Testing Theories about Ethnic Markers

Abstract

In recent years, evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have debated whether ethnic markers have evolved to solve adaptive problems related to interpersonal coordination or to interpersonal cooperation. In the present study, we add to this debate by exploring how individuals living in a modern society utilize the accents of unfamiliar individuals to make social decisions in hypothetical economic games that measure interpersonal trust, generosity, and coordination. A total of 4603 Danish participants completed a verbal-guise study administered over the Internet. Participants listened to four speakers (two local and two nonlocal) and played a hypothetical Dictator Game, Trust Game, and Coordination Game with each of them. The results showed that participants had greater faith in coordinating successfully with local speakers than with nonlocal speakers. The coordination effect was strong for individuals living in the same city as the particular speakers and weakened as the geographical distance between the participants and the speakers grew. Conversely, the results showed that participants were not more generous toward or more trusting of local speakers compared with nonlocal speakers. Taken together, the results suggest that humans utilize ethnic markers of unfamiliar individuals to coordinate behavior rather than to cooperate.

Evolutionary Dynamics of Homophily and Heterophily

“…A second factor is the nature of the interaction, which on purpose is kept very simple in the model of Fu and colleagues. Homophily may have a crucial role in coordinating the agents’ behaviour in a coordination game 56 57 58 or, more generally, in achieving a favourable outcome in ambiguous situations 59 60 61 . For example, most social interactions have a large number of possible (Nash) equilibrium solutions 27 28 33 .…”

A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms

“…One psychological explanation for positive reactions to norm-conforming ingroup members is that norm conformity promotes between-group distinctiveness, which in turn helps to maintain their social identity (Tajfel 1981). A distinct but not incompatible explanation is that norm conformity might function as "ethnic markers" that help us to identify reliable partners for the purposes of coordination and the pursuit of mutual goals (McElreath, Boyd, and Richerson 2003;Jensen et al 2015).…”

Affiliative terms as a linguistic tool for improving perceptions of out-group members?

“…Experimental simulations demonstrate that group cooperative strategies between individuals who share a group marker are able to arise and proliferate under a wide range of conditions (Hammond & Axelrod, 2006;Ihara, 2011;Riolo et al, 2001). Furthermore, results of laboratory one-shot economic games have shown that strangers who share group markers (even if arbitrarily assigned) are more likely to cooperate and act altruistically towards each other than participants who do not share a marker (Chen & Li, 2009;Hewstone, Rubin, & Willis, 2002) [for a critical discussion of some of this empirical evidence, see Jensen, Petersen, Høgh-Olesen, & Ejstrup, 2015]. An alternative account proposes that markers facilitate coordination among individuals in a heterogeneous population because they signal one's behavioural type/preferences/habits and allow unfamiliar individuals to identify others who share their social norms/cultural expectations (Gil-White, 2001;McElreath et al, 2003).…”

“…An alternative account proposes that markers facilitate coordination among individuals in a heterogeneous population because they signal one's behavioural type/preferences/habits and allow unfamiliar individuals to identify others who share their social norms/cultural expectations (Gil-White, 2001;McElreath et al, 2003). Support for this conjecture comes from field research (Barth, 1969), laboratory studies (Efferson, Lalive, & Fehr, 2008;Jensen et al, 2015) and modelling (McElreath et al, 2003).…”