Social Distance and Parochial Altruism: An Experimental Study

Béatrice Boulu-Reshef and Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl
Additional contact information
Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl: University of Virginia, The Department of Politics

Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL

Abstract: Parochial altruism-individual sacrifice to benefit the in-group and harm an out-group-undermines inter-group cooperation and is implicated in a plethora of politically-significant behaviors. We report new experimental findings about the impact of variation in social distance within the in-group together with variation in social distance between the in-and out-groups on parochial altruism. Building from a minimal group paradigm setup , we find that differential social distance has a systematic effect on individual choice in a setting of potential inter-group conflict. In particular, parochial altruism is stimulated when individuals' distance to both their in-and out-group is high. A long-standing finding about behavior in contexts of inter-group conflict is that low social distance facilitates collective action. Our results suggest that the effects of high social distance may create a potential additional pathway to group-based individual action. Research on inter-group conflict and collective action can be advanced by investigating such effects.

Date: 2019-05-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-exp
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-02135633
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-02135633/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Distance and Parochial Altruism: An Experimental Study (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:cesptp:hal-02135633

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().