Race, diversity and pro-social behavior in a segmented society

Diversity and the provision of public goods: Experimental evidence from South Africa

“…Of course, it is not possible to know for sure, since subjects were not debriefed after the task was completed, but we think that at the very least, our results do suggest some important avenues for future work, including further exploration of the impact of language and accent as a marker or identity. Finally, it is worth noting that taken together with prior experimental work on intra-and inter-group trust in South Africa, which demonstrated low levels of intra-group trust amongst Black South Africans ( (Burns, 2012)), our experimental results are entirely consistent with the broader applied econometric work that has typified much of the focus on Africa's growth tragedy, with the under-provision of public goods and associated lack of economic growth being associated with ethnolinguistic diversity, and low trust (Easterly and Levine, 1997;Zak and Knack, 2001).…”

“…In exploring this domain, we use the question "Generally speaking, would you say most people can be trusted" as our measure of trust, since this is the standard GSS question used internationally in this field to measure trust. In addition, previous experimental work in South Africa suggests that Black South Africans are both less trusting and less trusted by others, including by Black partners (Burns, 2012). This could manifest as low levels of intra-group trust in our setting for All Black groups.…”

“…More recent experimental evidence from economics demonstrates that in strategic interactions, where information is asymmetric, individuals may rely on costlessly observable cues such as race (Glaeser et al, 2000), gender (Scharleman et al, 2001;Chaudhuri and Gangadharan, 2002;Croson and Buchan, 1999) and ethnicity (Fershtman and Gneezy, 2001;Bouckaert and Dhaene, 2003;Burns, 2012) to distinguish between individuals and their anticipated behaviours. Moreover, costlessly observable visual cues are likely to be privileged over other categorisations, such as class or educational background, even when the latter might be more relevant (Chandra, 2003;Cornell and Welch, 1996).…”

The white-man effect: How foreigner presence affects behavior in experiments

“…4 By focusing on the experimenter's ethnicity, our paper differs from previous studies which have examined the import of players' racial, ethnic and national identities in determining behavioral game allocations (e.g. Burns, 2006Burns, , 2012Whitt and Wilson, 2007;Habyarimana et al, 2007;Cappelen et al, 2013;Adida et al, 2012). and Maner, 2008).…”

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Re-examining Nepotism and Discrimination in a Segmented Society

“…The racial mix of schools was quite varied. The impact of the extent of school integration on choices in a strategic trust game is reported in a separate paper (seeBurns, 2012). Schools were randomly allocated to treatment, so the six schools that participated in these experiments were no different on average than the remaining nine schools which were allocated to different experimental designs.…”