"The Diffusion Effect of Group Identity on Social Cooperation," with Qiqi Wang, Iowa State University. Thursday, October 25, 3:40 PM-5 PM, 360 Heady Hall.

Abstract: The recent literature on in-group/out-group bias has demonstrated that subjects who participate in group-identity building games are more likely to cooperate in subsequent experiments (for example, Chen and Chen ($2011$), Eckel and Grossman ($2006$)). We show that in-group/out-group bias can be mitigated by simply observing in-group members interact with out-group members. Our subject pool consists of students recruited from two different college majors at a Chinese university. In our control experiment, two students from each major whose identities are made salient are randomly matched to play a 2-player public goods game. We first show that the subjects exhibit an in-group/out-group bias relative to subjects without such identity priming. In our first treatment, these students watch two peers, the ``puzzle-solving team'' (again drawn from both majors), cooperate in solving a puzzle game. We find that subsequent cooperation in the public goods game significantly increases compared to the control treatment. We interpret our findings as an example of “diffusing” group identity where observing in-group/out-group interaction reduces the overall in-group/out-group bias. In a second treatment, we create puzzle-solving teams that consist of two randomly selected players to distinguish group identity diffusion from simply putting subjects in a cooperative mood.