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Review
. 2015 Feb 13:9:15.
doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00015. eCollection 2015.

Preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism

Jim A C Everett  1 , Nadira S Faber  2 , Molly Crockett  1
Affiliations
Review

Preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism

Jim A C Everett et al. Front Behav Neurosci. .

Abstract

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.

Keywords: behavioral economics; group processes; ingroup favoritism; parochial altruism; prosocial behavior.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Public Goods Dilemmas require participants to choose how many points to contribute to a common project. The points that are contributed are then doubled and then redistributed equally to each player.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The Dictator Game has two players. One player—the dictator—makes a unilateral decision of how to divide an amount of money with a second player—the recipient.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The Ultimatum Game has two players. One player (the proposer) receives an amount of money and makes a proposal to the other player (the responder) regarding how to divide the money between them. If the responder accepts the proposed split, both players receive the allocated money. However, unlike the DG, the responder has the option to reject the proposed split, leading both players to receive nothing.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The Trust Game has two participants, an investor (Person A) and a trustee (Person B). Person A is given some money and told that they must send a proportion (from zero to the full amount) of this money to Person B, and that the experimenter will multiply the money by some amount. Once Person B receives the money, they are told that they must send back a portion of it to Player A, again ranging from zero to the full amount.
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