Cost-Benefit Analyses for Your Group and Your Self: The 'Rationality' of Decision-Making in Conflict

Abstract:     
Two studies in the context of English-French relations in Quebec suggest that individuals who strongly identify with a group derive the individual-level costs and benefits that drive expectancy-value processes ('rational' decision-making) from group-level costs and benefits. Perceptions of the consequences of conflict choices for the actor were predicted by social identity processes. In considering individualistic and collectivistic actions, in Study 1, high identifiers linked group- and individual-level outcomes whereas low identifiers did not. Group-level expectancy-value processes, in Study 2, mediated the relationship between social identity and perceptions that collective action benefits the actor and between social identity and collective action intentions. These findings suggest the 'rational' underpinnings of identity-driven political behaviour, a relationship sometimes obscured in intergroup theory which focuses on cognitive processes of self-stereotyping. But the results also challenge the view that individuals' cost-benefit analyses are independent of identity processes. The findings suggest the importance of modelling the relationship of group and individual levels of expectancy-value processes as both hierarchical and contingent on social identity processes.

Keywords: Intergroup conflict, decision-making, ethnic conflict

Working Paper Series