Groups and Social Norms in the Economic Context: A Preliminary Experimental Investigation

Economics has not widely investigated the role of group identity in defining social norms. The present experiment considers the interplay between choices having social dimension and a notion of group affiliation based on shared intrinsic characteristics. More specifically, a triadic game setting (Cox, 2004) will be presented to detect trust, reciprocity and other-regarding concerns in choices relevant either for IN-group subjects or OUT-group subjects. What emerges from the experiment is that in general subjects do not conform to a rational self-oriented strategy. Discrimination at the group level is not a generalized pattern in our data but emerges clearly only in games involving exclusively other-regarding concerns. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.