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The Social Dimension of Stress: Experimental Manipulations of Social Support and Social Identity in the Trier Social Stress Test
Published on: November 19, 2015
Competing social identities and intergroup discrimination: Evidence from a framed field experiment with high school
Tam Kiet Vuong1,2, Ho Fai Chan1,2, Benno Torgler1,2,3
1School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
Abstract:
We conducted a framed field experiment to explore a situation where individuals have potentially competing social identities to understand how group identification and socialisation affect in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination. The Dictator Game and the Trust Game were conducted in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City on two groups of high school students with different backgrounds, i.e., French bilingual and monolingual (Vietnamese) students. We find strong evidence for the presence of these two phenomena: our micro-analysis of within- and between-school effects show that bilingual students exhibit higher discriminatory behaviour toward non-bilinguals within the same school than toward other bilinguals from a different school, implying that group identity is a key factor in the explanation of intergroup cooperation and competition.
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