Social Interactions and the Salience of Social Identity

By Kendra N. McLeish, Robert J. Oxoby. Social Science Research Network, 2011

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We explore the effect of identity salience on behaviour in a simple social interaction. Specifically, we compare ultimatum bargaining across three treatments: priming subjects with a shared identity, priming subjects with an identity distinct from those with whom they will interact, and priming subjects with no particular identity. We find that subjects are most cooperative in the identity-priming treatment and least cooperative in the distinctiveness-priming treatment. Similarly, subjects reveal the highest demands in the identity-priming treatment and the lowest demands in the distinctiveness-priming treatment. We discuss the implications of these results with respect to the literature on organizational identity.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73c6ec68d4194e75625afe54e3c403926034d00f

Citations in the corpus

• Vive la Différence: Social Banks and Reciprocity in the Credit Market (2013, unknown): “In addition, social identification fosters reciprocity (Chen and Li 2009; McLeish and Oxoby 2011).”
• Information and College Access: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment. Working Paper 18551. (2012, unknown): “Each of these identities can be more or less salient at any moment of time and the relative salience of different identities can significantly affect behavior (Akerlof and Kranton, 2002, McLeish and Oxoby, 2008).”