Why Do People Buy Guns? A Behavioral Economics Perspective

"Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all." Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons (December 1963)

Why are guns so prevalent? Why is it so difficult to enact gun legislation? Lots of answers—good answers—have been bandied about in recent days, including differences in sacred values across the political spectrum, the polarization of Congress, and the influence of the gun lobby.

But is there another way to formalize the debate on gun control so as to gain precise insight into its intractability? I argue yes. In particular, that at least one aspect of the debate—namely the common belief that buying guns helps an individual protect him/herself from someone else with a gun—fits within the framework of a classic dilemma in behavioral economics, the Tragedy of the Commons. And that once we think of it in such terms, we can use what we know about navigating the dilemma, in general, to make progress on the issue of gun control, in particular.

To understand how the Tragedy of the Commons works, first imagine a world where no one owns a gun. In that imaginary world, we are all reasonably safe. But each of us can do just a bit better—we can each buy ourselves a bit more safety, at least in a perceived sense—by purchasing a gun (I say perceived safety because I'm ignoring here important concerns about gun accidents in the home). And so eventually some observant person notices this, and buys a gun. And he’s a bit better for it.

But then at some point the gun owner’s neighbor thinks, “well, he is more safe with his gun, I’ll buy one too.” And so on and so forth. It's like an individual-level arms race playing out across a country with nearly 320 million people. And while these decisions might yield payoffs for the individual buyers, the effect to society overtime is deleterious. In other words, what benefits the individual costs society at large; when many of us defect (i.e., “buy”), society as a whole pays for it.

Overcoming the individual-level strategy in these scenarios is very hard—so hard that there are entire literatures in psychology and economics devoted to understanding how to go about it. And the Tragedy of the Commons captures other societal problems, as well. Take, for example, recycling. Recycling is often a hassle. We can each save ourselves some time by not doing it, but if everyone doesn’t recycle we all end up worse for it.

When we think about the gun control debate in these terms—and realize it is just one instantiation of the broader challenge we face as a society—we can apply strategies to the debate that have worked in other realms. And we can take advantage of what the literature has to say on the issue of cooperation.

So what has [or hasn’t] worked elsewhere? One potentially illuminating study examined the influence of social norms on cooperative behavior. The authors were particularly interested in disentangling the role of two different types of norms: descriptive norms, which describe how the majority of people behave in certain situations; and injunctive norms, which indicate how a majority of people think people should behave.

For this study in particular, the researchers examined the behavior of visitors to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Prior to the study, the park had faced problems with visitors removing bits of the petrified wood (presumably to take home as some sort of "souvenir"). The problem persisted, despite signage warning visitors that, “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.”

Interestingly, the authors wondered if learning about the prevalence of wood theft might actually encourage visitors to take wood themselves (an “everyone else is doing it” mentality). To investigate that possibility, they varied the wording of the sign to either say, “Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the Park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest” (i.e., invoking the descriptive norm), versus “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the Park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest” (i.e., invoking the injunctive norm). And in fact, the authors found that wood theft decreased with the “injunctive sign” in place as compared to the “descriptive sign.”

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While there are clear differences in the issues at stake, the findings suggest that messages highlighting the prevalence of guns (i.e., descriptive norms) might do more to encourage gun ownership than to deter it. In other words, making salient things like, “one in three people in the U.S. knows someone who has been shot”—precisely the kinds of messages that gun adversaries often promulgate—might actually backfire. That’s because these messages make people aware of the fact that many others are “defecting” (i.e., buying), and so they might fare best by defecting as well.

Another insight to be gleaned here is aimed not at the individual level—at changing individual behavior—but rather at the governmental level. Governments were created, in large part, to regulate the Commons. Because what benefits the individual (e.g., tax evasion) so often costs society at large, our ancestors established governments as a way of curbing free-riding—as a way of intervening to promote cooperation. That is, the very role of the government is to promote cooperation through legislation. And the problems associated with guns are precisely the type of problems governments were designed to solve. For change to be most effective, it has to occur both at the level of the individual and at the level of our institutions.

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Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly review of biology, 35-57.

Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 163-228). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Cialdini, R. B. (2003). Crafting normative messages to protect the environment. Current directions in psychological science, 12(4), 105-109.

Axelrod, R. M. (2006). The evolution of cooperation. Basic books.

(C) Sarah Cotterill. All rights reserved.