Intergroup competition, group status, and individuals’ cooperation behavior: Evidence from a laboratory experiment

Abstract

Intergroup competition has been proven to increase ingroup cooperation, but it will also divide individuals into high-status groups and low-status groups, which may lead to group-level conflict and affect cooperation behavior among different status group members. In this paper, we conduct a laboratory experiment to find how group status caused by intergroup competition changes individuals’ cooperation behavior in two representative social dilemma frameworks, the public goods game and the prisoner's dilemma game. Experimental results show that both high-status group members and low-status group members will improve ingroup cooperation, and there exists the framing effect of cooperation which affects different status group members’ decisions under different situations. Specifically, the increase of ingroup cooperation occurs among low-status group members in the public goods game and high-status group members in the prisoner's dilemma game. Besides, we find no evidence of any significant change in outgroup cooperation among different status group members.