Going Beyond the In-/Out-Group Dichotomy: Investigating Altruism towards Middle-Groups

Leon Houf and Christiane Schwieren

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: In-group favouritism and out-group hostility are well-documented, but real-world group settings rarely fit a simple dichotomy. Often, a "middle-group" shares some identity markers with the in-group without fully belonging to it. How do people treat such intermediate groups? We address this question using a formal identity marker framework and a multi-lab online experiment (N = 376) with a private allocation task immune to reputation effects and demand characteristics. We find that a middle-group can be treated neutrally, i.e., distinct from both in-group favouritism and out-group hostility, but only under specific conditions. When the middle-group shares two identity markers with the in-group, including university affiliation, a complete hierarchy emerges: the in-group is favoured, the middle-group is treated according to the allocation rule, and the out-group bears the loss. However, when the middle-group shares only one marker, it is treated indistinguishably from the out-group, regardless of which marker is shared. Furthermore, differentiated behaviour evolves only after participants have re-encountered the experimental instructions and group constellation in a second phase, not gradually across rounds. These findings demonstrate that participants can perceive beyond binary in-/out-group categorisation, but such perception requires both sufficient identity overlap and repeated exposure to the group setting. Our identity marker framework provides a tool for systematically studying group relations in more complex settings.

Date: 2026-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.09046 Latest version (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:arx:papers:2609.09046

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().