Religious fragmentation, social identity and cooperation: Evidence from a artefactual field experiment in India

Abstract

We study the role of village-level religious fragmentation on intra-and inter-group cooperation in India. We report on data on two-player Prisoners Dilemma and Stag Hunt experiments played by 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of village-level religious heterogeneity. In religiously-heterogeneous villages, cooperation rates in the Prisoners Dilemma are higher when subjects play with another in-group member for both Hindus and Muslims, but to a much lesser extent in the Stag Hunt game. This suggests that positive in-group biases operate primarily on the willingness to achieve socially efficient outcomes, rather than through beliefs about the actions by one's counterpart. Interestingly, cooperation rates among people of the same religion are significantly lower in homogeneous villages than in fragmented villages in both games. This is likely because a sense of group identity is only meaningful in the presence of an outgroup. This, together with little evidence for out-group prejudice in either game, means religious diversity is beneficial.

Social identity and discrimination: Introduction to the special issue

“…Those include strategic uncertainty (Currarini and Mengel, 2016), lack of education (Hombres and Nunziata, 2016) or perceived threats to the group (Weisel and Zultan, 2016). Exposure reduces discrimination in the case of gender biases (Finseraas et al, 2016;Gangadharan et al, 2016), but more exposure to ethnically diverse neighbors does not always lead to less discriminatory attitudes (Bisin et al, 2016;Chakravarty et al, 2016). We hope that the findings in this special issue will stimulate future research in this interesting and important research area.…”

“…They find that children are less prone to cooperate with out-group members and that this gap increases with age. Chakravarty et al (2016) and Chuah et al (2016) study discrimination based on religious identity. Chakravarty et al (2016) focus on village-level religious fragmentation among Hindus and Muslims in rural India.…”

“…Chakravarty et al (2016) and Chuah et al (2016) study discrimination based on religious identity. Chakravarty et al (2016) focus on village-level religious fragmentation among Hindus and Muslims in rural India. They find that cooperation rates in the prisoners' dilemma, and to a lesser extent the stag hunt game, are higher when subjects of either religion play with in-group members than when they play with out-group members or with someone whose identity is unknown.…”