Favoring Foreigners (Outgroup-bias): a trust intergroup experiment in Ecuador

Description: I study and provide experimental evidence of the emergence of out-group bias (or out-group favoritism) between two naturally occurring groups using Ecuadorean (developing country) students as the in-group and foreign students from developed countries as the out-group. Even though out-group bias may disturb the optimal allocation of scarce resources, there is little research done to understand how and why out-group bias may occur. I discuss how an individual?s level of commitment to her/his group and a ?status? difference between groups may play a role in promoting out-group bias. I designed a trust game experiment where the control group played a classic trust game with their countrymen and the treatment group played it with foreign students from developed countries. In addition I measure and categorize subjects according to their level of commitment. Finally I use countries? categorizations of ?developed? and ?developing? as a signal of status degree. Results fail to show that low-committed Ecuadoreans will trust the out-group more than they trust the in-group. Surprisingly, high-committed Ecuadoreans have a tendency to show out-group bias in the trust game. This result may be due to the fact that high-committed subjects are affectively influenced and care much about their country?s reputation.

Topic: ECONOM?A
GLOBALIZACI?N
INVERSI?N EXTRANJERA
DESARROLLO ECON?MICO
JUEGO DE CONFIANZA
IDENTIDAD SOCIAL
ECUADOR

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