Liz McGuire and Dr. Daniel Nielson, Political Science

Every person has some idea of who they are, but that idea is made up of several identities. A person can be a mother, a sister, an American, a Catholic, an Hispanic, and a friend all at the same time. How we order these identities in dominance was the original purpose of this study. The intent was to see how we can change that ordering to include a larger in-group. For example, what could we do to make people see themselves as Muslims, instead of Shia or Sunni. If we can expand this type of identity, we could change how people view others. When people see others as part of their identity or in-group, they treat each other differently. But instead of religion, we used the ethnic identities in Uganda to study these in group and out-group dynamics. Historically, ethnicity in this part of the world has caused some conflict, including in Uganda and infamously in neighboring Rwanda. What we found was not what we expected, but did give us insight into human nature.

In order to study this dynamics, we came up with an experiment that could show us these in-group preferences. The basis was a “divide-the-dollar” game. In the game, the subject would be able to assign different amounts of money to be given to different confederates, whom the subject did not know worked for us. Previous research has shown that people tend to give more money to those that they see as part of their in-group1. The idea was that if they were expanding their in-group, they would give more money to those that were in the expanded in-group. In Uganda, there are many ethnic groups, each made up of smaller tribes (see figure 1). People tend to relate most with their tribe, so we want them to see their larger, ethnic group as in the in-group.

Our methods were experimental. We brought subjects into a room with 3 other people that the subject assumed were other subjects, but who in reality worked for us. These confederates were part of the treatment. One was the same tribe as the subject, another was from a different tribe, but the same ethnicity, and a third was from a different ethnic group entirely. In addition to a control group, we experimented with three different treatments. In one treatment, we used name tags that labeled the subject and the confederates by their ethnicity. In another treatment, we had the confederates talk about the similarities between those that were in the same ethnic group compared to the one who was from a different group. This casual conversation lasted only 5 minutes. The third treatment was a combination of the first two, in which the group would be wearing the name tags and have the conversation.

After the treatment, we would tell the subjects that we were going to play the divide the dollar game. Each person would write on a piece of paper the names of the 4 people in the group (including his or her self) and assign each person an amount of money. To force the choice, we said that two people could be assigned 2000 shillings (about 80 cents in US dollars, but about an hour’s wages), one person had to get 1000 shillings, and one person had to be assigned no money. Each person did this independently and one person’s division would be chosen to give for each person (they were also given a sum of money just for coming).

We assumed that the subjects would give themselves one of the two 2000 shilling amounts, dividing the other three amounts among the confederates, giving more to those that they saw as members of their in-group. We hypothesized that with our treatments, they would be more likely to give more to the confederate who was a co-ethnic than those who did not have the treatment. What we found was very different however, but still very interesting.

After a lot work both in Uganda and back in the US, we did the statistical analysis and found very different results. We did not find a difference between what was given to the co-ethnics (those that were in the out-group that we hoped to move to the in-group) between any of the treatments and the control group. In the combined treatment, which was the strongest, it seemed to be getting closer to a significant result, but it did not cross a standard threshold for significance. But we did find something else. In the two strongest treatments (the conversation and the combined treatment), there was a difference in what was given to the person who was not intended to be in the in-group, the confederate who was not a member of the tribe or ethnic group. While this person was intended to be an outsider for comparison, this person in average received a significant amount more money when they were excluded. More interesting is that in the strongest treatment, we could see that the subject gave on average less to themselves to give more to the outsider.

These results are very interesting. They seem to suggest that the subjects were being altruistic. They saw someone who was being excluded from the group and gave from their own potential money out of sympathy. In a world where people are assumed to be universally self-serving, it is always a happy surprise when people act to help someone else, even at their own expense. There still needs to be some more in-depth statistical analysis so see if we can see different groups that were more or less likely to exhibit this behavior. We were able to present these results at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago in April of 2013. After the full statistical results have been analyzed, we are planning on submitting the full paper for publication in various academic journals.

References

• Habyarimana, J. M. (New York). Coethnicity: Diversity and the dilemas of collective action. 2009: Russell Sage Foundation.