Intergroup inequality and the breakdown of prosociality

Abstract

Each year about 60 million people flee their home country and seek to cross into developed countries, thus urging the latter to develop different policy responses to face the growing concerns about how immigration may affect social order. We design a novel two-part public goods experiment with radical income asymmetry between groups to investigate how voting on (not) helping less-endowed others affects pro-social behavior in the voting groups. We find that no group ever votes to help less-endowed ones. This, in turn, results in a breakdown of prosociality within the voting groups. We study the reasons why the implementation of voting-compared to no voting or to imposed solidarity-results in a significant, negative impact on cooperation levels within the voting groups.

Effect of Modulating DLPFC Activity on Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior: Evidence From a tDCS Study

“…Moreover, experimental studies also show that people's prosocial behavior is easily affected by endowment (Cameron, 1999), regional culture (Henrich et al, 2001;Buchan et al, 2004), religion (Chen and Tang, 2009), social identity (Eckel and Grossman, 2005;Chen and Li, 2009) and other related factors. As individuals' prosocial behavior is an important factor in resolving inequality, the impact of the endowment gap on prosocial behavior has also been found in experimental research (Piff et al, 2010;Romaniuc et al, 2019).…”