CeDEx Seminar - Natalie Gold (University of Oxford)

Location
A40 Sir Clive Granger Building
Date(s)
Wednesday 11th March 2020 (14:00-15:00)
Description
Our speaker this week is Natalie Gold (University of Oxford).

Title: Testing team reasoning: Group identification is related to coordination in pure coordination games

Games of pure mutual interest require players to coordinate their choices without being able to communicate. One way to achieve this is through team-reasoning, asking ‘what should we choose’, rather than just assessing one’s own options from an individual perspective. It has been suggested that team-reasoning is more likely when individuals are encouraged to think of those they are attempting to coordinate with as members of an in-group. In two studies, we examined the effects of group identity, measured by the ‘Inclusion of Other in Self’ (IOS) scale, on performance in nondescript coordination games, which contain several high paying strategies which cannot be distinguished by any feature other than their payoffs. In an online experiment (Experiment 1), our manipulation of group identity failed, but a positive overall correlation of r(629) = .18 (p < .001), between IOS and team-reasoning-consistent choosing was observed. This was also reflected in participants’ self-reported strategies: those who reported trying to pick an option that stood out (making it easier to coordinate on) also reported higher IOS scores than did those who said they tended to simply choose the option associated with the largest potential payoff, M = 3.40(±.08) vs M = 3.15(±.0.95), t(441) = 2.02, p = .044; d = 0.19. In a follow-up study in the lab (Experiment 2), participants played either with friends or with strangers. Experiment 2 replicated the relationship between IOS and team-reasoning in strangers, r(110) = .25, p = .008, but not in friends, r(102) = .07, p = .468. Instead, friends’ behavior was related to their expectations of what their partners would do, r(102) = .63, p < .001. We suggest that the strangers who group identify may have been team reasoning, but that friends may have used their superior knowledge of their partners to try to predict their strategy.

Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics

Sir Clive Granger Building
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0)115 951 5458
Enquiries: jose.guinotsaporta@nottingham.ac.uk
Experiments: cedex@nottingham.ac.uk