CeDEx workshop - Francesco Guala (University of Milan)

Group Identity, Team Preferences, and Efficiency

Francesco Guala & Antonio Filippin (University of Milan, Italy)

Abstract: Group identity and related concepts are currently quite popular in the social science literature. The idea is that "thinking as a collective" improves the performance of groups, facilitating for example the solution of coordination problems, dilemmas of cooperation, and other puzzles of choice theory. However, it is not clear how group identity affects individual behaviour. According to the "Team Preferences" hypothesis, group identity shifts the attention of individual members from their own individual payoffs to the joint payoffs of the group. According to the "Social Norms" hypothesis, it triggers a set of norms (of cooperation, equality, altruism) that are commonly associated with collectives. In our experiment we try to disentangle these two mechanisms using a large set of mini-dictator games with a minimal group paradigm manipulation. The results are quite surprising: group identity seems to trigger primarily egalitarian concerns, and does not improve the joint monetary payoff of group members. If anything, it seems to reduce efficiency, contrary to the implications of the Team Preferences interpretation.