Scenario-based projections of social processes

As we have noted in previous posts, social outcomes are highly path-dependent and contingent (link, link, link, link). This implies that it is difficult to predict the consequences of even a single causal intervention within a complex social environment including numerous actors -- say, a new land use policy, a new state tax on services, or a sweeping cap-and-trade policy on CO2 emissions. And yet policy changes are specifically designed and chosen in order to bring about certain kinds of outcomes. We care about the future; we adopt policies to improve this or that feature of the future; and yet we have a hard time providing a justified forecast of the consequences of the policy.

This difficulty doesn't only affect policy choices; it also pertains to large interventions like the democracy uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. There are too many imponderable factors -- the behavior of the military, the reactions of other governments, the consequent strategies of internal political actors and parties (the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) -- so activists and academic experts alike are forced to concede that they don't really know what the consequences will be.

One part of this imponderability derives from the fact that social changes are conveyed through sets of individual and collective actors. The actors have a variety of motives and modes of reasoning, and the collective actors are forced to somehow aggregate the actions and wants of subordinate actors. And it isn't possible to anticipate with confidence the choices that the actors will make in response to changing circumstances. At a very high level of abstraction, it is the task of game theory to model strategic decision-making over a sequence of choices (problems of strategic rationality); but the tools of game theory are too abstract to allow modeling of specific complex social interactions.

A second feature of unpredictability in extended social processes derives from the fact that the agents themselves are not fixed and constant throughout the process. The experience of democracy activism potentially changes the agent profoundly -- so the expectations we would have had of his/her choices at the beginning may be very poorly grounded by the middle and end. Some possible changes may make a very large difference in outcomes -- actors may become more committed, more open to violence, more ready to compromise, more understanding of the grievances of other groups, ... This is sometimes described as endogeneity -- the causal components themselves change their characteristics as a consequence of the process.

So the actors change through the social process; but the same is often true of the social organizations and institutions that are involved in the process. Take contentious politics -- it may be that a round of protests begins around a couple of loose pre-existing organizations. As actors seek to achieve their political goals through collective action, they make use of the organizations for their communications and mobilization resources. But some actors may then also attempt to transform the organization itself -- to make it more effective or to make it more accommodating to the political objectives of this particular group of activists. (Think of Lenin as a revolutionary organization innovator.) And through their struggles, they may elicit changes in the organizations of the "forces of order" -- the police may create new tactics (kettling) and new sub-organizations (specialized intelligence units). So the process of change is likely enough to transform all the causal components as well -- the agents and their motivations as well as the surrounding institutions of mobilization and control. Rather than a set of billiard balls and iron rods with fixed properties and predictable aggregate consequences, we find a fluid situation in which the causal properties of each of the components of the process are themselves changing.

One way of trying to handle the indeterminacy and causal complexity of these sorts of causal processes is to give up on the goal of arriving at specific "point" predictions about outcomes and instead concentrate on tracing out a large number of possible scenarios, beginning with the circumstances, actors, and structures on the ground. In some circumstances we may find that there is a very wide range of possible outcomes; but we may find that a large percentage of the feasible scenarios or pathways fall within a much narrower range. This kind of reasoning is familiar to economists and financial analysts in the form of Monte Carlo simulations. And it is possible that the approach can be used for modeling likely outcomes in more complex social processes as well -- war and peace, ethnic conflict, climate change, or democracy movements.

Agent-based modeling is one component of approaches like these (link).  This means taking into account a wide range of social factors -- agents, groups, organizations, institutions, states, popular movements, and then modeling the consequences of these initial assumptions. Robert Axelrod and colleagues have applied a variety of modeling techniques to these efforts (link).

Another interesting effort to carry out such an effort is underway at the RAND Pardee Center, summarized in a white paper called Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis. Here is how the lead investigators describe the overall strategy of the effort:

This report describes and demonstrates a new, quantitative approach to long-term policy analysis (LTPA).  These robust decisionmaking methods aim to greatly enhance and support humans’ innate decisionmaking capabilities with powerful quantitative analytic tools similar to those that have demonstrated unparalleled effectiveness when applied to more circumscribed decision problems.  By reframing the question “What will the long-term future bring?” as “How can we choose actions today that will be consistent with our long-term interests?” robust decisionmaking can harness the heretofore unavailable capabilities of modern computers to grapple directly with the inherent difficulty of accurate long-term prediction that has bedeviled previous approaches to LTPA. (iii)

LTPA is an important example of a class of problems requiring decisionmaking under conditions of  deep uncertainty—that is, where analysts do not know, or the parties to a decision cannot agree on, (1) the appropriate conceptual models that describe the relationships among the key driving forces that will shape the long-term future, (2) the probability distributions used to represent uncertainty about key variables and parameters in the mathematical representations of these conceptual models, and/or (3) how to value the desirability of alternative outcomes. (iii)

And here, in a nutshell, is how the approach is supposed to work:

This study proposes four key elements of successful LTPA: 

• Consider large ensembles (hundreds to millions) of scenarios.
• Seek robust, not optimal, strategies.
• Achieve robustness with adaptivity.
• Design analysis for interactive exploration of the multiplicity of plausible futures. 

These elements are implemented through an iterative process in which the computer helps humans create a large ensemble of plausible scenarios, where each scenario represents one guess about how the world works (a future state of the world) and one choice of many alternative strategies that might be adopted to influence outcomes. Ideally, such ensembles will contain a sufficiently wide range of plausible futures that one will match whatever future, surprising or not, does occur—at least close enough for the purposes of crafting policies robust against it.  (xiii)

Thus, computer-guided exploration of scenario and decision spaces can provide a prosthesis for the imagination, helping humans, working individually or in groups, to discover adaptive near-term strategies that are robust over large ensembles of plausible futures. (xiv)

The hard work of this approach is to identify the characteristics of policy levers, exogenous uncertainties, measures, and relationship (XLRM).  Then the analysis turns to identifying a very large number of possible scenarios, depending on the initial conditions and the properties of the actors and organizations. (This aspect of the analysis is analogous to multiple plays of a simulation game like SimCity.) Finally, the approach requires aggregating the large number of scenarios to allow the analysis to reach some conclusions about the distribution of futures entailed by the starting position and the characteristics of the actors and institutions.  And the method attempts to assign a measure of "regret" to outcomes, in order to assess the policy steps that might be taken today that lead to the least regrettable outcomes in the distant future.

It appears, then, that there are computational tools and methods that may prove useful for social explanation and social prediction -- not of single outcomes, but of the range of outcomes that may be associated with a set of interventions, actors, and institutions.

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Posted in: agency,analytical sociology,CAT_methodology,localism,prediction

Structures and structuration

Several recent posts have focused on new thinking about how to characterize "agency". Much of that thinking is aimed at dissolving the distinction between agency and structure. So what remains to be said about "structure"? Has the structure side of the debate developed much in the past decade or so?

One of the important exponents of a structure-centered approach to social theory is Anthony Giddens. His 1979 book, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis, is one place where his views on structure are expressed. He separates himself from earlier versions of "structuralism," including Saussure and Levi-Strauss; but he advocates for the reality of social structures and the methodological appropriateness of attempting to arrive at empirically based theories of social structures in sociology and other areas of the social sciences. He emphasizes the fact of process rather than static organization in his theory of structures; to capture the "verbiness" of a process view, he prefers the language of "structuration" rather than "structuralism." This distinction having to do with the location of things in time -- a static snapshot versus a continuous process -- extends to his treatment of action as well:

'Action' or agency, as I use it, thus does not refer to a series of discrete acts combined together, but to a continuous flow of conduct. We may define action... as involving a 'stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the-world'. (55)

A recent and unapologetic treatment of the reality of social structures is presented in Dave Elder-Vass's The Causal Power of Social Structures (2010). Elder-Vass accepts the point that agency and structure are inseparable; neither functions as a solely sufficient cause of social outcomes. But he argues strongly for the idea that social structures have causal powers that are not reducible to facts about individuals. He places his analysis generally within the tradition of critical realism (Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science). And he relies heavily on the theory of supervenience to solve the riddle of how structures can be composed of individual-level activity and yet possess autonomous causal powers (Kim, Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation).

Elder-Vass rejects the ontology of methodological individualism, which he regards as a species of reductionism: social properties need to be reducible to features of individuals. And yet he fully and unambiguously embraces the obvious fact that social structures must be composed of individuals in relations to each other. His way out of this apparent contradiction is to argue that social structures possess emergent causal powers: causal characteristics that pertain to the whole but not to the parts or their ensembles. Here is how he characterizes emergence:

A thing ... can have properties or capabilities that are not possessed by its parts. Such properties are called emergent properties. (4)

And later:

An emergent property is one that is not possessed by any of the parts individually and that would not be possessed by the full set of parts in the absence of a structuring set of relations between them. (17)

It is obvious and unexceptional that there are "emergent" properties in this limited sense. However, I'm not sure it captures the full concept of emergence. It would appear that holists have another idea in mind as well: the idea that the properties of the whole cannot be derived from knowledge of the properties of the parts and their relations to each other. ((E-V discusses this angle under the topic of "eliminative reductionism"; 24, 54.) A square figure is composed of four lines; the figure possesses area, whereas the lines do not. Sugar is sweet, but its component parts -- carbon, hydrogen, oxygen -- are not. So is "sweetness" an emergent property? Apparently it is not; because the sweetness of the compound can in fact be explained by the knowledge we have of the chemistry of the components, their molecular bonds, and the human sensors that register "sweetness." The property of sweetness can be derived from knowledge of the basic chemistry and the workings of the sensory system. So sweetness can be "reduced" to facts about the molecule and the sensor. It is not a novel causal power.

Here is why Elder-Vass thinks the concept of emergence is valuable in the context of social structures:

The value of the concept of emergence lies in its potential to explain how an entity can have a causal impact on the world in its own right: a causal impact that is not just the sum of the impacts its parts would have if they were not organised into this kind of whole. (5)

But really his central insight is that composites may have causal powers that are relatively autonomous from the powers of their parts:

Reductionist thinkers have argued that if we can explain how a causal power works in terms of lower-level forces, the original power itself becomes redundant to any explanation of its effects. By contrast, I argue in chapter 3 that when we explain a causal power, we do not explain it away. (6)

And here is his central point:

I shall argue that social entities [structures] are causally effective in their own right, with causal powers that are distinct from those of human individuals. But I shall also examine the mechanisms that underpin these causal powers, thus recognizing the contributory role that human individuals make to the functioning of social structures. (6)

(This last point is what I and others refer to as providing "microfoundations" for claims about social causation.)

So this seems to be Elder-Vass's core ontology of structures: structures are composed of individuals in relation to each other; structures have "emergent" causal powers that are not simply the sum of the causal powers of the component individuals; these emergent powers derive from the relations between the components; and for any particular causal power of the structure it must be possible to provide an explanation of the power in terms of mechanisms involving the individuals and their relations.

The bulk of the book takes the form of an effort to work out this view in detail with respect to two important types of social structures: organizations and normative circles. A bank is an organization (which in turn fits into a web of other organizations). A normative circle is a set of overlapping sets of individuals who both embody and conform to a normative rule or ideal. (E-V traces the idea here back to Durkheim and Simmel.) More on this later!

I suggested above that the concept of explanatory autonomy might work better than emergence. So what is a good definition of "relative autonomy" of causal powers at one level or another, with respect to the underlying entities? I think there are many areas of the sciences where we identify a set of causal processes that are sufficiently regular and predictable, that we don't feel obliged to drop down to the next level in order to achieve an adequate explanation. A level is "explanatorily autonomous" if entities at that level conform to a regular set of causal relations. Thinking of the brain as a computing system is an example. If we analyze the visual system in terms of a set of receptors, aggregators, detectors, analyzers, etc., and if this model allows us to explain and predict the organism's perceptual capacities (including mistakes), then we don't need to have a full theory of the neurophysiology that underlies. On this example, "perception as computational system" is relatively autonomous with respect to the underlying neurophysiology.

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Posted in: agency,analytical sociology,CAT_structure,microfoundations

Herbert Simon's satisficing life

Herbert Simon was a remarkably fertile thinker in the social and "artificial" sciences (The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition (1969, first edition)).  His most celebrated idea was the notion of "satisficing" rather than "optimizing" or "maximizing" in decision-making; he put forward a theory of ordinary decision-making that conformed more closely to the ways that actual people reason rather than the heroic abstractions of expected utility theory.

Essentially the concept of satisficing takes the cost of collecting additional information into account as a decision maker searches for a solution to a problem -- where to eat for dinner, which university to attend, which product to emphasize in a company's short-term strategy.  And the theory commends the idea that we are best served overall by accepting the "good-enough" solution rather than searching indefinitely for the best solution.  Rather than attempting to inventory all possible choices available at a given point in time and assigning them utilities and probabilities, the satisficing theory recommends setting parameters for a problem of choice, and then selecting the first solution that comes along that satisfies these parameters.  It means searching for a solution that is "good enough" rather than optimal.

And why not go for the optimal solution?  Because the cost of collecting the additional information associated with a broader choice set may well exceed the total benefit of the current decision.  This is obvious in the case of the decision of which restaurant to go to; slightly less obvious in the case of the decision of which university to attend; and perhaps flatly unpersuasive in the case of decisions where the outcome can influence life and death.

I've described the theory of satisficing in a little detail here for an unexpected reason: Simon took some interest in the art of autobiography, and it turns out that he interprets his own life as a series of satisficing decisions.  His autobiography Models of My Life appeared in 1996, and it's an interesting narrative of the intellectual and personal choices that led Simon from Milwaukee to Pittsburgh and beyond.

The idea is particularly apt for Simon's view about how a life unfolds.  He rejects the idea that one's life has an overriding theme.  He discusses the fact that the title of the book is a plural noun -- "Models of My Life".

There is a further reason for using the plural [models].  It is a denial -- a denial that a life, at least my life, has a central theme, a unifying thread running through it. True, there are themes (again the plural), some of the threads brighter or thicker or stronger than others.  Perhaps clearest is the theme of the scientist and teacher, carrying on his persistent heuristic search, seeking the Holy Grail of truth about human decision making.  In my case, even that thread is woven of finer strands: the political scientist, the organization theorist, the economist, the management scientist, the computer scientist, the psychologist, the philosopher of science. (xviii)

Rather than one underlying theme that underlies a person's biography and career, there are multiple choices, directions, and emphases -- that add up to a woven lifetime of contribution when the choices work out well.

Simon accepts the implication that this vision of a life presents: that there is no single "self" underlying all these changes and choices:

Which of the wanderers through these different mazes will step forward at the call for the real Herbert Simon?  All of them; for the "real" self is an illusion.  We live each hour in context, different contexts for different hours.... We act out our lives within the mazes in which Nature and society place us. (xviii-xix)

The analogy between daily decision-making and living a life is a direct one: instead of setting upon a course with very specific goals and objectives, and then taking the steps necessary to bring about the achievement of that system of goals, Simon is recommending a more local form of life decision-making. Build capacities, recognize opportunities, take risks, and build a life as a result of a series of local choices.  It is a form of bounded rationality for living rather than an expression of a fully developed life plan.  So we might say that Simon's "philosophy of living" is entirely consistent with his theory of bounded rationality.

There are a few real surprises in the book -- for example, a conversation between Simon and Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina in 1970.  Simon was fascinated by Borges' use of the idea of a labyrinth in his novels, and wanted to find out from Borges how he was led to this family of metaphors.  Simon himself was drawn to the idea of a series of choices as a maze -- incorporating the insight that there are always unexplored outcomes behind the avenues not taken.  So a labyrinth is a good metaphor for choice within uncertainty and risk.

I have encountered many branches in the maze of my life's path, where I have followed now the left fork, now the right.  The metaphor of the maze is irresistible to someone who has devoted his scientific career to understanding human choice. (xvii)

Here is a snippet of the conversation between Simon and Borges as quoted in the book:

SIMON: I want to know how it was that the labyrinth entered into your field of vision, into your concepts, so that you incorporated in your stories.

BORGES: I remember having seen an engraving of the labyrinth in a French book -- when I was a boy. It was a circular building without doors but with many windows. I used to gaze at this engraving and think that if I brought a loupe close to it, it would reveal the Minotaur.

SIMON: Did you see it?

BORGES: Actually my eyesight was never good enough.  Soon I discovered something of the complexity of life, as if it were a game. In this I am not referring to chess. 

...

SIMON: What is the connection between the labyrinth of the Minotaur and your labyrinth, which calls for continual choice? Does the analogy go beyond the general concept?

BORGES: When I write, I don't think in terms of teaching. I think that my stories, in some way, are given to me, and my task is to narrate them. I neither search for implicit connotations nor start out with abstract ideas; I am not one who plays with symbols. But if there is some transcendental explanation of one of my stories, it is not for me to discover it, that is the task of the critics and the readers.

And a final surprise -- it emerges from the conversation that Borges had read "a very interesting book" early in his life, Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy -- not exactly the most predictable influence on the creator of magical realism.  And Russell's mathematical logic was likewise a formative influence for Simon, at a comparably early age.

There is an interesting short section where Simon discusses one of the directions he did not take in his own personal career maze -- the step of trying to become a college president at Carnegie Mellon or elsewhere (262 ff.).  Simon writes briefly about the reasons why this might have been a realistic aspiration for him -- a history of administrative competence at the department level and a stellar academic record.  But he decided not to pursue the presidency at CMU:

However that may be, I did not seriously consider taking on the context. ... I have never regretted the decision, especially in view of Dick's stellar performance on the job, a performance made possible by a "deviousness" that our colleague Leland Hazard admiringly attributed to him, and that I surely did not possess. (263)

He adds that he didn't have the personality needed to cultivate the community of wealthy businessmen whose support would be essential to Carnegie: "In fact, the close association with the business community that is essential for effective performance as president of a university such as Carnegie Mellon would have been uncomfortable for me" (263).

But here is the way this discussion strikes me (as a person whose career did take him in that direction). Simon gives no evidence here of understanding even the most basic facts about this domain of choice: what the job of president actually is; what the qualities of personality and leadership are that would lead to success; and what the intellectual satisfactions might be in the event that he became a university president. He seems to be working from a very shallow stereotyped view of the job of university president. In other words, Simon had none of the information that would be needed to make an informed career choice about this option. And this suggests that his decision-making on this issue was narrowly bounded indeed -- driven by a few stereotyped assumptions that were probably a poor guide to the reality.

(Here is a lecture by Herbert Simon on organizations, public administration, and markets:)

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Posted in: agency,autobiography,CAT_agency,rationality

Fresh thinking about government

The eminent neo-Confucian scholar Tu Weiming argues for the importance of bracketing our Western-centric ideas about society, progress, and justice when we think about our global futures. (Here is an interesting article by Tu titled "Mutual Learning as an Agenda for Social Development"; link.) So for a moment let us put aside the familiar rhetoric about "democracy" that usually surfaces when we talk about how societies ought to be governed. Much of that language derives from Western political theorists like Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, and Mill, and arguably shows the signs of times and places very different from current social realities. Can we begin to rethink the task of collective governance in a way that might help frame current discussions more fruitfully?  Is it possible to rethink democracy in a way that is less Western-centric?

In order to think carefully about the idea of government, we need two different sets of assumptions: first, what the social realities or conditions are within the context of which "government" needs to function; and second, a core set of value assumptions that define the standards to which government ought to conform.

What are the fundamentals? There are several basic social realities that are hard to seriously question, and there are a few normative ideas that have credibility but could be debated.

Large social groups require governance.

Let's define a large group as a population of greater than 50,000 people living in proximity to one another, involved in a range of interactions and exchanges with each other and sharing access to a set of resources. This establishes interdependence and mutual effects among persons.

Here are some core governance needs: Maintenance of public order, management of conflicts, provision of some set of public goods, establishment of a system of rules and laws, collection of taxes to support the activities of government.

Persons have interests and commitments that they care about.

People have interests, desires, and commitments, and these interests lead to competition and cooperation, predation and defense. They behave purposively and strategically to further their interests and protect themselves against predation.

There are perhaps other basic facts about individuals that would be important from the perspective of other civilizational values systems -- for example,

Persons are psychologically and socially defined by the social relationships within which they exist.

Here is another salient fact:

Governments take actions that affect different people differently.

And another fact:

The powers of government create opportunities for corruption, preferential treatment, and favoring of the powerful by government officials.

So citizens care deeply about the outcomes of governmental action, and they are especially concerned at the possibility that others may gain great advantages through corrupt influence on officials and agencies.

Now consider a few values that most people would probably accept.

• Government should pursue the public good, not the private good of officials or private individuals.
• Government should not favor some persons over others.
• Government should take the desires and needs of citizens into account when formulating rules, policies, and laws.
• Government policies and laws should reflect the preferences and interests of citizens.
• Government should establish a neutral framework of law and policy that is applied without regard to persons and private interests.
• Citizens should have the ability to express criticism and disagreement with government actions.

Designing government requires that we take account of these basic facts and do our best to embody the values we agree about.  We need a set of institutions that will be durable, that will reinforce the fundamental values around which they are designed, and that will be difficult to distort when self-interested actors occupy roles within them.  Most fundamentally, we need a set of institutions that embody pursuit of the public good; that reflect citizen preferences; and that secure a just system of law for all citizens.

So what kinds of governance institutions are compatible with this list of facts and values?

This is where the mechanisms of constitutional electoral democracy come in. Western political theorists argue that a constitution sets the regulative framework for governance -- the fundamental legal protections defining citizenship and the scope and role of government. And electoral democracy permits citizens to express their preferences and enforce good performance by officials.  So policies are selected that correspond to the preferences of citizens; and they are implemented in good faith under the enforcement mechanism of representative electoral democracy.

But here is the more challenging question: are there other institutional arrangements that might fit these facts and values about as well? In particular, could we imagine a Confucian single-party state with an energetic anti-corruption office, an energetic and independent "investigative journalism" office, and a robust social survey office that serves the functions of gathering citizen preferences and concerns? Could such a system genuinely embody the public good in a hypothetical modern Asian society? In other words, could we imagine an administrative-authority system that effectively embodied the public good and protections of the fundamental interests and preferences of citizens? Could the "checks and balances" represented by an electoral system be established through other means?

It is easy to see objections to this hypothetical possibility; they largely come down to the problem of independence and effectiveness when a regulative office finds it necessary to criticize powerful officials or private persons. But it's worth asking the question of alternative governance design, and it's not inconceivable that solutions to these problems could be created.

(Here is an interesting collection of Tu Weiming's writings; Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought.)

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Posted in: agency,CAT_policy,democracy,institutions

The politics color wheel

The problem of mapping or classifying people's political attitudes is more complicated than it looks. Placing people on a spectrum from left to right is convenient but over-simple. It assumes that there is a single dimension of political difference, ranging from conservative to liberal, and that everyone can be placed somewhere along that spectrum. But social and political attitudes aren't single-dimensional. So we'd like to have a way of mapping the space of attitudes that captures the separate dimensions that go into political attitudes.

Most of the schemes above take a step forward by hypothesizing two dimensions reflecting attitudes towards the involvement of the state in the economy and in individual social and moral life. An economic conservative opposes state involvement in the economy. A social liberal opposes state involvement in individual choices and lifestyle, while a social conservative favors intervention in individual behavior when it comes to certain "social" issues. A libertarian opposes both forms of state intervention and an authoritarian supports both.

This kind of classification is an improvement, but it doesn't fully satisfy. It doesn't really capture the substantive moral ideas that might underlie these attitudes, the political philosophy that might underlie political preferences.

A more substantive effort at classification might take the form of a cluster of values shared by various groups. Conservatives favor maintaining traditional values (religion and morality), maintaining an existing system of wealth, power, and prestige (market and social inequality), and limiting the use of state power to these functions. Progressives favor greater social equality and opportunity; they favor the free expression of individual life choices; and they favor using the authority of the state to increase the equality and freedom of ordinary people. Conservatives defend existing inequalities and oppose redistribution. Progressives condemn certain kinds of inequality and justify redistributive measures to redress these inequalities.

Yet another approach is to consider a diagnostic set of issues and classify the individual according to where he/she falls on these issues. For example:

• Guaranteeing a woman's right to choose
• Restricting the sale of assault rifles
• Carbon tax
• Inheritance tax
• Immigration reform
• Affirmative action

We might imagine grouping the population into a sort of Venn diagram.  Suppose that each circle represents individuals who include the specific issue within his/her top five issues.  Overlaps indicate the circumstance of individuals who share the issues of each overlapping circle.  So region A represents individuals who rank civil liberties, social justice, and environmental issues in their top five; region B represents individuals who rank markets, guns, right to life, and religious fundamentalism in their top five priorities.  On this diagram, there is no one who is a militia activist and a social justice advocate.

Several questions arise here: are there correlations across individuals with respect to these issues? Is there a set of philosophical principles that underlie the choices that individuals make within connected clusters?  And do the clusters correspond to identifiable political groups?

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Posted in: agency,CAT_agency,norms,values

Real Utopias

It is worth thinking a bit about the intellectual project of envisioning a utopia. By definition, a utopia is a vision of a social order that is profoundly different from the real historical circumstances and institutions in which we live.  It would correct important flaws in the social world we currently inhabit. It is a social order that does not yet exist.  And there is an implication that this better social order is not simply a marginal improvement over the current world, but rather a sweeping revamping of the institutions and practices that create the social order.  To be a utopian thinker is usually to have an intellectual disposition of impatience for small, gradual change.  Mill was patient and gradualist -- and not utopian; Marx was impatient and revolutionary -- and utopian.

So to think about a utopia, we need to have a set of values that specify the features that we would like to see in the social institutions that govern us. Such a system of values provides the basis for social criticism.  These might include moral equality of all human beings, or the freedom of all human beings, or the intrinsic importance of community, or a preference for a world in which each individual is in a position to realize his/her full human potential.  As social critics, we hold up the values, and we measure the current functioning of social relations and institutions to see how well or badly they conform to the value prescriptions.  How free or equal are individuals within these institutions?  How good is the sense of community that actually exists?  And we criticize the actual on the grounds of its divergence from our moral ideals.

So envisioning a utopia requires that we have a basis for social criticism, grounded in a social philosophy specifying some system of important values.  But it requires something else as well: a credible argument for the feasibility of a concrete and specific set of institutions that do a better job with respect to the values -- without simultaneously creating new harms that are even more terrible.  This is a call for a science of the hypothetical alternative: "Here is how this complex set of institutions should be expected to work if they were established and were populated by ordinary human beings."  This is one part of the story where the social sciences can help; social scientists have a lot to say about how institutions work, and how alternatives might function as well.

Here is an example. A Chinese social critic in the 1930s might have observed tenant peasant farming in North China; he/she might have argued that the system was exploitative, unfair, and inefficient (three different social values); and he/she might have argued that the collective farm was a superior alternative, being more democratic, fair, and efficient.  The collective farm might have been offered as a utopian alternative to tenant farming.

This is where careful institutional analysis is required, and the analysis needs to be rigorous and empirically and theoretically informed.  What incentives would be established by the collective farm?  How would authority be exercised?  Who would make important decisions?  And how would ordinary human behavior be conducted when it came to labor, consumption, and power relations?  We might hope that this careful effort at analysis would have arrived at some important results:

"There will be a lot of 'easy riding' because of public goods problems; there will be a lot of petty tyranny because of the vacuum created by the institutions when it comes to collective decision-making; and there will be chronic over-consumption because food is a common resource."  

So the collective farm is likely not to be a utopian solution to China's rural problems in 1930.  And in fact, subsequent history confirms this conclusion; the Great Leap Forward famine was the consequence of many of these institutional failures.

But let's say that our institutional analysis indicates that a given system of institutions would work as advertised.  The next thing we need is a theory of a feasible pathway through which these institutions could be established; a pathway of how we might get from here to there.  It may be that there is a stable equilibrium of stacked dominoes embodying a certain topological structure; stable simply means that, once established, the configuration will survive small shocks.  But this isn't very useful information if there isn't any way to get the dominoes into that configuration through a series of incremental steps.  So to engage in "real utopian" thinking, we need to have some theories of pathways of change that are realistic when applied to real people.

So utopian thinking requires critique; envisioning of alternatives; and discovery of pathways from here to there.

How can social theory and social research help inform our thinking about "utopian alternatives"?   And what is a "real utopia"?  The Real Utopias project has been going for almost twenty years now (link).  And some of the most interesting thinkers writing today in social philosophy and criticism have been involved -- Erik Olin Wright, Josh Cohen, Joel Rogers, John Roemer, and Archon Fung, for example.  One of the most recent titles to come out of the project is Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (Real Utopias Project) (v. 4), by Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright.

Erik Olin Wright talks about the underlying rationale for the project in this fascinating interview by Valerio Bacak (link).  Here is how Wright sets up the problem:

The Real Utopias Project is, in a sense, a response to a deep problem within the Marxist tradition. Here’s the issue: Marxism is, above all, an emancipatory critique of capitalism. It identifies an array of oppressions and harms generated by capitalist relations and dynamics and then makes the extraordinary claim that these harms could be eliminated if capitalism was radically transformed. This kind of system-level, radical critique of the basic structures of society requires a huge leap of imagination: how is it possible that the basic institutions of society, which seem so natural to most people, could be radically changed without generating chaos and massive perverse consequences?

And here is his preferred approach:

Develop a coherent, positive social scientific theory of feasible alternative institutions without attempting a prediction of their likely emergence. The idea is to explore alternative designs of institutions in terms of three criteria: first, to what extent would the institutional design, if implemented, contribute to the realization of emancipatory values of one sort or another; second, in what ways might the institutional design generate perverse side-effects and are their plausible strategies for countering these; and third, if implemented, is the institutional design sustainable, does it generate a social dynamic that reinforces rather than systematically undermines its own conditions of possibility. I refer to this strategy as envisioning real utopias: “utopias” insofar as the agenda is anchored in vision of emancipatory social change; “real” insofar as the analysis revolves around institutional feasibility. This is a wide-open theoretical and empirical agenda. It involves explorations of theoretical proposals which have no immediate real-world exemplars as well as empirical cases in which efforts at constructing, not just envisioning, real utopias have occurred. The premise of this third strategy is that while there are real limits on the possibilities of emancipatory futures that cannot be breached simply by an act of will, those limits are not fixed independently of our beliefs about what is possible. While it is false that “where there is a will there is a way” it is nevertheless the case that without a “will” many “ways” become impossible, and envisioning real utopias is part of the process of creating a will for change.

What the Real Utopias project is aimed at validating, most fundamentally, is the idea of emancipatory agency: that it is possible for us humans to restructure our social institutions in a direction that fits our fundamental values better than the present institutions do.  And it is worth underlining how important, but also how risky, this effort is: important, because it gives a basis for thinking that we can create a better world; and risky, because many of the worst historical experiences of modern memory came from "utopian" efforts to redefine society.  (This is a point that James Scott makes in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (link).)

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Posted in: agency,CAT_institutions,CAT_policy

Doug McAdam on contentious politics and the social sciences

Doug McAdam is hard at work shedding new light on the meso-dynamics of contention.  What are the specific social and psychological mechanisms that bring people into social movements; what factors and processes make mobilization more feasible when social grievances arise?  Recently he has done work on the impact of Teach for America on its participants, and he and his graduate students are now examining a set of environmental episodes that might have created local NIMBY movements -- but often didn't.

McAdam's most sustained contribution to the field of contention is his 1982 book on the dynamics of the struggle for racial equality, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970.  The book was reissued in 1999 with a substantive new introduction, and it has set the standard for sophisticated sociological study of a large, complex movement.  McAdam collaborated with Sidney Tarrow and Chuck Tilly in articulating a new vision of how to approach the politics of contention in Dynamics of Contention.  And he has co-authored or co-edited another half dozen books on social movements and popular mobilization.  So McAdam has been one of the architects of the field of contentious politics.  Most importantly, he and his collaborators have brought innovative new thinking to the definition of problems for social research.

So it is valuable to dig into some of McAdam's thoughts and his sociological imagination as we think about how the sociology of the future might be shaped.  I conducted an extensive interview with Doug earlier this month, and it opened up quite a few interesting topics.  The full interview is posted on YouTube (link).



There are quite a few important turns to the conversation.

1. Segment 1: Why is the study of contention a central topic within the social sciences?
2. Segment 2: How can we approach contention without looking only at the successful cases?  How about the moments where contention might have developed but did not?  We can combine quantitative and qualitative methods -- perhaps in an order that reverses the usual approach.  Maybe we can use quantitative studies to get a general feel for a topic, and then turn to qualitative and case studies to discover the mechanisms.
3. Segment 3: Another important theme: "We are voracious meaning-making creatures." Human beings have a cognitive-emotional-representational ability to attempt to represent meanings and their own significance within the larger order.  Rational choice theory has too narrow a conception of agency.  Why did the Black community stay off the buses in Montgomery?  Because people were strongly enmeshed in communities of meaning and commitment that framed the bus boycott in terms of meaning and identity.
4. Segment 4: The psychology of mobilization is complex.  It's not just "rational incentives".  Organizers and leaders use the affinities and loyalties of the community to bring about collective action.  For example, an interesting strategy by SNCC to "shame" church leaders into supporting activists.  Movements happen very suddenly; this seems to reflect a process of "redefining" the situation for participants.  Another interesting issue: what is the right level of analysis -- micro, meso, or macro?  Doug favors the "meso" level.
5. Segment 5: More on the meso level: disaggregated social activity.  McAdam argues that government actions are themselves often at the meso level.  And he makes the point that Civil Rights reform was strongly influenced in the United States by the issues created internationally through the tensions and ideological conflicts of the Cold War.  This explains why it was Truman rather than Roosevelt who endorsed the need for Civil Rights reform.  You can't explain the broad currents of the Civil Rights movement without understanding the international context that was influencing the Federal government.  (This is an example of a macro-level effect on social movements.)
6. Segment 6: Now to mechanisms and processes.  There are no laws of civil wars.  So we need to look downward into the unfolding of the episodes of contention.  Comparative historical sociology is a very dynamic movement today.  Your work isn't quite as comparative as that of Tilly or McAdam.  Doug indicates that he favors comparison; but he tends to choose cases that are broadly comparable with each other.  Tilly often made comparisons at a much higher level of variation.  Q: Would you have been comfortable framing your study of the American Civil Rights movement as a comparison with the Solidarity Movement in Poland?  A: no.  There is too broad a range of differences between the cases.
7. Segment 7: McAdam offers some interesting observations about the relationship between general theory and the specific social phenomena under study.  An important point here is a strong advocacy for eclectic, broad reading as one approaches a complex social phenomenon.  We can't say in advance where the important insights are going to come from -- anthropology, political science, history, sociology, ....
8. Segment 8: We can dig into the social features that make certain figures very successful in bringing a group of people into a readiness to engage together.  Is social status a key factor?  Is it that some people are particularly persuasive?  Doug wants to break open the black box and get a lot better understanding of the meso-level processes and mechanisms through which mobilization occurs.  A closing topic: what about protest and mobilization in Asia?  Do you think these ideas about mobilization are relevant and illuminating in China or Thailand?  Or has it developed in too specific a relationship to democratic societies? Does the current understanding of popular mobilization help us when we try to understand movements like the Redshirt movement in Thailand?  Doug believes the framework is relevant outside the democratic West.  The ideas need to be applied loosely and flexibly.
9. Segment 9: So the theory is really a "sketch" of the space of mobilization, rather than a set of specific hypotheses about how mobilizations always work.  And in that understanding -- the field is very relevant to research on the Thailand movement.

(Note the strong connections between this discussion and a few of the earlier interviews -- Tilly, Tarrow, and Zald in particular (link).  My interview with Gloria House about her experience with SNCC in Lowndes County is very relevant as well (link).)

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Posted in: agency,CAT_collective action,leadership,mechanism,theory

Sociology in time: cohorts

What difference does it make to a person's personality, values, agency, or interpretive schemes that she was born in 1950 rather than 1930 or 1970?  How does a person's place in time and in a stream of historical events influence the formation of his or her consciousness?  (I've raised some of these questions in prior posts, here and here.)

If we thought of people as being pretty much uniform in their motivations and understandings of the world, then we wouldn't be particularly interested in the micro-circumstances that defined the developmental environment of a cohort; these circumstances would have been expected to lead to pretty much the same kinds of actors.  We don't think it is useful to analyze ants or cattle into age cohorts.

If, on the other hand, we think that a person's political and social identity, the ways in which she values a range of social and personal outcomes, the ways in which she organizes her thinking about the world -- if we think that these basic features of cognition, valuation, and motivation are significantly influenced by the environment in which development and maturation take place, then we are forced to consider the importance of cohorts.

The ideas of the "Great Generation" the "Children of the Depression," or the "Sixties Generation" have a certain amount of resonance for us. We think of the typical members of these cohorts as having fairly important features of personality, memory, and motivation that are different from members of other cohorts.  Americans born in the 1920s were thrown into social environments that were very different from those of people born twenty years earlier or later.  And their political consciousness and behavior seem to reflect these differences.

But here is the difficult question raised by these considerations: how should sociologists attempt to incorporate the possibility of cohort differences in behavior and outlook?  Here is one possible way of conceptualizing cohort differences with respect to a personality characteristic -- let's say "propensity to trust leaders."  Suppose we have conducted a survey that operationalizes this characteristic so that the trust propensity of each individual can be measured.  We might postulate that every individual has some degree of trust, but that different cohort groups have different mean values and different distributions around the mean.

The graph below represents four hypothetical cohorts: purple, blue, green, red.  Blue, green, and red cohorts have the same mean value for trust (normalized to 0).  But they differ in terms of the degree of variation there is within the cohort with respect to this feature.  The red cohort is tightly scattered around the mean, whereas the blue cohort is very widely distributed.  The "average" red individual has the same degree of trust as the average blue individual; but there is a much wider range of the blues than the reds.  Members of the purple cohort show a fundamentally different behavior.  They have a significantly lower level of trust, with a mean of -2.  And the degree of distribution around the mean is moderate for the purple cohort -- not as tight as the reds, not as broad as the blues.  Finally, it should be noted that there are reds, greens, and blues who are as untrusting as some purples, and there are some purples who are more trusting than some reds, greens, and blues.  In other words, the distributions overlap.

If we were confronted with data like these, our next question would be causal and historical: what were the circumstances of development in which the generation of people in the purple cohort took shape that caused them to be less trusting than other cohorts?  And what circumstances led the blue cohort to have such a wide distribution of variation in comparison to the green and red cohorts?

Now let's put some dates on the curves.  Suppose that the purple cohort is the baby-boom generation -- people born between 1945 and 1954.  Red is the "Greatest Generation", born between 1915 and 1924.  And blue is the "me-generation", born between 1955 and 1964.  We might speculate that growing up in the sixties, with a highly divisive war in Vietnam underway, a government that suffered a serious credibility gap, and a youth culture that preached the slogan, "trust no one over 30!", would have led to a political psychology that was less inclined to trust government than generations born earlier or later.  So the Purple cohort has a low level of trust as a group.  The social necessity of sticking together as a country, fighting a major world war, and working our way out of the Great Depression, might explain the high degree of unanimity of trust found in the Red cohort.  And the Blue generation is all over the map, ranging from a significant number of people with extremely low trust to an equal group of extremely high trust.  We might imagine that the circumstances of maturation and development following the wild and crazy sixties imposed little structure on this feature of political identity, resulting in a very wide distribution of levels of trust.

It is also important to consider some of the factors that vary across time that might have important influences on the development of different cohorts.  Circumstances like war, famine, or economic crisis represent one family of influences that are often markedly different across age cohorts.  Ideologies and value systems also change from decade to decade.  The turn to a more conservative kind of Christianity in the United States in the 1990s certainly influenced a significant number of young people coming of age during those decades, and the value system of nationalism and patriotism of the 1940s and 1950s influenced the young people of those decades.  Third, institutions change significantly over time as well. Schools change, the operations and culture of the military change, and the internal workings of religious institutions change.  So the institutions in which children and young adults gain their perspectives, motives, and allegiances are often significantly different from one decade to another.  And presumably, all these factors are involved in the formation of the consciousness and identity of the young people who experience them.  Difference in settings (events, ideologies, institutions) lead to differences in psychology across cohorts.

Andrew Abbott raised some of these questions in his presidential address to the Social Science History Association in 2004 (link).  The title he chose is illuminating -- "The Historicality of Individuals".  And the central point here could be put in the same terms: it is important for us to attempt to understand processes of social and historical change, through the shifting characteristics of the age-specific populations that make these processes up. The historicality of individuals adds up to the sociological importance of cohorts.

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Posted in: agency,CAT_agency,cohort,identity,mentality

Methodological localism

I offer a social ontology that I refer to as methodological localism (ML).  This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes.  But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals.  The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules.

This account begins with the socially constituted person. Human beings are subjective, purposive, and relational agents. They interact with other persons in ways that involve competition and cooperation. They form relationships, enmities, alliances, and networks; they compose institutions and organizations. They create material embodiments that reflect and affect human intentionality. They acquire beliefs, norms, practices, and worldviews, and they socialize their children, their friends, and others with whom they interact. Some of the products of human social interaction are short-lived and local (indigenous fishing practices); others are long-duration but local (oral traditions, stories, and jokes); and yet others are built up into social organizations of great geographical scope and extended duration (states, trade routes, knowledge systems). But always we have individual agents interacting with other agents, making use of resources (material and social), and pursuing their goals, desires, and impulses.

At the level of the socially constituted individual we need to ask two sorts of questions: First, what makes individual agents behave as they do? Here we need accounts of the mechanisms of deliberation and action at the level of the individual. What are the main features of individual choice, motivation, reasoning, and preference? How do these differ across social groups? How do emotions, rational deliberation, practical commitments, and other forms of agency influence the individual’s deliberations and actions?  This area of research is purposively eclectic, including performative action, rational action, impulse, theories of the emotions, theories of the self, or theories of identity.

Second, how are individuals formed and constituted? Methodological localism gives great importance to learning more about how individuals are formed and constituted—the concrete study of the social process of the development of the self. Here we need better accounts of social development, the acquisition of worldview, preferences, and moral frameworks, among the many other determinants of individual agency and action. What are the social institutions and influences through which individuals acquire norms, preferences, and ways of thinking? How do individuals develop cognitively, affectively, and socially? So methodological localism points up the importance of discovering the microfoundations and local variations of identity formation and the construction of the historically situated self.

So far we have emphasized the socially situated individual. But social action takes place within spaces that are themselves socially structured by the actions and purposes of others—by property, by prejudice, by law and custom, and by systems of knowledge. So our account needs to identify the local social environments through which action is structured and projected: the inter-personal networks, the systems of rules, the social institutions. The social thus has to do with the behaviorally, cognitively, and materially embodied reality of social institutions.  An institution is a complex of socially embodied powers, limitations, and opportunities within which individuals pursue their lives and goals. A property system, a legal system, and a professional baseball league all represent examples of institutions. Institutions have effects that are in varying degrees independent from the individual or “larger” than the individual. Each of these social entities is embodied in the social states of a number of actors—their beliefs, intentions, reasoning, dispositions, and histories. Actors perform their actions within the context of social frameworks represented as rules, institutions, and organizations, and their actions and dispositions embody the causal effectiveness of those frameworks. And institutions influence individuals by offering incentives and constraints on their actions, by framing the knowledge and information on the basis of which they choose, and by conveying sets of normative commitments (ethical, religious, interpersonal) that influence individual action.

It is important to emphasize that ML affirms the existence of social constructs beyond the purview of the individual actor or group.  Political institutions exist—and they are embodied in the actions and states of officials, citizens, criminals, and opportunistic others.  These institutions have real effects on individual behavior and on social processes and outcomes—but always mediated through the structured circumstances of agency of the myriad participants in these institutions and the affected society.  This perspective emphasizes the contingency of social processes, the mutability of social structures over space and time, and the variability of human social systems (norms, urban arrangements, social practices, and so on).

This approach highlights the important point that all social facts, social structures, and social causal properties depend ultimately on facts about individuals within socially defined circumstances.  Social ascriptions require microfoundations at the level of individuals in concrete social relationships.  According to this way of understanding the nature of social ontology, an assertion of a structure or process at the macro-social level (causal, functional, structural) must be supplemented by two things: knowledge about what it is about the local circumstances of the typical individual that leads him or her to act in such a way as to bring about this relationship; and knowledge of the aggregative processes that lead from individual actions of that sort to an explanatory social relationship of this sort. So if we are interested in analysis of the causal properties of states and governments, we need to arrive at an analysis of the institutions and constrained patterns of individual behavior through which the state’s characteristics are effected.  We need to raise questions such as these: How do states exercise influence throughout society?  What are the institutional embodiments at lower levels that secure the impact of law, taxation, conscription, contract enforcement, and other central elements of state behavior? If we are concerned about the workings of social identities, then we need to inquire into the concrete social mechanisms through which social identities are reproduced within a local population—and the ways in which these mechanisms and identities may vary over time and place.  And if we are interested in analyzing the causal role that systems of norms play in social behavior, we need to discover some of the specific institutional practices through which individuals come to embrace a given set of norms.

The microfoundations perspective requires that we attempt to discover the pathways by which socially constituted individuals are influenced by distant social circumstances, and how their actions in turn affect distant social outcomes.  There is no action at a distance in social life; instead, individuals have the values that they have, the styles of reasoning, the funds of factual and causal beliefs, etc., as a result of the structured experiences of development that they have undergone as children and adults.  On this perspective, large social facts and structures do indeed exist; but their causal properties are entirely defined by the current states of psychology, norm, and action of the individuals who currently exist.  Systems of norms and bodies of knowledge exist—but only insofar as individuals (and material traces) embody and transmit them.  So when we assert that a given social structure causes a given outcome, we need to be able to specify the local pathways through which individual actors embody this causal process.  That is, we need to be able to provide an account of the causal mechanisms that convey social effects.

It is evident that methodological localism implies a fairly limited social ontology.  What exists is the socially constructed individual, within a congeries of concrete social relations and institutions.  The socially constructed individual possesses beliefs, norms, opportunities, powers, and capacities.  These features are socially constructed in a perfectly ordinary sense: the individual has acquired his or her beliefs, norms, powers, and desires through social contact with other individuals and institutions, and the powers and constraints that define the domain of choice for the individual are largely constituted by social institutions (property systems, legal systems, educational systems, organizations, and the like). Inevitably, social organizations at any level are constituted by the individuals who participate in them and whose behavior and ideas are influenced by them; sub-systems and organizations through which the actions of the organization are implemented; and the material traces through which the policies, memories, and acts of decision are imposed on the environment: buildings, archives, roads, etc.  All features of the organization are embodied in the actors and institutional arrangements that carry the organization at a given time.  At each point we are invited to ask the question: what are the social mechanisms through which this institution or organization exerts influence on other organizations and on agents’ behavior? 

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Posted in: agency,CAT_ontology,causal mechanism,localism,microfoundations

Assurance game

How does a group of people succeed in coming together to contribute to a collective project over an extended period of time?  For example, what leads a group of unemployed workers to travel to the capital to lobby for an extension of unemployment benefits, or a group of expatriate Burmese people in London to attend demonstrations against the junta?  What motivations are relevant at the individual level? And what circumstances are most conducive to creating and sustaining collective action?

Purely self-interested egoists won't make it -- that is the message of Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods. The maximizing egoist will reason that the activity will either succeed or fail independent of his/her own participation.  If it succeeds then he will enjoy the benefits of cooperation; and if it fails he will have avoided the wasted costs of participation.  Either way the egoist does better by refraining from participation.  So collective action in pursuit of a public good is all but impossible within a society of rationally disinterested egoists.  As Amartya Sen observes in "Rational Fools" (link),  "The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron." 

But we know that this conclusion does a bad job of describing real social life.  People in villages, communities, political parties, religious organizations, public television audiences, and ethnic groups do in fact often succeed in getting themselves organized and mobilized in pursuit of a public good for the group.  Often the level of mobilization is below the level that would be optimal for production of the good for the population; often it is fairly straightforward to identify the symptoms of incipient free-riding; but ordinary social experience and history alike are replete with examples of voluntary collective action.

Many theories can be articulated in order to account for the spontaneous occurrence of collective action.  People may be irrational; they may be motivated entirely by non-utility considerations; they may be governed by norms of solidarity beyond their rational control; they may be disciplined by grassroots organizations that punish defectors; there may be an evolutionary basis hard-wired into the human cognitive-deliberative system that favors cooperation; or, for that matter, there may be a hard-wired impulse towards punishing defectors from common projects that tips the balance of utility calculation for would-be free-riders.

But here is a factor that seems to be a credible observation about social motivation and that still makes sense of the behavior in deliberative terms.  Many real social actors seem to be what might be called "conditional altruists": they are willing to contribute some effort or personal resource to a collective project if they have grounds for confidence that a reasonable number of other members of the group will contribute as well. (Jon Elster explores the idea in The Cement of Society: A Survey of Social Order.)  And it isn't that these actors make a calculation error along the lines of the fallacy of unanimity -- "I want the benefits of the collective action, and it won't occur without me."  Instead, they seem to reason in ways that would please a communitarian: "I'm a member of this group, I believe that other members will do what's good for the group, and I'm willing to do my part as well."  This is a fairly explicit willingness to sacrifice the benefits of free riding.  But the conditional part is important as well: the conditional altruist is calculating about the likelihood of success in the collective undertaking, and is willing to participate only if he/she judges that enough other people will contribute as well to make the undertaking feasible.

Conditional altruism thus attributes a common moral psychology to social actors, which we might refer to as the "fairness factor."  Individuals are willing to factor collective goods into their calculation of the costs and benefits of action, and they have some degree of motivation to act in accordance with a proposed collective action that would benefit them even if they could evade participation.  They are disposed to act fairly: "If I benefit from the action, I should take my fair share of creating the benefit."  (Allan Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment offers an effort to bring together the evolutionary history of the species with a philosopher's analysis of moral reasoning.)

If fairness or conditional altruism are real components of human agency (for all or many human beings), then we can identify a few factors that are likely to increase the likelihood of cooperation and collective action.  Measures that increase the actor's assurance of the behavior of others will have the effect of eliciting higher levels of collective action.  And it is possible to think of quite a few social circumstances that have this effect.  A shared history of success in collective action is clearly relevant to current actors' level of assurance about future cooperation.  Shared history can be made more powerful in the present through the currency of songs, stories, and performances that highlight earlier successes (Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty).  Researchers who study peasant village communities emphasize the importance of face-to-face relations among villagers; individuals know a good deal about the past behavior of their neighbors, which can provide a better basis for predicting their future cooperative behavior (Robert Netting, Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture). And members of small, stable communities also know that they will need to interact with each other long into the future -- increasing the cost of non-cooperation today (Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition).

What is particularly interesting about this topic is the fact that actual social outcomes show a wide range of variations in the degree of self-interest and fairness that seems to be present.  Some groups seem to act more like Mancur Olson egoists; others (like Welsh coal miners) seem to act as though they have a very high "solidarity and fairness" quotient.  So no single answer to the question of collective action seems to work: "people are rational egoists," "people are altruists," or "people are conditional altruists."  Rather, a given opportunity for collective action seems to display a mix of all these styles of reasoning.  These variations could be the result of several independent factors: differences in the formation of individuals' moral psychology (emphasizing individualism or community from infancy); differences in current institutional settings (arrangements that make future interactions seem more likely to each participant); even potentially differences in personality or the genetic basis of decision-making across individuals.

I'm sure that there is work in experimental economics that probes the boundaries of this feature of practical reasoning.  Ordinary social experience informs us that people have different levels of willingness to undertake sacrifice for a group's projects.  And having a more nuanced empirical understanding of how people behave in the settings of potential cooperation and collective action would help refine our understanding of the thought-processes and styles of reasoning through which individuals decide what to do. Here is an interesting paper by Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt titled "The Economics of Fairness, Reciprocity and Altruism – Experimental Evidence and New Theories."

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Posted in: agency,CAT_collective action,motivation