To cooperate or not to cooperate? An analysis of in-group favoritism among Syrian refugees

Nora El-Bialy, Elisa Fraile Aranda, Andreas Nicklisch, Lamis Saleh and Stefan Voigt

No 48, ILE Working Paper Series from University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics

Abstract: Does the experience of civil war promote in-group bias among survivors? We try to answer this question by analyzing cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma game among Syrian refugees in two host countries, Germany and Jordan. We use a between-subjects analysis to test our in-group cooperation hypothesis. We find that Syrians are more likely to cooperate when they are interacting with another Syrian participant than when they are interacting with a German or a Jordanian participant. While Syrian refugees self-report a feeling of relative welcome in the host country, punishment of cooperation norm violations by ingroup or out-group members does not differ significantly. We conclude that our results are more likely to be driven by in-group favoritism rather than out-group hostility.

Keywords: cooperation; in-group favoritism; refugees; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C92 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/232497/1/ile-wp-2021-48.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:ilewps:48

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ILE Working Paper Series from University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().