Open AccessCompeting social identities and intergroup discrimination: Evidence from a framed field experiment with high school students in Vietnam
Author(s) -
Tam Kiet Vuong,
Ho Fai Chan,
Benno Torgler
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0261275
Subject(s) - vietnamese , social identity theory , psychology , ho chi minh , social psychology , competition (biology) , identity (music) , affect (linguistics) , dictator game , collective identity , social discrimination , social group , sociology , political science , demography , linguistics , politics , ecology , philosophy , physics , population , communication , socioeconomics , low income , acoustics , law , biology
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.