Political Orientation is Associated with Behavior in Public-Goods- and Trust-Games

To examine whether political orientation is reflected in actual behavior, we applied classical paradigms of behavioral economics, namely the Public-Goods- (PGG) and the Trust-Game (TG) which constitute measures of cooperativeness, interpersonal trust and reciprocity respectively in a large German sample of N = 454. Participants intending to vote for right-of-center-parties showed significantly lower monetary transfers in both games than those intending to vote for left-of-center-parties. Accordingly, both scores were negatively associated with self-assessed conservatism and support for policies advocated by Germany’s right-of-center-parties, while showing positive correlations with the support of policies left-of-center-parties advocate. Interestingly, both measures also show distinct correlational patterns with Right-Wing-Authoritarianism and Social-Dominance-Orientation. None of these patterns applied to the Lottery-Game measuring unspecific risk-tolerance. We conclude by discussing potential psychological mechanisms mediating the relationships between ideology and actual social behavior as well as differences in experimental design to explain the deviant pattern of (null-) results in former studies relating ideology to behavior in game-theoretic paradigms.