The development of ingroup favoritism in repeated social dilemmas

Abstract

In two comprehensive and fully incentivized studies, we investigate the development of ingroup favoritism as one of two aspects of parochial altruism in repeated social dilemmas. Specifically, we test whether ingroup favoritism is a fixed phenomenon that can be observed from the very beginning and remains stable over time, or whether it develops (increases vs. decreases) during repeated contact. Ingroup favoritism is assessed through cooperation behavior in a repeated continuous prisoner's dilemma where participants sequentially interact with 10 members of the ingroup (own city and university) and subsequently with 10 members of the outgroup (other city and university), or vice versa. In none of the experiments do we observe initial differences in cooperation behavior for interaction partners from the ingroup, as compared to outgroup, and we only observe small differences in expectations regarding the interaction partners' cooperation behavior. After repeated interaction, however, including a change of groups, clear ingroup favoritism can be observed. Instead of being due to gradual and potentially biased updating of expectations, we found that these emerging differences were mainly driven by the change of interaction partners' group membership that occurred after round 10. This indicates that in social dilemma settings ingroup favoritism is to some degree dynamic in that it is enhanced and sometimes only observable if group membership is activated by thinking about both the interaction with the ingroup and the outgroup.

Cooperation and Optimism in a Social Dilemma

“…Social cooperation, its evolution and stability can be understood from a number of perspectives: social value orientation (see Balliet et al, 2009); social norms (e.g., Buckholtz and Marois, 2012;Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004); group bias (e.g., Dorrough et al, 2015;McAuliffe and Dunham, 2016); conditional cooperation or reciprocity (e.g., Kocher et al, 2008;Fischbacher and Gaechter, 2010;Smith, 2013); context-specificity (e.g., Rand and Nowak, 2013); and so on.…”

Investigating the Evolution of Ingroup Favoritism Using a Minimal Group Interaction Paradigm: The Effects of Inter- and Intragroup Interdependence

“…Outgroup aggression in earlier rounds promoted altruistic giving in later rounds in comparison with the experimental condition that did not allow aggression. Dorrough, Glöckner, Hellmann and Ebert [37] asked members of two real world groups to play a sequence of 20 simultaneous PD games, first with 10 different members one group (ingroup or outgroup, counterbalanced), then with 10 different members of the other group. They found no evidence of ingroup favoritism at round 1, but found that ingroup favoritism increased over repeated contacts, and was linked to the expectation of ingroup reciprocation, especially in the shift between groups between rounds 10 and 11.…”

“…Chen and Li [30], Cacault et al [36], and Dorrough et al, [37] studied ingroup favoritism over a sequence of rounds, and showed that subsequent behaviors may be influenced by prior actions. Nonetheless, these experiments lacked the responsive quality of true interaction.…”

Health and psychological health in present time

“…Hence this human nature is also responsible for creating differences. 39,[45][46][47] This human tendency has helped them in evolution in early phases but in later phases of evolution, human wisdom helped them to perform better than animals. Most of our behavior depends on our DNA and human DNA resembles to that of animals especially chimpanzee, to a very large extent.…”