Abstract
In two comprehensive and fully incentivized studies, we investigate the development of ingroup favoritism as one of two aspects of parochial altruism in repeated social dilemmas. Specifically, we test whether ingroup favoritism is a fixed phenomenon that can be observed from the very beginning and remains stable over time, or whether it develops (increases vs. decreases) during repeated contact. Ingroup favoritism is assessed through cooperation behavior in a repeated continuous prisoner's dilemma where participants sequentially interact with 10 members of the ingroup (own city and university) and subsequently with 10 members of the outgroup (other city and university), or vice versa. In none of the experiments do we observe initial differences in cooperation behavior for interaction partners from the ingroup, as compared to outgroup, and we only observe small differences in expectations regarding the interaction partners' cooperation behavior. After repeated interaction, however, including a change of groups, clear ingroup favoritism can be observed. Instead of being due to gradual and potentially biased updating of expectations, we found that these emerging differences were mainly driven by the change of interaction partners' group membership that occurred after round 10. This indicates that in social dilemma settings ingroup favoritism is to some degree dynamic in that it is enhanced and sometimes only observable if group membership is activated by thinking about both the interaction with the ingroup and the outgroup.
Highlights
Cooperation is an essential prerequisite for human social life, but it often involves social dilemma situations that require individuals to decide whether to maximize selfish or collective interests
We do not control for counterbalancing condition since this information is included in the variable group due to considering the first and the last trial only. 7Interestingly and we do observe ingroup favoritism in both experiments, when analyzing the first 10 rounds of Experiment 1 separately, we find a tendency toward outgroup favoritism, b = −1.20, t(71) = −1.91, p = 0.060
In Experiment 1, we find ingroup favoritism to be a dynamic phenomenon that develops over contacts with the ingroup and the outgroup
Summary
Cooperation is an essential prerequisite for human social life, but it often involves social dilemma situations that require individuals to decide whether to maximize selfish or collective interests. A typical social dilemma situation is the following: a team of two people works together on a collectively profitable project where benefits are shared evenly and independently of individual contributions. Numerous factors have been shown to influence the tendency of individuals to behave cooperatively in social dilemmas or not (for overviews, see Dawes, 1980; Komorita and Parks, 1995; Zelmer, 2003; Van Lange et al, 2013). One important determinant is group affiliation, that is, whether the partner is perceived as a member of the ingroup or the outgroup.
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