To what extent is the tendency to act more prosocially towards ingroup than outgroup members a 'default' tendency that is based on intuitive processes activated across different social contexts and with different social groups? Here I report three sets of targeted empirical studies that use economic games to explore ingroup favouritism in prosocial behaviour. In Chapter 2, I use a newly developed measure to explore whether simply categorizing people into groups is sufficient to induce ingroup favouritism in both gains and losses frames. I find that minimal groups are significantly more prosocial to ingroup members than outgroup members, regardless of the economic cost of helping, whether decisions were public or private, and whether the decision is framed in terms of gains and losses. In Chapter 3 I apply dual-process models to intergroup prosocial behaviour and show that even under time pressure without the potential to deliberate, participants cooperate more with minimal ingroup than outgroup members in both gains and losses frames. In Chapter 4, I explore ingroup favouritism in the context of real religious groups using games that either have (Trust Game) or lack (Dictator Game) interdependent outcomes. I find ingroup favouritism only by atheist participants in a Dictator Game. In both games, Christian participants transferred more to both Christian and atheist recipients, and this was driven by the frequency of thinking about religious ideas. Together, my results support the thesis that ingroup favouritism is a default, intuitive, tendency robust across different contexts and even with novel groups, and charts a course for future research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:729843 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Everett, Jim A. C. |
| Contributors | Hewstone, Miles ; Faber, Nadira ; Crockett, Molly |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f9e38ee8-796b-4cdc-9778-d68b738fc418 |
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