Crosscutting circles in a social dilemma: Effects of social identity and inequality on cooperation

Abstract

I investigate experimentally the effects of heterogeneity in social identities and inequality in resources on cooperative behavior in a social dilemma. The experiment also varies the overlap between social identity and resources. The results show that both heterogeneity in social identities and inequality in resources reduce cooperation. When social identity and unequal resources are crossed orthogonally, the existence of composite group memberships mitigates the negative effects of inequality, but not of heterogeneity in social identities. When social identity and unequal resources overlap, cooperation decreases substantially among the participants with low resources, in both ingroup and outgroup interactions. My results also show that participants who are assigned to advantaged roles cooperate significantly less than those who are assigned to disadvantaged roles.