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Shifting punishment on minorities: experimental evidence of scapegoating
Bauer, Michal ; Cahlíková, J. ; Chytilová, Julie ; Roland, G. ; Želinský, T.
This paper provides experimental evidence showing that members of a majority group systematically shift punishment on innocent members of an ethnic minority. We develop a new incentivized task, the Punishing the Scapegoat Game, to measure how injustice affecting a member of one’s own group shapes punishment of an unrelated bystander (“a scapegoat”). We manipulate the ethnic identity of the scapegoats and study interactions between the majority group and the Roma minority in Slovakia. We find that when no harm is done, there is no evidence of discrimination against the ethnic minority. In contrast, when a member of one’s own group is harmed, the punishment ”passed” on innocent individuals more than doubles when they are from the minority, as compared to when they are from the dominant group. These results illuminate how individualized tensions can be transformed into a group conflict, dragging minorities into conflicts in a way that is completely unrelated to their behavior.
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Using survey questions to measure preferences: lessons from an experimental validation in Kenya
Bauer, Michal ; Chytilová, Julie ; Miguel, E.
Can a short survey instrument reliably measure a range of fundamental economic preferences across diverse settings? We focus on survey questions that systematically predict behavior in incentivized experimental tasks among German university students (Becker et al. 2016) and were implemented among representative samples across the globe (Falk et al. 2018). This paper presents results of an experimental validation conducted among low-income individuals in Nairobi, Kenya. We find that quantitative survey measures -- hypothetical versions of experimental tasks -- of time preference, attitude to risk and altruism are good predictors of choices in incentivized experiments, suggesting these measures are broadly experimentally valid. At the same time, we find that qualitative questions -- self-assessments -- do not correlate with the experimental measures of preferences in the Kenyan sample. Thus, caution is needed before treating self-assessments as proxies of preferences in new contexts.\n
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Do minorities misrepresent their ethnicity to avoid discrimination?
Kudashvili, Nikoloz ; Lergetporer, P.
Discrimination against minorities is pervasive in many societies, but little is known about strategies minorities may apply to minimize discrimination. In our trust game with 758 highschool students in the country of Georgia, ethnic Georgian trustors discriminate against the ethnic Armenian minority group. We introduce an initial signaling stage to investigate Armenians’ willingness to hide their ethnicity to avoid expected discrimination. 43 percent of Armenian trustees untruthfully signal that they have a Georgian name. Signaling behavior is driven by expected transfers and non-pecuniary motives. This strategic misrepresentation of ethnicity increases Georgian trustors’ expected back transfers and eliminates their discriminatory behavior.\n
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Anti-social behavior in groups
Bauer, Michal ; Cahlíková, J. ; Celik Katreniak, D. ; Chytilová, Julie ; Cingl, L. ; Želinský, T.
This paper provides strong evidence supporting the long-standing speculation that decisionmaking in groups has a dark side, by magnifying the prevalence of anti-social behavior towards outsiders. A large-scale experiment implemented in Slovakia and Uganda (N=2,309) reveals that deciding in a group with randomly assigned peers increases the prevalence of anti-social behavior that reduces everyone’s payoff but which improves the relative position of own group. The effects are driven by the influence of a group context on individual behavior, rather than by group deliberation. The observed patterns are strikingly similar on both continents.
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Effects of poverty on impatience: preferences or inattention?
Bartoš, V. ; Bauer, Michal ; Chytilová, Julie ; Levely, I.
We study two psychological channels how poverty may increase impatient behavior – an effect\non time preference and reduced attention. We measured discount rates among Ugandan farmers\nwho made decisions about when to enjoy entertainment instead of working. We find that\nexperimentally induced thoughts about poverty-related problems increase the preference to\nconsume entertainment early and delay work. The effect is equivalent to a 27 p.p. increase in\nthe intertemporal rate of substitution. Using monitoring tools similar to eye tracking, a novel\nfeature for this subject pool, we show this effect is not due to a lower ability to sustain attention.
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