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Intergroup Revenge: A Laboratory Experiment

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Abstract

Several everyday examples imply that humans reciprocate not only towards direct perpetrators, but also to entire groups, thereby potentially affecting innocent bystanders. We test the hypothesis that people are predisposed to reciprocate against groups. In a laboratory experiment, subjects who were helped or harmed by another player’s action reacted by helping or harming another member of that player’s group. This group reciprocity was only observed when one group was seen as unfairly advantaged. Thus, activation of group reciprocity may be a causal mechanism that links perceived injustice to intergroup conflict. We discuss the relevance of group reciprocity to political and economic phenomena including violence, discrimination and team competition.

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Notes

  1. It was forbidden to communicate personal information. All subjects followed these instructions.

  2. 100 ECU per subject were described as an endowment for the second part of the experiment. To ensure that each subject had at least 100 ECU, minimum group earnings of 400 ECU were implemented. This endowment was purely a framing manipulation to increase subjects’ sense that they had “earned” their ECU.

  3. The reason for the imbalance between the number of sessions in each treatment is as follows: we wished to examine individual-level correlates of group reciprocity, so we ran extra sessions using the random bonus treatment which turned out to induce group reciprocity. Note that our results are significant when aggregating across all types of sessions.

  4. By “harm”, we simply mean “reduce the other’s earnings”. We cannot be sure whether our subjects perceived taking from the common fund as harmful or simply as not helpful, since this depends on what they perceived to be the default or baseline action.

  5. Subjects might become more generous to other members of their own group in the face of an external threat (e.g. Sherif et al. 1961). To avoid this potential confound, we ensured that P2 was never from the subject’s own group.

  6. In third party repetitions, we also varied whether the feedback player P1 was playing against someone from the subject’s own group, or someone from a different, neutral group. This allows us to examine whether subjects react more strongly when P1’s action affects a member of the subject’s own group. As overall results from third party treatments were null, we do not report further on this here.

  7. Two of our sessions used only the first party treatment.

  8. The online appendix shows participants’ descriptive statistics, including demographics.

  9. A derivation is in the online appendix.

  10. These include removing the fixed effects; using session- rather than individual-clustered standard errors; adding controls for the history of play; and running Tobit regressions.

  11. This is within random bonus sessions only. Results are similar in winner bonus sessions. Controlling for fairness perceptions reduces, but does not eliminate, the difference between sessions.

  12. In fact, there were no significant correlations within groups.

  13. If we do not multiply impute Expectations, we lose all repetitions other than 2 and 7. Results on repetitions 2 and 7 alone are insignificant whether or not Expectations are included.

  14. Expectations was imputed from the following variables: first round amount taken by participant F, first and second round amounts taken by the subject and his/her own round 1 and round 2 partners, lags of these amounts from the previous repetition; amount the subject last saw taken by a participant from the same colour group as the current partner; a quadratic in repetition (from 1 to 8), and treatment dummies.

  15. To gather more information, these sessions only included first party treatments, with two repetitions of each color treatment.

  16. A pooled linear regression without fixed effects also gives a significant result at 5%. A Tobit model and a linear regression model including controls for the history of play did not reach significance, although the coefficients had the same signs.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by British Academy Small Research Grant SG101553. We thank Astrid Buba, Vittoria Levati, Werner Güth, Eva Steiger, Johannes Weisser, Ro’i Zultan, David Reinstein, Ryan McKay, Eva van den Broek, Shaun Hargreaves Heap, Brian Lickel, Arthur Lupia, Tore Ellingsen, Lorenz Goette, Alicia Melis, Michelle Brock, Catherine Scacco, Rafael Hortalla-Vallve, Nadine Chlass, Matthew Braham and seminar participants at the Max Planck Institute of Economics, University of Hamburg, University of Warwick, King’s College London, University of East Anglia, NYU-CESS, IMEBE, ESA and THEEM for helpful comments; and the Max Planck Institute ESI group hiwis and administrative staff: Martin Beck, Nadine Erdmann, Adrian Liebtrau, Christian Williges, Christian Streubel, Claudia Zellmann and especially Christoph Göring.

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  1. University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom

    David Hugh-Jones

  2. Center of Conflict Resolution, Hamburg, Germany

    Martin Alois Leroch

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  1. David Hugh-Jones
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Correspondence to Martin Alois Leroch.

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Hugh-Jones, D., Leroch, M.A. Intergroup Revenge: A Laboratory Experiment. Homo Oecon 34, 117–135 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41412-017-0049-0

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