Religious Fragmentation, Social Identity and Conflict: Evidence from an Artefactual Field Experiment in India

Abstract

We examine the impact of religious identity and village-level religious fragmentation on behavior in Tullock contests. We report on a series of two-player Tullock contest experiments conducted on a sample of 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural West Bengal, India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of religious fragmentation in the village where subjects reside. Our main finding is that the effect of social identity is small and inconsistent across the two religious groups in our study. While we find small but statistically significant results in line with our hypotheses in the Hindu sample, we find no statistically significant effects in the Muslim sample. This is in contrast to evidence from Chakravarty et al. (2016), who report significant differences in cooperation levels in prisoners’ dilemma and stag hunt games, both in terms of village composition and identity. We attribute this to the fact that social identity may have a more powerful effect on cooperation than on conflict.

Identity, Communication, and Conflict: An Experiment

“…In a laboratory experiment, Chowdhury et al (2016) use race as the real identity and a minimal identity as the classification and find support for Sen's proposition at a group level. Chakravarty et al (2016) find a similar result in a lab-in-the-field experiment involving Hindus and Muslims in India. See the survey by Chowdhury (2021) for further studies on identity and conflict.…”

Universal Love or One True Religion? Experimental Evidence of the Ambivalent Effect of Religious Ideas on Altruism and Discrimination

“…At the same time, the authors do not find consistent evidence in noncooperative games (Chakravarty et al. ), and Johansson‐Stenman, Mahmud, and Martinsson () similarly find no evidence for intergroup bias among religious groups in Bangladesh. Gupta et al.…”

Don't judge a book by its cover: The role of intergroup contact in reducing prejudice in conflict settings

“…More generally, we contribute to a growing literature in economics that seeks to better understand the causes and implications of religious violence in India, as well as how to address it (see e.g. Chakravarty et al, 2016Chakravarty et al, , 2019Gupta et al, 2018;Iyer & Shrivastava, 2018;Mitra & Ray, 2014).…”