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

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