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Attacking the Weak or the Strong? An Experiment on the Targets of Parochial Altruism

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Abstract

Studies on parochial altruism have insofar focused on the causes leading individuals to attack any outgroup on the behalf of one’s group. Yet, we lack clues to understand why parochial altruists target specific groups, such as dominant groups in some contexts and minority groups in others. The present paper introduces an experiment to analyze the conditions under which individuals costly attack strong versus weak outgroups. In a first study, 300 participants played a repeated Inter-group Prisoner Dilemma involving multiple groups and inter-group differences in resources. Results show that individuals have a preference for targeting strong outgroups, but that attacks decrease when the inequality in destructive capacity between groups is high. Besides, individuals target weak outgroups when they are threatening their ingroup status. Decisions in the game correlate with participants’ political ideology and Social Dominance Orientation. In a second study, we provide evidence that our results generalize to historical linkages between economic inequality and left-wing versus right-wing terrorist attacks.

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Notes

  1. The present paper focuses on the hypotheses 2 and 3 (about social comparison) of the preregistered project. The hypothesis 1 (about the ingroup situation) is explored in a separate study.

  2. Our version of the IPD game entails the likelihood that subjects have negative payoffs. To address this issue, we decided that a subject who has negative points can no longer attack and no longer loses points from outgroup attacks. Yet, subjects of the outgroups continue to gain points when attacking the subject’s ingroup irrespectively of the subject’s number of points. When all subjects of the ingroup attain zero, we consider the ingroup “dead” and the outgroups can no longer attack it.

  3. Except the case in which the resources in points \({p}_{0}\) of the poor subject are below the absolute limit \(\beta\).

  4. Source code available here: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/ecopol/ipdradical/

  5. Instructions and screenshots from the software are provided in the online appendix. The oTree package is available upon request.

  6. This reduces the sample to N = 17,728. Including all observations in the analyses does not alter our conclusions. The authors can send results upon request.

    Note that the sample is further reduced in the regression analyses, due to the inclusion of some variables (e.g. variable measuring behaviors during a previous round). We specify in notes under the regression tables the rationale behind sample reductions.

  7. We also present in the online appendix alternative models based on ingroup-outgroup dyads with ingroup random effects and models based on subject-outgroup dyads with subject fixed effects.

  8. Detailed summary statistics are provided in the online appendix.

  9. The negative binomial regression is a generalization of the poisson regression for count variables with overdispersion (the variance exceeds the mean). Such model is appropriate for our dependent variable, which is an observed count (of the number of points contributed in attacks) with overdispersion (M = 6.54, Var = 100.61).

  10. Descriptive statistics and bivariate analyses of the level of individual attacks by subjects’ characteristics are presented in the online appendix.

  11. The variable theoretically goes from 20% (perfect equality across the five groups) to 100% (perfect concentration of the resources in the richest group). Empirically, the variable goes from 20.0% to 34.2%.

  12. In unequal societies, economically powerful groups have a higher political influence on policies (Gilens, 2012).

  13. The results are robust to dropping interpolation, robustness checks are available upon request.

  14. The final sample includes Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States and Uruguay.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Innovacs for funding this study. We also thank Anna Cortijos Bernabeu for her work on the text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Science Po Grenoble, School of Political Studies, PACTE, 38000, Grenoble, France

    Simon Varaine & Raul Magni-Berton

  2. Univ. Grenoble Alpes, IPhiG, 38000, Grenoble, France

    Ismaël Benslimane

  3. Univ. Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, CNRS, Grenoble INP, GAEL, 38000, Grenoble, France

    Paolo Crosetto

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  1. Simon Varaine
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Varaine, S., Benslimane, I., Magni-Berton, R. et al. Attacking the Weak or the Strong? An Experiment on the Targets of Parochial Altruism. Polit Behav 45, 211–242 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09696-9

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