One Eye, Two Eyes, the Needy Other, the Better-Off Other, Envy, a Genie, and the Logic of Voting Decisions

A genie says to a peasant, "I will grant you any wish, but remember that I will give your neighbour twice what I give you." The peasant thinks for a while and responds, "Poke out one of my eyes." (via)

Encouraging resentment of taxpayer-funded benefits flowing to people down the ladder of life's fortune can deliver political dividends (...).
Lewis & Woods, 2014

Here are a few thought-provoking excerpts that shed a light on aspects of voting decisions following the logic of "I don't have health insurance now and can't afford the medicine I need but at least Mexicans can't immigrate." 

Economists have long speculated that envy and malice play important roles in economic decisions. (...) Envy and malice turn out to be powerful motivations with strong differential impacts across countries and relative positions.
Beckman et al, 2002

Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems—compassion, self-interest, and envy—guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution. (...)
By economic redistribution, we mean the modification of a distribution of resources across a population as the result of a political process. (...)
We conducted 13 studies with 6,024 participants in four countries to test the hypothesis that compassion, envy, and self-interest jointly predict support for redistribution. (...) If the mind sees modern redistribution as a three-player game eliciting compassion, envy, and self-interest , then the intensities of those emotions and motives will independently predict support for redistribution. (...) As predicted, the three motives have positive, significant, and independent effects on support for redistribution. (...)
Participants in the United States also reported the political party they most identify with. Consistent with historical survey data, self-described Democrats endorsed redistribution to a greater extent than Republicans and Libertarians did. Democrats also reported more compassion and more expected personal gain from redistribution than Republicans and Libertarians did; envy did not differ by party (...). Thus, compassion and self-interest predict identification with political parties, which are themselves associated with attitudes toward redistribution. In isolation, the emotion/motivation triplet accounts for 28% of the variance in support for redistribution, whereas party identification accounts for 34%; when entered together, they have unique effects of similar magnitude (...). This suggests that emotions and party ideology shape attitudes toward redistribution to a similar extent. (...)
Participants in the United States, India, and the United Kingdom (studies 1a–c) were given two hypothetical scenarios and asked to indicate their preferred one. In one scenario, the wealthy pay an additional 10% in taxes, and the poor receive an additional sum of money. In the other scenario, the wealthy pay an additional 50% in taxes (i.e., a tax increment five times greater than in the first scenario), and the poor receive (only) one-half the additional amount that they receive in the first scenario. (...) Fourteen percent to 18% of the American, Indian, and British participants indicated a preference for the scenario featuring a higher tax rate for the wealthy even though it produced less money to help the poor. (...) Compassion and envy motivate the attainment of different ends. Compassion, but not envy, predicts personally helping the poor. Envy, but not compassion, predicts a desire to tax the wealthy even when that costs the poor. (...)
A taste for fairness had little or no effect on support for redistribution. This is striking, because fairness is invoked in many arguments for redistribution. Notions of fairness are intuitive and compelling—they seem to inspire charity, courageous acts, outrages, wars, and moral crusades. (...)
Sznycer et al., 2017

Envy-freeness (EF) is a criterion of fair division. In an envy-free division, every agent feels that their share is at least as good as the share of any other agent, and thus no agent feels envy. (via)

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- Beckman, S. R., Formby, J. P., Smith, W. J. & Zheng, B. (2002). Envy, malice and Pareto efficiency: An experimental examination. Social Choice and Welfare, 19, 349-367.
- Sznycer, D., Lopez Seal, M. F., Sell, A., Lim, J., Porat, R., Shalvi, S., Halperin, E., Cosmides, L, & Tooby, J. (2017). Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, link
- photographs of Audrey Hepburn by Douglas Kirkland (1965) via and via
- interesting read: Two eminent political scientists: The problem with democracy is voters