Intergroup Competition, Group Status, and Individuals’ Cooperation Behavior : Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment

Intergroup competition has been proven to increase ingroup cooperation, but it will divide individuals into high-status groups and low-status groups, which may lead to group-level conflict and affect cooperation behavior. In this paper, we conduct a laboratory experiment to find how group status caused by intergroup competition changes individuals’ cooperation behavior in two representative social dilemma frameworks, the public goods game and the prisoner's dilemma game. Experimental results show that both high-status group members and low-status group members will improve ingroup cooperation, and there exists the framing effect of cooperation which affects different status group members’ decisions under different situations