Matthias Greiff Affective Social Ties without the Need to Belong ?

Frans van Winden presents a quick introduction to the dynamic ‘dual process’ model of social ties, which was developed by van Winden and colleagues in various publications during the last 20 years. Drawing on evidence from economics and psychology, van Winden argues that preferences are determined by different mixtures of emotional/subcortical and cognitive/neocortical brain activity, with the mixture depending on the social context. Thus, the main contribution of van Winden’s approach concerns the role of preferences, which are not exogenously given but endogenous. In particular, van Winden focuses on one specific aspect of the social context, namely affective social ties between individuals. He argues that close relationships are more affect-laden than exchange relationships, and that by taking emotional and cognitive factors into account the ’dual process’ model is able to explain voluntary contributions to public goods. The idea is that a player has social preferences and the weight given to another player’s payoff depends on the strength of the social tie between both players, which changes over time due to automatic affective responses. Since the weights in a player’s utility function are endogenous, van Winden’s model encompasses other models in which the weights are fixed (e.g., selfish preferences, altruism, or inequality aversion). In this comment, I want to discuss two aspects. The first aspect is conceptual and concerns the nature of affect-laden, close relationships. The second aspect concerns the experimental evidence from van Dijk et al. (2002), Sonnemans et