Join CSES for a virtual presentation by Siegwart Lindenberg, Professor of Cognitive Sociology at Tilburg University, as he discusses his latest paper, “Calibrating competition. The special role of competitive intensity and winner selection rule for cooperation after competing. An experimental study.”
Abstract
Much has been written about the desirability to combine the advantages of both competition and cooperation (“coopetition”). Yet, there is surprisingly little research on coopetition inside organizations, even though it may be argued that people’s mindset that is relevant for coopetition even between firms is largely formed on the basis of their experience with competition and cooperation inside the organization. How and under what conditions does the experience of competition negatively affect subsequent cooperation and when does it not have this negative influence? We present an experimental test of two competing theories about experiencing competition of different intensities, the subsequent willingness to cooperate, and the moderating role of how winners are selected: a relative deprivation theory (cooperation compromised by the frustration of losers) and a shifting salience theory (cooperation compromised by regimes that make competitiveness salient). The results favor the shifting salience theory. Experiencing moderate competition intensity affects people’s subsequent willingness to cooperate more positively than experiencing fierce competition. Moderate competition intensity works best, especially with selecting winners on the basis of their performance. If fierce competition cannot be avoided, subsequent cooperation is best served by random selection of winners.
In a recent interview conducted by C.J. Polychroniou for Teachout, Noam Chomsky argues that peace talks in Ukraine will "get nowhere" if the United States refuses to join.
For the media and for members of the public more generally, the eruption of war creates an urgent need to affix blame and identify villains. Rendering such judgments helps make sense of an otherwise inexplicable event. It offers assurance that the moral universe remains intact, with a bright line separating good and evil.
Today we face an avoidable crisis between the United States and Russia that was predictable, willfully precipitated, but can easily be resolved by the application of common sense.
Making war cleaner has made it endless. Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale University, examines the origins of ‘humane’ warfare and argues that its embrace by policymakers has led to the justification of U.S. involvement in armed conflict across the world.
Join the Center for the Study of Economy & Society for the fourth installment of its lecture series on “The American State in a Multipolar World,” featuring distinguished scholars and public intellectuals Francis Fukuyama, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Joseph Nye, Samuel Moyn, and Theda Skocpol, as they discuss the future of American foreign policy.
About the Speaker
Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. He received his PhD in modern European history from the University of California at Berkeley and his JD from Harvard University. Before joining the faculty of Yale, he was the James Bryce Professor of European Legal History at Columbia University and the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of several books on European intellectual and human rights history including, among others, Christian Human Rights (2015), Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018), and Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (2021). His research spans legal scholarship in international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought as well as the intellectual history of twentieth-century European moral and political theory.
“[T]he challenge is to specify and explicate the social mechanisms determining the relationship between the informal social organization of close-knit groups and the formal rules of institutional structures.”— Victor Nee
