Who discriminates? Evidence from a trust game experiment across three societies

Swee-Hoon Chuah, Simon Gächter, Robert Hoffmann and Jonathan Tan

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2023, vol. 97, issue C

Abstract: What personal characteristics are associated with the extent to which individuals discriminate against particular groups? We use an incentive-compatible measure of an individual’s tendency to discriminate on others’ different social identities that takes into account the costs of discrimination. In particular, we elicit participants’ willingness to discriminate (WTD) in their investments to make their decisions dependent on others’ social identities using a laboratory trust game experiment with 545 participants in three countries: Malaysia, China and the UK. Analysis of our WTD measure shows that discrimination differs depending on discriminators’ cultural group identity and political values. Demographic variables including age and gender are not significant. Overall our results support the psychological distinctiveness of WEIRD participants found in other studies.

Keywords: Discrimination; Experiment; Willingness to discriminate; Trust; Culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 J15 J71 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487023000314
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:joepsy:v:97:y:2023:i:c:s0167487023000314

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2023.102630

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().