Voting in a Group Brings Out More Envy

You’re sitting at a computer, choosing how to split a pot of money between yourself and a stranger you’ wi’ll never meet. Take the even split, or take an option that hands the stranger a bit more while you get exactly the same. Alone, most people shrug and pick fairness. Add 48 other people voting on the same split, and something shifts: people start choosing to shrink the stranger’s share instead, even when it costs them nothing to be generous. Voting, it turns out, makes envy louder. Sharing the decision with a crowd seems to loosen whatever keeps that impulse in check when we decide alone.

That is the finding from a pair of experiments led by Gustav Tinghög, an economist at Linköping University, and colleagues, published in the European Economic Review. The first ran in a Swedish lab with 574 students. The second, preregistered to check whether the pattern would hold up, ran online with 1,176 people recruited through Prolific.

Both experiments used the same basic setup: redistribution games in which a participant picks between an equal payoff and an unequal one. Sometimes the unequal option pays the participant more. Sometimes it pays the other person more while the participant’s own cut stays fixed, the condition that isolates envy from ordinary self-interest. Participants were randomized into one of two decision conditions. One group decided alone, their choice implemented on the spot. The other voted in clusters of 49, majority rule deciding the outcome for everyone in the cluster, a group size chosen specifically so no single vote would be likely to matter.

Fairness Wins, Until Everyone Votes

The gap showed up clearest in what the researchers call the Envy Game. Faced with a straight choice between an even 40 to 40 split and a 40 to 50 split favoring the other person, 56.7 percent of the online sample chose fairness when deciding alone. Under majority vote, that rose to 67.9 percent, an 11.2 percentage point jump. The lab sample, run first, showed almost the identical shape: a 9.6 point rise. Two very different populations, one Swedish and academic, one English speaking and drawn from across the internet, landed on the same story.

Crucially, this was not people simply becoming kinder when they voted. A separate game tested whether participants would sacrifice their own payoff purely to boost someone else’s, at real cost to themselves, and voting made no measurable difference there in either study. Another game asked something different again: whether people would give up an advantage they already held over the other person, at no cost to themselves. Here voting nudged the online sample slightly toward keeping their edge rather than sharing it, a small effect that did not show up in the lab sample, so the researchers are not treating it as a solid finding.

“Put simply, people dislike others getting more than they do. And that is reinforced when people vote rather than make an individual decision,” says Tinghög. The team is careful about what the pattern does and does not mean. “This is not an argument against democracy. But when we make collective decisions, we are driven a little more by envy. The fact that it shows up so clearly in an experiment tells us that there is good and bad in everything,” he says.

The effect was not fixed, either. A second version of the game let people achieve equality with the other person at a real cost to their own payoff, from 40 to just 41 against the other side’s 50. Voting still nudged people toward equality, by 11.5 points. But when the personal sacrifice got steeper still, the gap narrowed and lost statistical significance. Envy driven by voting, in other words, is strongest when it is close to free and weakens the more it actually costs the voter to indulge it.

Nobody Feels Fully Responsible

So why would 49 strangers voting together behave differently from any one of them deciding alone? The researchers’ working explanation is diffusion of responsibility, the same psychological mechanism long studied in bystander research: when a decision is shared among many people, no individual feels fully answerable for the outcome, so voters feel freer to indulge impulses they would rein in acting solo. The same logic has turned up in colder settings too, from market trading that made people more willing to accept harm to a third party than deciding alone did, to formal economic models built specifically around how guilt gets shared out in committee votes. The second study built in an additional condition to test this directly, replacing the vote with a random dictator mechanism: one person from each group of 49 was picked at random and their choice alone decided the outcome for everyone. That arrangement produced an intermediate result, 61.5 percent choosing fairness, hinting that some of the effect comes from being in a group at all, not from voting specifically, though the gap between voting and the random dictator condition itself fell just short of significance.

The researchers also checked whether people’s broader political leanings mattered, using a standard scale that separates individualist from collectivist worldviews. In both studies, participants who scored as more collectivist showed a bigger jump in envy driven choices once voting entered the picture, on paper a curious twist, since collectivist worldviews are usually linked to prioritizing the group over the self. But formal statistical tests built to check whether that pattern was reliable came back inconclusive in both studies, so the team is not claiming ideology moderates the effect, only noting the pattern was there to see.

Gender told a cleaner story. Women were consistently more likely than men to choose the equal split in the envy focused games, across both studies and regardless of how the decision was made. The researchers read this as a stronger aversion among women to being at a disadvantage relative to others, rather than a broader preference for fairness as such, since the same gap did not show up in the pure altruism game.

None of this was measured beyond the moment of casting a vote. The experiments say nothing about the discussion that happens before people vote, or about how people behave once they know how the vote turned out, both of which shape real elections and referendums in ways a one-shot lab task cannot capture. Tinghög puts the takeaway back in the reader’s hands rather than the ballot box: “Personally, I think it’s foolish to let envy determine how you vote. It’s worth asking yourself: would I vote the same way if I were making the decision on my own at my kitchen table?”

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