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

Silvia Angerer; Daniela Glätzle-Rützler; Philipp Lergetporer; Matthias Sutter

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

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Year of publication:	2015
Authors:	Angerer, Silvia ; Glätzle-Rützler, Daniela ; Lergetporer, Philipp ; Sutter, Matthias
Publisher:	Munich : ifo Inst.
Subject:	Cooperation \| discrimination \| language \| children \| experiment \| Kinder \| Children \| Sprache \| Language \| Mehrsprachigkeit \| Multilingualism \| Diskriminierung \| Discrimination \| Experiment \| Kooperation