Cooperation and discrimination within and across language borders: Evidence from children in a bilingual city

Arbeitspapier

We present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether thelanguage spoken by a partner in a prisoner’s dilemma game affects behavior and leadsto discrimination. Running a framed field experiment with 828 six- to eleven-year oldprimary school children in the city of Meran, we find that cooperation generallyincreases with age, but that the gap between cooperation among in-group members andcooperation towards children speaking another language is considerable and increasingwith age. This gap is due to both, in-group favoritism and language group discrimination.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: ifo Working Paper ; No. 200

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Individual ; Field Experiments
• Subject: Cooperation ; discrimination ; language ; children ; experiment

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Angerer, Silvia ; Glätzle-Rützler, Daniela ; Lergetporer, Philipp ; Sutter, Matthias
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2015

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/123108
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET