Competing social identities and intergroup discrimination: Evidence from a framed field experiment with high school students in Vietnam.

Tam Kiet Vuong,Ho Fai Chan,Benno Torgler,Natalia Jiménez

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0261275

Abstract

We conducted a framed field experiment to explore a situation where individuals have potentially competing social identities to understand how group identification and socialisation affect in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination. The Dictator Game and the Trust Game were conducted in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City on two groups of high school students with different backgrounds, i.e., French bilingual and monolingual (Vietnamese) students. We find strong evidence for the presence of these two phenomena: our micro-analysis of within- and between-school effects show that bilingual students exhibit higher discriminatory behaviour toward non-bilinguals within the same school than toward other bilinguals from a different school, implying that group identity is a key factor in the explanation of intergroup cooperation and competition.

Highlights

Identity is a source of pride and joy, confidence, and strength–but identity can kill, as a strong and exclusive sense of belonging to a specific group can lead to a perception of distance to other groups or individuals [1]
We find substantial evidence that in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination exist in both the bilingual and non-bilingual student groups
While the symmetry in behaviour is remarkable as both groups discriminate against each other substantially, bilingual students showed stronger out-group discrimination than non-bilingual students

Summary

Introduction

Identity is a source of pride and joy, confidence, and strength–but identity can kill, as a strong and exclusive sense of belonging to a specific group can lead to a perception of distance to other groups or individuals [1]. Amartya Sen [1] refers to the deadly HinduMuslim riots in the 1940s: “The political instigators who urged the killing (on behalf of what they respectively called “our people”) managed to persuade many otherwise peaceable people of both communities to turn into dedicated thugs. They were made to think of themselves only as Hindus or only as Muslims (who must unleash vengeance on ‘the other community’) and as absolutely nothing else: not Indians, not sub-continentals, not Asians, not members of a shared human race” Whereas in-group favouritism is a tendency to behave more favourably toward those of the same social group, who often

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Conclusion