Accents, Race and Discrimination: Evidence from a Trust Game

Ece Yagman () and Malcolm Keswell ()
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Malcolm Keswell: SALDRU, School of Economics, University of Cape Town

No 158, SALDRU Working Papers from Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town

Abstract: We investigate discrimination according to accent and race on trust behaviour. Proposers were randomly paired with responders of the same/different race, and asked to play the trust game after looking at a photograph and hearing a 10 second audio clip of the responders reading a standardised script in English. This allows us to check for within and across-group favouritism in both race and accentedness. We find that accentedness is a statistically significant predictor of trust and is strongly non-linear in the race of the paired subjects for males but not for females. In the case of males, offers decrease by 11.3% if the responder has a mother-tongue English accent and does not share the same race as the proposer, but increases by about 6.6% if there is racial similarity. This effect is especially pronounced for Black males who are paired with other Black males: offers are 19.5% higher if responders have a mother-tongue English accent. By contrast, females in general seem less sensitive to the signal package. These large gender differences are not because men behave any more strategically than women.

Keywords: Experiments; Trust; Accents; Discrimination; Race (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-lab and nep-soc
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ldr:wpaper:158

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