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When Syria was in Egypt’s land: Egyptians cooperate with Syrians, but less with each other

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Abstract

With the number of people fleeing Syria since 2011 exceeding 5 million, and unclear prospects regarding the country’s future, Syrians currently residing outside their homeland are not expected to return any time soon. The question of their integration into their respective hosting countries is, therefore, directly policy relevant. We focus on Syrians who fled to Egypt. Cultural, religious and linguistic differences between those two countries are minor, which is expected to facilitate integration. We ran three incentivized lab-in-the-field experiments pairing 114 Syrian refugees residing in Egypt with 194 Egyptian nationals to measure various behavioral dimensions such as altruism, cooperation and reciprocity, while varying the partner in each game to be either a refugee or an Egyptian. Our findings indicate that Egyptians treat Syrians more favorably than they treat each other across all games, whereas the behavior of Syrians does not depend on the identity of their interaction partner.

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Notes

  1. United Nations. http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/refugees. Accessed on October 10, 2018.

  2. United National Higher Commission in refugees. http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html. Accessed on July 20, 2018.

  3. Statistics on Refugees, United Nations. http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/refugees/. Accessed on May 10, 2018.

  4. ‘Egypt hosting 5 million refugees despite economic challenges: Sisi at G20’, Ahram Newspaper, September 5, 2016. http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/242459/Egypt/Politics-/Egypt-hosting--mln-refugees-despite-economic-chall.aspx. Accessed on April 15, 2018.

  5. Nineteen ninety-four is the last year for which figures on the religious composition of Syria could be obtained.

  6. Statement by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics. Shorouk Newspaper, 25th September, 2012. http://www.shorouknews.com/news/view.aspx?cdate=25092012&id=c021929f-c2dd-4726-9916-9e5a67ed8195. Accessed on June 11, 2018.

  7. Data for Lower Middle Income Countries, World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/?locations=XN-SY. Accessed on May 9, 2018.

  8. Hofstede Insights. https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/. Accessed on May 11, 2018.

  9. In addition, the informal sector is of significant size.

  10. Certain neighborhoods in Cairo are known to have a high concentration of Syrian owned shops, mainly selling traditional Syrian food. One such area in western Cairo is even commonly known as ‘little Damascus’ due to the dominance of shops owned by Syrians that even have clearly Syrian names.

  11. However, this does not mean that the majority of Syrians who moved to Egypt come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. According to a UNCHR survey, 45% of registered Syrian refugees in Egypt suffer from moderate to severe food insecurity.

  12. Gihan Shahine. ‘Syrians in Egypt: A haven despite the hardships’, Ahram Newspaper, May 17, 2016. http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/151/217025/Egypt/Features/Syrians-in-Egypt-A-haven-despite-the-hardships.aspx. Accessed on April 15, 2018.

  13. As a result of a presidential decree issued in October 2012.

  14. Note that the conjecture is not identical to contact theory, according to which the main driver of non-discrimination vis-à-vis an outside group is the number of meaningful contacts between members of different groups regardless of their differences (Pettigrew and Tropp 2006).

  15. Anderson et al. (2006) surveys experiments that have been run on discrimination by both psychologists and economists.

  16. Reuters, URL: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria/syrian-observatory-says-war-has-killed-more-than-half-a-million-idUSKCN1GO13M. Accessed on May 11, 2018.

  17. In experiments relying on the strategy method, the participating subjects are asked to make decisions for all possible scenarios (Morton and Williams 2010).

  18. It also should be made clear that the experimenter reminded the subjects before the start of the experiment that the identity of the gaming partner would be made clear at the beginning of each game and that matching is done randomly by computer.

  19. Because we are applying the strategy method, and not the immediate interaction between players, Player B had to make his/her reciprocation decision six times, according to the six options that faced Player A.

  20. We also had subjects play three other experimental games; the trust game, a game measuring honesty, and a third measuring risk preferences. The order of the games was the same in all sessions.

  21. At the end of the experiment, the points collected by each subject and, thus, the payments to subjects were determined by matching the R-file of a session with a different session’s R-file to avoid deception. The R code was designed in a way that only one round of each game was chosen randomly for each subject, with an implied allocation of points to each of the two partners.

  22. In the online supplementary material, two alternative measures of altruism and egoism are adopted and tested. The results are very similar to those reported here. The material can be found at http://refugee.law-and-economics.eu/data/egypt/appendices/online_appendix_syria_in_egypt.pdf.

  23. For the comparison overall, the t test yields p = 0.0002 and the Wilcoxon non-parametric test yields z = 3.476 with Prob > |z| = 0.0005.

  24. The traumatization level was calculated as a simple average of the subject’s answers to the 16 trauma questions at the end of the experiment (see Table 1.1 in the online appendix). The trauma questions were derived from Harvard Trauma Questionnaire. Note that no significant difference is observed in the level of trauma reported by Syrians and Egyptians, with the mean being 2.30 among Syrians and 2.35 among Egyptians.

  25. See Table 1.1 in the online appendix for a description of all regression variables.

  26. In order to determine the effect in probability scale, however, the marginal effects were computed in Table 2.1 in the online appendix.

  27. Interestingly, the longer Syrians have been in Egypt, the less likely they are to behave altruistically. Yet, that result is statistically insignificant. Also, membership in social networks is positively correlated with altruistic behavior among Syrians; Syrians involved in at least one social activity are more likely to display altruistic behavior than those involved in no such activity. However, that finding is not statistically significant either.

  28. The study by De Angelo et al. (2018) can be read as complementary to ours: they are interested in knowing whether an endowed in-group (think of the Egyptians with regard to our study) would allow a non-endowed outgroup (think of the Syrian refugees) to participate in the consumption of a local public good. The twist in their study is that they allow the ingroup to vote on that decision. They find that allowing voting may increase cooperation within the voting group at the expense of refusing solidarity with the outsiders. In a related study with a similar setup, Romaniuc et al. (2019) find that allowing the ingroup to vote does not only result in refusing to share the local public good with the outgroup but also reduces cooperation within the ingroup.

  29. See the online appendix for a clear representation of the game as displayed to subjects.

  30. It should, however, also be noted that the interaction effect indicates that playing against older Syrians increases the probability of making more selfish choices, but the effect is smaller in size and less precisely estimated.

  31. The logistic coefficient for our interaction term is − 1.007 [calculated as follows: (− 1.270 * 1) + (− 0.938 * 1) + (1.201 * 1)].

  32. Note that another variable was constructed in the online appendix to take into account how the choice made by the initiator affects the behavior of the reciprocator. The variable is labelled weighted destruction index and is constructed using factor analysis. The results confirm the findings reported here and are shown in the online appendix.

  33. The online appendix shows estimates based on an alternative approach to analyzing the willingness to destroy points. It turns out that, using aggregate data, being a Syrian and playing with a Syrian partner reduces the probability of being destructive by 54 and 25 percentage points, respectively. Having a Syrian play versus a fellow Syrian lowers the probability of destruction by 79 percentage points compared to an Egyptian playing against a fellow Egyptian.

  34. Student’s t test yields p = 0.056.

  35. Student’s t test yields p = 0.037.

  36. Note that the regression in Table 6 relies also on a fractional logistic regression model to take into account the possibility that the dependent variable (tolerance in this case) can take on boundary values, in which case use of log-odds transformation or OLS is impossible and implies having to make arbitrary adjustments for the boundary values.

  37. To be able to infer probabilities, Table 2.4 in the online appendix was constructed. It reports average marginal effects.

  38. The online appendix provides the instructions given to subjects for this game.

  39. For the Egyptian sample, Pearson χ2(1) = 11.9079, p = 0.001.

  40. Table 2.6 in the online appendix calculates the marginal effects reported here.

  41. Among Egyptians, Pearson χ2(1) = 0.4137, p = 0.520. Among Syrians, Pearson χ2(1) = 0.3071, Pr = 0.579.

  42. Among Egyptians, Pearson χ2(1) = 2.9967, p = 0.083. Among Syrians however, Pearson χ2(1) = 0.5307, p = 0.466.

  43. Herrmann et al. (2008) inquire into the propensity to punish anti-socially across 15 different locations and find that anti-social punishment is most prevalent in Muscat, Ryad and Athens.

  44. Tables with detailed results are available from authors upon request.

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Acknowledgements

Nora El Bialy and Andreas Nicklisch helped to design the experiments, Thais Hamasaki and Olaf Bock of the Hamburg lab with the programming of lime survey, Engi Amin and Omar El-Khawas with running the experiments, and the Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research (Baseera) with data collection. We thank all of them. The authors further thank the Volkswagen Foundation for supporting their research within the framework of its project line on “Experience of Violence, Trauma Relief and Commemorative Culture—Cooperative Research Projects on the Arab Region.” Elisa Fraile made important suggestions that improved the paper. Funding for the experiments was provided by the Volkswagen Stiftung (Project ID 91 479). Both Greg deAngelo and Bill Shughart, the editor of Public Choice, made extremely helpful suggestions that improved the paper. All errors remain ours.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt

    Mazen Hassan, Sarah Mansour & May Gadallah

  2. Institute of Law and Economics, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Stefan Voigt

  3. CESifo, Munich, Germany

    Stefan Voigt

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  1. Mazen Hassan
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  2. Sarah Mansour
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Correspondence to Stefan Voigt.

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Hassan, M., Mansour, S., Voigt, S. et al. When Syria was in Egypt’s land: Egyptians cooperate with Syrians, but less with each other. Public Choice 191, 337–362 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-019-00727-y

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