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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Favoritism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Favoritism. Show all posts

Friday, May 15, 2020

“Do the right thing” for whom? An experiment on ingroup favouritism, group assorting and moral suasion

E. Bilancini, L. Boncinelli, & others
Judgment and Decision Making, 
Vol. 15, No. 2, March 2020, pp. 182-192

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preferences), and morally relevant issues in another treatment (assorting on moral preferences). In the second stage, participants choose how to split a given amount of money between participants of their own group and participants of the other group, first in the baseline setting and then in a setting where they are told to do what they believe to be morally right (moral suasion). Our main results are: (i) in the baseline, participants tend to favour their own group to a greater extent when groups are assorted according to moral preferences, compared to when they are assorted according to non-moral preferences; (ii) the net effect of moral suasion is to decrease ingroup favouritism, but there is also a non-negligible proportion of participants for whom moral suasion increases ingroup favouritism; (iii) the effect of moral suasion is substantially stable across group assorting and four pre-registered individual characteristics (gender, political orientation, religiosity, pro-life vs pro-choice ethical convictions).

From the Discussion:

The interest in moral suasion stems, at least in part, from being a cheap and possibly effective policy tool that could be applied to foster prosocial behaviours. While the literature on moral behaviour has so far produced a substantial body of evidence showing the effectiveness of moral suasion, its dependence on the identity of the recipients of the decision-maker’s actions is far less studied, leaving open the possibility that individuals react to moral suasion by reducing prosociality towards some types of recipients. This paper has addressed this issue in the setting of a decision to split a given amount of money between members of one’s own group and members of another group, providing experimental evidence that, on average, moral suasion increases pro-sociality towards both the ingroup and the outgroup; however, the increase towards the outgroup is greater than the increase towards the ingroup, and this results in the fact that ingroup favouritism, on average, declines under moral suasion.

The research is here.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Profit Versus Prejudice: Harnessing Self-Interest to Reduce In-Group Bias

Stagnaro, M. N., Dunham, Y., & Rand, D. G. (2018).
Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(1), 50–58.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617699254

Abstract

We examine the possibility that self-interest, typically thought to undermine social welfare, might reduce in-group bias. We compared the dictator game (DG), where participants unilaterally divide money between themselves and a recipient, and the ultimatum game (UG), where the recipient can reject these offers. Unlike the DG, there is a self-interested motive for UG giving: If participants expect the rejection of unfair offers, they have a monetary incentive to be fair even to out-group members. Thus, we predicted substantial bias in the DG but little bias in the UG. We tested this hypothesis in two studies (N = 3,546) employing a 2 (in-group/out-group, based on abortion position) × 2 (DG/UG) design. We observed the predicted significant group by game interaction, such that the substantial in-group favoritism observed in the DG was almost entirely eliminated in the UG: Giving the recipient bargaining power reduced the premium offered to in-group members by 77.5%.

Discussion
Here we have provided evidence that self-interest has the potential to override in-group bias based on a salient and highly charged real-world grouping (abortion stance). In the DG, where participants had the power to offer whatever they liked, we saw clear evidence of behavior favoring in-group members. In the UG, where the recipient could reject the offer, acting on such biases had the potential to severely reduce earnings. Participants anticipated this, as shown by their expectations of partner behavior, and made fair offers to both in-group and out-group participants.

Traditionally, self-interest is considered a negative force in intergroup relations. For example, an individual might give free reign to a preference for interacting with similar others, and even be willing to pay a cost to satisfy those preferences, resulting in what has been called “taste-based” discrimination (Becker, 1957). Although we do not deny that such discrimination can (and often does) occur, we suggest that in the right context, the costs it can impose serve as a disincentive. In particular, when strategic concerns are heightened, as they are in multilateral interactions where the parties must come to an agreement and failing to do so is both salient and costly (such as the UG), self-interest has the opportunity to mitigate biased behavior. Here, we provide one example of such a situation: We find that participants successfully withheld bias in the UG, making equally fair offers to both in-group and out-group recipients.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism

Jim A. C. Everett, Nadira S. Faber, and Molly Crockett
Front. Behav. Neurosci., 13 February 2015

Ingroup favoritism—the tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those in other groups—is well documented, but the mechanisms driving this behavior are not well understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the behavior of ingroup and outgroup members. In this review we analyze research on ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature and providing suggestions on how future work can incorporate these insights to shed further light on when, why, and how ingroup favoritism occurs. In doing so, we demonstrate how social psychological theory and research can be integrated with findings from behavioral economics, providing new theoretical and methodological directions for future research.

Across many different contexts, people act more prosocially towards members of their own group relative to those outside their group. Consequently, a number of scientific disciplines concerned with human cognition and behavior have sought to explain such ingroup favoritism (also known as parochial altruism). Here we explore to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the (future) behavior of ingroup and outgroup members.

The article is here.