Ultimatum Game with Ethnicity Manipulation: Problems Faced Doing Field Economic Experiments and their Solutions

Abstract

This article reports the experiences of one ethnographer conducting economic experiments in Bulgan Sum, Khovd, Republic of Mongolia. Torguud and Kazakh nomadic pastoralists played the ultimatum game against anonymous coethnics and nonethnics. The evidence gathered is relevant to (1) whether there is an in-group favoritism bias as maintained by social identity theory and social categorization theory and (2) whether non-Western populations behave differently from the now relatively well-studied Western populations in ways that are plausible given their culture. Special attention is given to the challenges involved in adapting this valuable research method to non-Western populations in rural settings. The biggest difficulty had to do with bootstrapping for participants all of the “obvious” background cultural assumptions about experiments as social situations, which an ideal participant carries in his head and which are assumed to be there rather than verified when conducting experiments in the West.