Cooperation and the In-Group-Out-Group Bias: A Field Test on Israeli Kibbutz Members and City Residents

Abstract

The in-group-out-group bias is among the most well documented and widely observed phenomenon in the social sciences. Despite its role in hiring decisions and job discrimination, negotiations, and conflict and competition between groups, economists have paid little attention to the in-group-out-group bias. We question the universality of the bias by conducting field experiments to test whether it extends to the cooperative behavior of one of the most successful and best-known modern collective societies, the Israeli kibbutz. The facts that kibbutz members have voluntarily chosen their lifestyle of cooperation and egalitarianism, the ease with which they could join the surrounding capitalist society and their disproportionate involvement in social and national causes suggest that if ever there was a society of individuals whose cooperativeness extends equally to members and non-members, the kibbutz is it. Nonetheless, our results indicate that kibbutz members display higher levels of cooperation when paired with anonymous kibbutz members than when paired with city residents. In fact, when paired with city residents, kibbutz members-observed levels of cooperation are identical to those of the city residents. Moreover, we show that self-selection rather than kibbutz socialization largely accounts for the extent to which kibbutz members are cooperative.cooperation, in-group-out-group bias, field experiment, self-selection, socialization, kibbutz