both ways. To some extent, we have an in-group here. The people you’re voting with or the people that you’re dividing the money with can be assumed to be pretty similar to you. In the real world, when you’re voting, you’re often voting about groups that aren’t very similar to you.
What do your findings tell us more broadly about when humans will choose competition versus collective action?
I’m speculating here again, but as we become groupish, we become more selfish, and more likely to compete. When we’re working with individuals one-on-one, we’re less competitive. But that might come across most in cultures that are more collective than others.
I was surprised that women showed stronger envy-driven behavior than men. What do you make of that finding?
This is a pattern we’ve seen in many other studies: Women in general tend to be more equality oriented than efficiency oriented. Usually, it’s interpreted as the idea that females are more compassionate and care more about other people. But the data suggests it may be a different story. Maybe what’s driving that effect is the envy side of it.
Do you think your findings are reflected in any recent specific votes or elections in Sweden or the U.S.?
The honest, boring answer is I don’t know. But to some extent I like this finding because it makes a lot of sense to me. That’s a good thing for a researcher, when you recognize your findings in the real world. I feel like this is something that happens to many people in my surroundings. When they’re starting to talk about other groups, what is influencing how they vote is very much a feeling that it’s important that other groups don’t get more than them. That debate becomes very prominent when it’s election time—not for everyone, but I don’t think that’s a new thing in Sweden or anywhere else.
How could people living in democracies use these findings to drive greater fairness, whether through election design or other measures?
It’s important not to have a one-sided view on whether voting or democracy is good or bad. There are pros and cons with everything, and one should be aware that these psychological things are out there. You can say that markets make people immoral, and you can also see that there are good things with markets, just as easily as you can say there are bad things with voting, there are also good things with voting. I often feel these things get very polarized so that we only see black or white. In fact, psychological mechanisms play an important role for how people make decisions. We’re very context dependent in our views.
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