Effects of Group Identity on Trust and Transformations of Motivation (Center for Institutional Studies Research Seminar)

Speaker: Vadim Nelidov (The Center for Institutional Studies)

Speaker: Vadim Nelidov (The Center for Institutional Studies)

March 6, Thursday, Maysnitskaya 24, building 3, room 424, 18.30. 

It has been only several years since group identity phenomenon appeared in the economic literature. Ever since there has been many fruitful studies about its effects on economic variables and group performance in various games. Still, the mechanisms lying behind the effects of group identity remain uncertain, as they have been mostly studied only in social psychology, where strict money-paid economic experiments are rarely used and the research topics are generally quite different from those interesting to the economists. We establish a connection between group identity phenomenon and cooperation expectation, through which the actual ingroup cooperation might actually increase. In addition, we measure the difference between expected and real cooperation and the emotions felt after observing the real cooperation; these parameters are compared in two treatments. Moreover, we observe how an introduction of a new game mechanism aimed to improve cooperation (but able to destroy social ties) would affect the resulting cooperation and the parameters mentioned above. If a decrease in both social ties and cooperation would be observed after an introduction of such mechanism – this will prove our hypothesis that group identity affects cooperation through cooperation expectations.

Working paper: download