I thought of a situation in which individuals seem to act irrationally, but I don’t know of any cognitive bias that would cause them to. Some individuals seem willing to fight in wars to “help out” in it despite having a small risk of being killed in it. E.g. some are willing to have a 1/100 chance of being killed if they have a 1/100,000 chance of causing their nation to win the war, meaning that if they decided not to join the war, their nation would be 1/100,000 more likely to lose. However, people seem much less willing to have a 1/1 chance of being killed and a 1/1000 chance of causing their nation to win the war. Assuming one’s utility is a weighted linear sum of whether they died or not (with 1 meaning they died and 0 meaning they lived) and whether their nation lost the war or not (with 1 meaning lose and 0 meaning win), I don’t know of any weights that would make it both worth fighting in the former scenario but not worth fighting in the latter. Are people just acting irrationally or is my model wrong? If they are acting irrationally, what bias is causing them to do so?
In many wars, those who fight get a much higher reputation than those who were expected to fight but refused. This has often translated into a reproductive advantage for those who fought. It's not obviously irrational to want that reproductive advantage or something associated with it.
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