Group identity and social preferences (by Yan Chen and Sherry X. Li)

Abstract

Beyond a summary of the paper, this review of "Group Identity and Social Preferences" by Yan Chen and Sherry X. Li highlights its exceptional impact on our understanding of group-contingent social preferences. This paper has made an important theoretical contribution by introducing group identity in the Charness and Rabin (2002)'s model of social preferences. The core of the contribution is to show experimentally that social identity influences distributional preferences, reciprocity and welfare-maximizing behavior. In particular, charity increases and envy decreases when people are matched with an in-group compared to an out-group, and people are more likely to reward and less likely to punish an ingroup than an out-group match. This paper has also contributed to the methodological debates about the use of minimal group identity in laboratory experiments. It has inspired many research programs on the role of group-contingent preferences in various dimensions of decision-making in society. It is also important to emphasize its policy implications regarding how groupcontingent social preferences could be activated to improve efficiency and the quality of social interactions in our segmented societies. This research agenda is more relevant than ever.I cannot visit a museum exhibiting paintings of Klee or Kandinsky without thinking immediately of Yan Chen and Sherry Li. Of course, the Klee-Kandinsky protocol used for inducing minimal group identity in the lab was introduced in 1971 by social psychologists, H. Tajfel, M. Billig, R. Bundy and C. Flament, decades before the publication of "Group Identity and Social Preferences" in the American Economic Review in 2009. But if my reference point on group identity is Yan and Sherry's paper, it is not because of an in-group bias in favor of economists! It is because their paper had a huge impact on any scholar interested in understanding the impact of group biases and social preferences on individual decision-making.

Conflicting identities and cooperation between groups: Experimental evidence from a mentoring program

“…Thus, we will test H1 also for each natural group separately to detect any differences in behavior. If H1 is rejected, this might suggest that the minimal group paradigm may not hold in heterogeneous groups with strong natural identities (see Pechar andKranton 2017, andVilleval 2021).…”

“…Moreover, since our context is strategic (a Prisoners' Dilemma Game), this may affect the strength of the minimal-group identity (seeVilleval 2021, andYamagishi andKiyonari 2000).…”

La contribución del arte a la comunicación sobre el cambio climático

“…El arte también puede reforzar un sentimiento de identidad de grupo entre el público que aprecia una misma obra de arte, y esta es una forma de involucrar a las personas en los movimientos sociales y suscitar el cambio social (Charness y Chen, 2020;Villeval, 2021). Históricamente, el arte ha desempeñado un rol importante a la hora de llamar la atención sobre una serie de cuestiones sociales, sensibilizar y cambiar percepciones: por ejemplo, el papel del arte feminista en el movimiento de liberación de la mujer de las décadas de 1960 y 1970 (Adams, 2002).…”