Some random thoughts, starting with personal experience: * When my team gives me ownership over a project, I take pride in that project and produce higher-qual

Some random thoughts, starting with personal experience: * When my team gives me ownership over a project, I take pride in that project and produce higher-quality work. This is loosely related to "people act more responsibly when you give them more responsibility" in the sense that direct democracy will make people feel like they have more ownership over issues. * Homeowners tend to take better care of their place of living than renters. * When people have kids, most tend to mature and act more responsibly in general. Not all, but most. In this case "having a child" is a proxy for "having more responsibility" in general. In terms of studies, I'm intrigued by experiments [1] where people are assigned leadership roles randomly. They seem to suggest that people tend to make better decisions when given more responsibility. An even more radical idea that is more closely related to this study would be to assign random citizens to be in charge of a certain political issue, say for 6 to 12 months. [1] http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/10/is-it-sometimes-rational-to-select-leaders-randomly-a-cool-old-study.html http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/10/is-it-sometim...