Here's a piece on this - and how it applies to the Ukraine conflict - from The Conversation: Will booking an Airbnb help Ukraine? Why people make counterproductive decisions about charity (theconversation.com).
A quote:
Another concept that explains why people take counterproductive actions is “responsibility utility”. This describes the pleasure that derives from being responsible for a virtuous action – the warm glow we feel for having done the “right thing”, or the bragging rights that come of promoting a good cause. Those bragging rights are especially powerful drivers of behaviour in an age of social media.
If an arts organisation has scheduled a Russian performer, there is positive responsibility utility from dropping them from the programme. The act of dropping the performer is a salient (though crude) signal that the organisation condemns an immoral attack. A worrisome implication is that individuals will be punished simply for having been born in Russia.
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Boycotts that hit Putin’s internal critics push an especially useful ally out of the anti-Putin camp, and they bolster Putin’s claim that the west has an anti-Russian agenda. Misdirected bans and boycotts will weaken Russian civil society, strengthen Putin’s power in Russia and damage the very institutions that will be so vital to stability after the Putin regime.
Some interesting comments too. e.g.
The paragraph starting ‘Boycotts that hit Putin’s internal critics…’ makes wide-ranging and questionable assumptions and any link to evidence from either behavioural science or economics (the author’s fields of expertise) is not clear. Better perhaps to have confined the thrust of the article to what behavioural science can tell us (ie that people do not always think about the most effective ways to help in an emergency) or what economics can tell us (ie that cash is usually better than used goods). An interesting question is whether we really need a behavioural scientist or an economist to help us to those conclusions.
It's a good question. Which discipline is best adapted to anticipate the repercussions of boycotts?
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