The facts that there is a lot of collective action even in many large-number contexts … and that, therefore, many people are not free riding in relevant contexts suggest [that] … the actors in the seemingly successful collective actions fail to understand their own interests.

Despite the fact that people regularly grasp the incentive to free ride on the efforts of others in many contexts, it is also true that the logic of collective action is hard to grasp in the abstract. The cursory history… [of collective action] suggests just how hard it was to come to a general understanding of the problem. Today, there are thousands of social scientists and philosophers who do understand it and maybe far more who still do not. But in the general population, few people grasp it. Those who teach these issues regularly discover that some students insist that the logic is wrong, that it is, for example, in the interest of workers to pay dues voluntarily to unions or that it is in one's interest to vote …. It would be extremely difficult to assess how large is the role of misunderstanding in the reasons for action in general because those who do not understand the issues cannot usefully be asked whether they do understand. But the evidence of misunderstanding and ignorance is extensive.