Abstract
Ingroup favoritism—the tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those in other groups—is well documented, but the mechanisms driving this behavior are not well understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the behavior of ingroup and outgroup members. In this review we analyze research on ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature and providing suggestions on how future work can incorporate these insights to shed further light on when, why, and how ingroup favoritism occurs. In doing so, we demonstrate how social psychological theory and research can be integrated with findings from behavioral economics, providing new theoretical and methodological directions for future research.
Highlights
Across many different contexts, people act more prosocially towards members of their own group relative to those outside their group
We focus on economic games here, we selectively draw upon other related research to highlight how social-psychological theory and research can be incorporated with findings from behavioral economics to provide exciting new directions for research
Research using economic games to study prosocial behavior has often used a small number of specific games with slight modifications: the Tajfel Minimal Group Paradigm Matrices (“Tajfel Matrices”: Tajfel, 1970); the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD; Rapoport and Chammah, 1965; Axelrod, 1980); the Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD; Bornstein and Ben-Yossef, 1994); the Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma Maximising Difference (IPD-MD; Halevy et al, 2008); Common Pool Dilemmas (CPD; Hardin, 1968; Messick et al, 1983); Public Goods Dilemmas (PGD; Hardin, 1968; see Figure 1); the Dictator Game (DG; Kahneman et al, 1986; Forsythe et al, 1994; see Figure 2); the Ultimatum Game (UG; Güth et al, 1982: see Figure 3); and the Trust Game (TG: Berg et al, 1995; see Figure 4)
Summary
Reviewed by: Melissa Marie McDonald, Michigan State University, USA David Gertler Rand, Yale University, USA Valerio Capraro, Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica, Netherlands. In this review we analyze research on ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature and providing suggestions on how future work can incorporate these insights to shed further light on when, why, and how ingroup favoritism occurs. We explore to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs beliefs about the (future) behavior of ingroup and outgroup members In this theoretical review we combine insights from a behavioral economic approach with knowledge from social psychological research on social identity processes in intergroup behavior to explain the proximate psychological causes of ingroup favoritism. We provide an integrative review of ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature, as well as providing suggestions on how future work can incorporate these insights to shed further light on when, why, and how ingroup favoritism occurs. Once groups have been formed, how does this influence behavior?
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