Cooperation and Discrimination within and Across Language Borders: Evidence from Children in a Bilingual City

We present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether the language spoken by a partner in a prisoner's dilemma game affects behavior and leads to discrimination. Running a framed field experiment with 828 six- to eleven-year old primary school children in the city of Meran, we find that cooperation generally increases with age, but that the gap between cooperation among in-group members and cooperation towards children speaking another language is considerable and increasing with age. This gap is due to both, in-group favoritism and language group discrimination.

[1]  Samuel Bowles,et al.  Supporting Online Material Materials and Methods Som Text Figs. S1 and S2 Table S1 References and Notes the Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War , 2022 .

[2]  U. Fischbacher,et al.  Are People Conditionally Cooperative? Evidence from a Public Goods Experiment , 2001 .

[3]  R. Kerschbamer,et al.  How the value of information shapes the value of commitment or why the value of commitment does not vanish , 2014 .

[4]  Jeremy Clark,et al.  Free-Riding and the Provision of Public Goods in the Family: A Laboratory Experiment , 2004 .

[5]  Joshua D. Angrist,et al.  Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion , 2008 .

[6]  Kenneth J. Arrow,et al.  What Has Economics to Say about Racial Discrimination , 1998 .

[7]  Philipp Lergetporer,et al.  How to measure time preferences in children: a comparison of two methods , 2015 .

[8]  D. Bar-Tal.  Formation and change of ethnic and national stereotypes: An integrative model , 1997 .

[9]  S. Meier,et al.  The Impact of Group Membership on Cooperation and Norm Enforcement: Evidence Using Random Assignment to Real Social Groups , 2006, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[10]  Christoph Schinke.  Government Ideology, Globalization, and Top Income Shares in OECD Countries , 2014 .

[11]  S. Meier,et al.  Trust and In-Group Favoritism in a Culture of Crime , 2016, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[12]  Nadine Fabritz.  ICT as an Enabler of Innovation. Evidence from German Microdata , 2015 .

[13]  Chinn-Ping Fan.  Teaching children cooperation — An application of experimental game theory , 2000 .

[14]  Macartan Humphreys,et al.  Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision? , 2007, American Political Science Review.

[15]  Johann Scharler,et al.  How Strongly are Business Cycles and Financial Cycles Linked in the G7 Countries , 2014 .

[16]  Anna Dreber,et al.  Gender and Cooperation in Children: Experiments in Colombia and Sweden , 2012, PloS one.

[17]  M. Lobo,et al.  Shining light on motivation, emotion, and memory processes , 2015, Front. Behav. Neurosci..

[18]  Johann Scharler,et al.  Total factor productivity and the propagation of shocks: Empirical evidence and implications for the business cycle , 2016 .

[19]  Andrej Tusicisny.  Reciprocity and Prejudice: An Experiment of Hindu-Muslim Cooperation in the Slums of Mumbai , 2013 .

[20]  A. Zeileis,et al.  Innovation and institutional ownership revisited: an empirical investigation with count data models , 2016, Empirical Economics.

[21]  Wolfgang J. Luhan,et al.  When do fiscal consolidations lead to consumption booms? Lessons from a laboratory experiment , 2016 .

[22]  Geoffrey J. Leonardelli,et al.  Minority and Majority Discrimination: When and Why ☆ , 2001 .

[23]  Alex Kupfer,et al.  The impact of liquidity on inflation-linked bonds : A hypothetical indexed bonds approach ∗ , 2014 .

[24]  Helga Wagner,et al.  Random intercept selection in structured additive regression models , 2015 .

[25]  N. Miller,et al.  Effects of numerical representation within cooperative settings: Examining the role of salience in in‐group favouritism , 1999 .

[26]  Carmen Arguedas,et al.  On fraud and certification of corporate social responsibility , 2014 .

[27]  D. Buttelmann,et al.  The Ontogeny of the Motivation That Underlies In-Group Bias , 2014, Psychological science.

[28]  William T. Harbaugh,et al.  Children's altruism in public good and dictator experiments , 2000 .

[29]  J. Yinger,et al.  Evidence on Discrimination in Consumer Markets , 1998 .

[30]  U. Sunde,et al.  Incentives and Selection in Promotion Contests: Is It Possible to Kill Two Birds with One Stone? , 2015 .

[31]  E. W. Morris.  No , 1923, The Hospital and health review.

[32]  James M. Walker,et al.  Externalities in appropriation: responses to probabilistic losses , 2017, Experimental economics.

[33]  Yan Chen,et al.  Group Identity and Social Preferences , 2009 .

[34]  M. E. Yamamoto,et al.  Does group size matter? Cheating and cooperation in Brazilian school children , 2008 .

[35]  James C. Cox,et al.  What is trustworthiness and what drives it? , 2014, Games Econ. Behav..

[36]  Jillian J. Jordan,et al.  Development of in-group favoritism in children’s third-party punishment of selfishness , 2014, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[37]  Philipp Lergetporer,et al.  The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Experimental Evidence from Children's Intertemporal Choices , 2015, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[38]  Mark Rubin,et al.  Intergroup bias. , 2002, Annual review of psychology.

[39]  J. Qiu,et al.  Car mechanics in the lab : investigating the behavior of real experts on experimental markets for credence goods , 2014 .

[40]  Kenneth Harttgen,et al.  Multilevel Modelling of Child Mortality in Africa , 2015 .

[41]  Engelbert Theurl,et al.  Out-of-pocket payments in the Austrian healthcare system – a distributional analysis , 2015, International Journal for Equity in Health.

[42]  Armin Falk,et al.  A City-Wide Experiment on Trust Discrimination , 2013 .

[43]  Achim Zeileis,et al.  Visualizing Count Data Regressions Using Rootograms , 2016, 1605.01311.

[44]  M. K. Chen.  The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets , 2012, The American economic review.

[45]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  The Hidden Costs of Tax Evasion: Collaborative Tax Evasion in Markets for Expert Services , 2015, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[46]  E. Theurl,et al.  Out-of-pocket expenditure by private households for dental services – empirical evidence from Austria , 2016, Health Economics Review.

[47]  C. Ai,et al.  Interaction terms in logit and probit models , 2003 .

[48]  Richard Sosis,et al.  Cooperation and the in-group-out-group bias: A field test on Israeli kibbutz members and city residents. , 2006 .

[49]  Frances E Aboud,et al.  The formation of in-group favoritism and out-group prejudice in young children: are they distinct attitudes? , 2003, Developmental psychology.

[50]  David F. Sally,et al.  The development of interpersonal strategy: Autism, theory-of-mind, cooperation and fairness , 2006 .

[51]  T. Parsons.  The School Class as a Social System: Some of Its Functions in American Society * , 2017 .

[52]  E. Dutcher,et al.  To mitigate or to adapt? Collective action under asymmetries in vulnerability to losses , 2014 .

[53]  Ernst Fehr,et al.  Parochial altruism in humans , 2006, Nature.

[54]  S. Borsky,et al.  Setting one voluntary standard in a heterogeneous Europe - EMAS, corruption and stringency of environmental regulations , 2014 .

[55]  E. Theurl,et al.  What drives out-of pocket health expenditures of private households? - Empirical evidence from the Austrian household budget survey , 2014 .

[56]  Robert Slonim,et al.  Patience among children , 2007 .

[57]  B. Rockenbach,et al.  Egalitarianism in young children , 2008, Nature.

[58]  M. Crockett,et al.  Preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism , 2015, Front. Behav. Neurosci..

[59]  M. Brewer.  The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love and Outgroup Hate? , 1999 .

[60]  F. Sindermann,et al.  Do Banks Lend Less in Uncertain Times? , 2017 .

[61]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  The Development of Egalitarianism, Altruism, Spite and Parochialism in Childhood and Adolescence , 2011, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[62]  T. Schober,et al.  Follow Your Heart: Survival Chances and Costs after Heart Attacks—An Instrumental Variable Approach , 2017, Health Services Research.

[63]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  Experimental Games on Networks: Underpinnings of Behavior and Equilibrium Selection , 2014, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[64]  Helen F. Ladd,et al.  Evidence on Discrimination in Mortgage Lending , 1998 .

[65]  Maik H. Wolters,et al.  Estimating the impact of climate change on agricultural production: accounting for technology heterogeneity across countries , 2014 .

[66]  Wolfgang A. Brunauer,et al.  Statistical Risk Analysis for Real Estate Collateral Valuation using Bayesian Distributional and Quantile Regression , 2014 .

[67]  Jeffrey L. Jordan,et al.  The today and tomorrow of kids: Time preferences and educational outcomes of children , 2011 .

[68]  U. Sunde,et al.  Optimal prizes in dynamic elimination contests: Theory and experimental evidence , 2014 .

[69]  Matthias Sutter,et al.  Third-party punishment increases cooperation in children through (misaligned) expectations and conditional cooperation , 2014, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[70]  J. Andreoni.  Cooperation in Public-Goods Experiments: Kindness or Confusion? , 1995 .

[71]  Engelbert Theurl,et al.  Out-of-pocket expenditures for pharmaceuticals: lessons from the Austrian household budget survey , 2016, The European Journal of Health Economics.

[72]  C. Fershtman,et al.  Trust and discrimination in a segmented society: An experimental approach , 2001 .

[73]  A. Alcock.  The history of the South Tyrol question , 1970 .

[74]  M. Goodman.  Race Awareness in Young Children , 2011 .

[75]  Mei Wang,et al.  Behavioral determinants of home bias - theory and experiment , 2014 .

[76]  A. Eagly,et al.  Gender stereotypes stem from the distribution of women and men into social roles , 1984 .

[77]  R. Liebert.  Effects of Vicarious Consequences and Race of Model upon Imitative Performance by Black Children. , 1972 .

[78]  E. Theurl,et al.  Atypical Employment and Health: A Meta-Analysis , 2014 .

[79]  D. Bar-Tal.  Development of social categories and stereotypes in early childhood: The case of “The Arab” concept formation, stereotype and attitudes by Jewish children in Israel , 1996 .

[80]  A. Rustichini,et al.  Individual Behavior and Group Membership , 2006 .

[81]  M. Sutter,et al.  Donations, Risk Attitudes and Time Preferences: A Study on Altruism in Primary School Children , 2015, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[82]  G. Harrison,et al.  Field experiments , 1924, The Journal of Agricultural Science.

[83]  M. Kirchler,et al.  Friendliness pays off! Monetary and Immaterial Gifts in Consumer-Salesperson Interactions , 2014 .

[84]  W. Darity,et al.  Evidence on Discrimination in Employment: Codes of Color, Codes of Gender , 1998 .

[85]  U. Dulleck,et al.  Too Much or Too Little? Price Discrimination in a Market for Credence Goods , 2014, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics.

[86]  Achim Zeileis,et al.  Partykit: a modular toolkit for recursive partytioning in R , 2015, J. Mach. Learn. Res..