The Impact of Group Membership on Cooperation and Norm Enforcement: Evidence Using Random Assignment to Real Social Groups

By Lorenz F. Goette, David Huffman, Stephan Meier. Social Science Research Network, 2006

696 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Due to incomplete contracts, efficiency of an organization depends on willingness of individuals to take non-selfish actions, e.g., cooperate when there is no incentive to do so, or punish inefficient actions by others. Organizations also constitute a social boundary, or group. We investigate whether this social aspect of organizations has an important benefit, fostering unselfish cooperation and norm enforcement within the group, but whether there is also a dark side, in the form of hostility between groups. Our experiment provides the first evidence without the confounding effect of self-selection into groups. Individuals are randomly assigned to different platoons during a four-week portion of officer training in the Swiss Army. We conduct choice experiments – simultaneous prisoner’s dilemma games, with and without third-party punishment – in week three. Random assignment significantly increases willingness to cooperate with fellow platoon members. Assignment does not lead to hostility, in the sense of vindictive punishment of outsiders, but does affect norm enforcement, enhancing willingness to enforce a norm of cooperation towards fellow platoon members. This suggests that the social aspect of organizations motivates efficient behavior even when ordinary incentives fail, and helps explain practices designed to foster social ties or group identification within an organization.

Subfields: Demography, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/581c18472bff03d99d5c1d72790c88efaf345418

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

In Management Science and Operations Research

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

Other Regarding Preferences: A Selective Survey of Experimental Results (2012, background): “…in finding strong in-group effects on other-regarding behavior: Bernhard, Fehr, and Fischbacher (2006) find this studying dictator games with third party punishment in Papua New Guinea as do Goette, Huffman, and Meier (2006) studying this game and prisoner’s dilemma games for Swiss army platoons.”
Explaining the Diversity of Motivations Behind Community Renewable Energy (2016, result): “This result is supported by extensive evidence from experimental settings and the field (Brown-Kruse and Hummels, 1993; Dawes et al., 1988; Goette et al., 2006).”
Enforcement of contribution norms in public good games with heterogeneous populations (2009, neutral): “20 coeﬃcient, but it allows for dependence across periods within groups (see Page, 1963).”
Social Identity and Preferences Over Redistribution (2010, neutral): “d Goette et al. (2006).”
ETHNIC DIVERSITY, PUBLIC SPENDING, AND INDIVIDUAL SUPPORT FOR THE WELFARE STATE: A REVIEW OF THE EMPIRICAL LITERATURE (2013, neutral): “Goette et al. (2006)”
Cooperation and Discrimination within and Across Language Borders: Evidence from Children in a Bilingual City (2016, neutral): “Evidence for the economic implications of intergroup discrimination is vast and spans from discrimination in labor, housing, credit or consumer markets to political conflict or even social unrest (see, e.g., Arrow, 1998; Darity and Mason, 1998; Ladd, 1998; Yinger, 1998; Fershtman and Gneezy, 2000; B”
Ingroup favoritism in cooperation: a meta-analysis. (2014, neutral): “…[ 0.70, 0.20] M DG C $ OS 2 Goerg et al. (2013) 40 IL 0.39 [ 0.23, 1.02] N PD C $ OS 2 0.27 Sample 2 40 PAL 0.71 [0.07, 1.35] N PD C $ OS 2 0.38 Goette et al. (2006) 116 1.00 CH 0.44 [0.02, 0.86] N PD C $ OS 2 0.36 Goette, Huffman, & Meier (2012) 111 1.00 CH 0.22 [ 0.19, 0.64] M PD C $ OS 2…”
What Drives Taxi Drivers? A Field Experiment on Fraud in a Market for Credence Goods (2013, background): “This hints at the possibility that distributional preferences might affect the provision of credence goods, as has been documented in the laboratory experiments of Kerschbamer et al. (2009) and Dulleck et al.”
Social Interactions and the Salience of Social Identity (2011, positive): “Experimentally, simple games have been used in the study of group identity and results have shown individuals to exhibit more cooperative behavior to in-group members, and punish in-group members more for uncooperative behavior (Goette et al., 2006; Bernhard et al., 2006; McLeish and Oxoby, 2007).”