Social Categorisation And Social Decision-Making Analysis

Negotiation and Social Decision-Making
Assignment 4

a. The processes of social categorisation and social identification could be harmful for collective interests if the person is unable to make his/her membership in the collective category salient, which could possibly lead to the lack of cooperative behaviour towards collective unit. This might occur when the person’s levels of categorisation in another domain (either subgroup or single individual) is the most salient. In subgroup categorisation, a person might develop a high identification with their subgroup and consequently, he/she allocates more resources toward actions that solely reward their subgroup while abandoning the needs of larger society (collective unit). Similarly, if the individual categorisation is the most salient, the person might possibly show less concern about their collective interest compared to his/her personal interest.

b. The processes of social categorisation and social identification could benefit the collective interests if the individuals that are identified within the collective group create a positive impact to the society. For instance, individuals who contribute for the public interest, such as the voters of presidential election. These people are aware that they are a part of a collective unit (i.e., nation) and being strongly identified with it, which

(2016) revealed that people are more reluctant to punish non-cooperative behaviour than reward cooperative behaviour. The preference of rewarding over punishing is more evident for people who are alone compared to when they were in groups, which shows that people are reluctant to punish because they feel responsible about the harm, compared to people in groups who share the responsibility with the others. The findings depicted that people are hesitant to punish non-cooperative behaviour merely because of moral reasons in inflicting harm, but also because of the burden of