Is a Rational Politics of Disaster Possible? Making Useful Decisions for Others in an Experimental Disaster Game.

Disaster responses are political. But can citizens make useful disaster decisions? Potential obstacles are that such decisions are complex, involve public goods, and often affect other people. Theories of political decision-making disagree on whether these problems can be overcome. We used experimental economic games that simulate disaster to test whether people are willing and able to prevent disasters for others. Groups of players face a complex task in which options that might help vary in their riskiness. Importantly, although all options are reasonable, which option is most useful depends on the experimental condition. We find that players will pay to help, can identify which option is most useful across experimental conditions, and will pay to learn how best to help. Thus, players were able to make useful and costly decisions to prevent others from experiencing disaster. This suggests that, in at least some situations, citizens may be able to make good disaster decisions. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-021-09700-2.

The political complexity of attack and defense.

De Dreu and Gross's distinction between attack and defense is complicated in real-world conflicts because competing leaders construe their position as one of defense, and power imbalances place status quo challengers in a defensive position. Their account of defense as vigilant avoidance is incomplete because it avoids a reference to anger which transforms anxious avoidance into collective and unified action.

Differentiated responsibilities and prosocial behaviour in climate change mitigation.

A characteristic feature of the global climate change dilemma is interdependence between the underlying economic development that drives anthropogenic climate change-typically modelled as a common pool resource dilemma1,2-and the subsequent dilemma arising from the need to mitigate the negative effects of climate change, often modelled as a public goods dilemma3,4. In other words, in a carbon-based economy, causal responsibility for climate change is a byproduct of economic development, and is therefore endogenous to it. To capture this endogeneity, we combine these two dilemmas into a 'compound climate dilemma' and conduct a series of incentivized experiments in the United States and China to test its implications for cooperation and prosocial behaviour. Here we show that, in a differentiated development condition, even while the advantaged parties increase their prosociality relative to an endogenous but homogeneous baseline condition, the accompanying decrease in cooperative behaviour by the disadvantaged parties more than offsets it. Furthermore, compared with exogenous but identically parameterized control conditions, this endogeneity decreases cooperation in the mitigation dilemma. In light of this interdependence, the basis upon which mitigation obligations should be differentiated becomes an additional dimension of conflict, with implications for domestic politics and international negotiations discussed5,6.