Ingroup Favoritism and Outgroup Non-Cooperation in a Stag Hunt Coordination Game

Abstract

According to the bounded generalized reciprocity theory (BGR), people are endowed with psychological devices that facilitate within-group cooperation under a situation of conflicting interests. When interacting with ingroup members, they approach the situation as one of aligned interests and expect their partner to follow suit. So far, the role of expected cooperation in ingroup favoritism remains elusive. Against this backdrop, we probed whether expected cooperation is necessary for ingroup favoritism to occur. To this end, we employed a stag hunt game (SH), which instantiates a situation of aligned interests, and tested a BGR-derived prediction that ingroup favoritism in this game would be associated with ingroup-specific elevation of expected cooperation. We found support for this view. Unexpectedly, people also cooperated less in SH with outgroup members than with unclassified strangers. This pattern has seldom been observed empirically and cannot be accounted for by existing theory.