Positive Consequences of Negative Attitude: Game-Theoretic Analysis

At first glance, the world would be a better place if all the people had positive attitude towards each other. It is known that this is not always the case: sometimes, the excess of positive attitude can lead to negative consequences. In this paper, we show that, vice versa, a reasonable amount of negative attitude can make life better for everyone. What is therefore needed is not the exclusive appearance of positive attitude, but rather a balance – titled towards moderately positive attitude. 1 How to Take Attitude into Account When Describing Human Behavior How to describe human behavior. According to decision theory, a rational (i.e., consistent) human decision maker should select an alternative with the largest possible value of expected utility u; see, e.g., [5, 9, 10, 12, 16]. How to take attitude into account. Usually, it is assumed that the utility of a person depends only on this person’s gains and losses. However, in real life, the person’s preferences also take into account gains and losses of others. If a person A has a positive attitude towards a person B, then B’s happiness (and high utility values) increases A’s utility as well. On the other hand, if a person A has a negative attitude towards a person C, then C’s happiness makes the person A less happy (i.e., decreases A’s utility value). The idea that a utility of a person depends on utilities of others was first described in [14, 15]. It was further developed by a future Nobelist Gary Becker; see, e.g., [1]; see also [3, 6, 7, 17]. In general, the utility ui of i-th person can be described as ui = fi(u (0) i , uj), where u (0) i is the utility that does not take other people into account, and uj are utilities of other people.