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Testing Theories about Ethnic Markers

Ingroup Accent Facilitates Coordination, Not Cooperation

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Abstract

In recent years, evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have debated whether ethnic markers have evolved to solve adaptive problems related to interpersonal coordination or to interpersonal cooperation. In the present study, we add to this debate by exploring how individuals living in a modern society utilize the accents of unfamiliar individuals to make social decisions in hypothetical economic games that measure interpersonal trust, generosity, and coordination. A total of 4603 Danish participants completed a verbal-guise study administered over the Internet. Participants listened to four speakers (two local and two nonlocal) and played a hypothetical Dictator Game, Trust Game, and Coordination Game with each of them. The results showed that participants had greater faith in coordinating successfully with local speakers than with nonlocal speakers. The coordination effect was strong for individuals living in the same city as the particular speakers and weakened as the geographical distance between the participants and the speakers grew. Conversely, the results showed that participants were not more generous toward or more trusting of local speakers compared with nonlocal speakers. Taken together, the results suggest that humans utilize ethnic markers of unfamiliar individuals to coordinate behavior rather than to cooperate.

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Notes

  1. As a means of effectively discriminating between ingroup and outgroup individuals, accents strike a functional balance between allowing detection of cheaters (a given accent typically cannot be faked in a fleeting encounter) and allowing the accommodation of new individuals into the ethnic group (an accent can typically be acquired through extensive exposure to it). See Cohen 2012.

  2. Experimental studies using behavioral responses to adult speakers’ accents are rare. Using natural experiments with cinema audiences, however, two studies have shown that behavioral compliance to public solicitations (i.e., to fill out questionnaires) made over the cinema’s loudspeakers were affected by the solicitor’s language and accent. In Wales, Bourhis and Giles (1976) found significantly greater compliance with the solicitations when they were made by ingroup speakers as compared to outgroup speakers. Kristansen and Giles (1992) replicated this finding in a Danish sample, but only with adult audiences. Young audiences returned more questionnaires when the solicitations were made by a nonlocal (Standard) speaker.

  3. In 2013, Denmark ranked ninth (of 187 countries) on UNDP’s Human Development Index adjusted for inequality, and Denmark has a Gini coefficient of about 0.25—one of the smallest in the world (see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2013; United Nations Development Programme 2013).

  4. In essence, this meant that only a fraction of the respondents would listen to locally accented speakers in the most narrow sociolectual linguistic sense. Most participants instead listened to two evidently nonlocal speakers (i.e., speakers living more than 150 km from the participant’s region of origin) and to two speakers with accents that approximated the accent spoken by the participant (i.e., speakers living less than 150 km from the participant’s region of origin).

  5. The most common verbal descriptions made by the speakers include descriptions of children playing on a seesaw, children playing with a ball, children climbing a tree, and the time indicated by a large clock.

  6. Answer labels: (1) No, I don’t think we would; (2) That would probably be completely random; (3) Well, I guess we might; (4) Yes, I’m pretty sure we would; (5) Yes, definitely.

  7. Answer labels: (1) Definitely not; (2) Most likely not; (3) Probably not; (4) Neutral; (5) Probably yes; (6) Most likely yes; (7) Definitely yes.

  8. Two of the sites (www.bt.dk and www.politiken.dk) convey general news (both sites have nearly one million unique users a month each); one site (www.tdc.dk) conveys IT-support and news (700,000 users); one site (www.videnskab.dk) conveys science news (100,000 users); two sites (www.oestrogen.dk and www.femina.dk) specialize in fashion and lifestyles for women (100,000 users each); and one smaller site (www.studerende.au.dk) conveys news for students at the local university (<10,000 users).

  9. More specifically, if participants were born and raised in Jutland, they were assigned two Herning speakers (ingroup) and two Copenhagen speakers (outgroup). Assignments of the particular speakers from each speaker category were random. Similarly, if participants were born and raised in the larger Copenhagen region, they were assigned two Copenhagen speakers and two Herning speakers (outgroup). Finally, if participants were born and raised in Zealand but outside the larger Copenhagen region, they were assigned two Naestved speakers (ingroup) and two Herning speakers (outgroup). Participants born and raised outside the study regions (N = 618) could not be assigned local speakers. They were assigned two Herning speakers and two Copenhagen speakers.

  10. We cannot report standardized regression coefficients (betas) because we also use cluster robust standard errors.

  11. Additional analyses show that in both games, the effect of perceptions of trustworthiness is significantly stronger than the effect of dominance (p < 0.001).

  12. Analyses of the actual choices in the Coordination Game, however, show that the assumption that it is easier to coordinate with ingroup members is false. In the overall sample, the restaurant “Odysseus” constitutes a focal point, with 68% of the sample choosing this restaurant. However, individuals living in the same city as the speaker are slightly more uncoordinated in their choices, with 65% choosing “Odysseus.” This difference is marginally significant (p < 0.10). The disparity between assumptions and actual success underlines that this bias is driven by intuition rather than reason.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 9, 8000, Aarhus, Denmark

    Niels Holm Jensen & Henrik Høgh-Olesen

  2. Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Michael Bang Petersen

  3. Danish School of Media and Jounalism, Aarhus, Denmark

    Michael Ejstrup

Authors
  1. Niels Holm Jensen
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  2. Michael Bang Petersen
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  3. Henrik Høgh-Olesen
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  4. Michael Ejstrup
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Correspondence to Niels Holm Jensen.

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Jensen, N.H., Petersen, M.B., Høgh-Olesen, H. et al. Testing Theories about Ethnic Markers. Hum Nat 26, 210–234 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-015-9229-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-015-9229-4

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