Using Discourse to Incentivize Cooperation in Arab-Muslim Culture : Experimental Evidence from Egypt

Voluntary cooperation contributes significantly to development and prosperity. Particularly in developing countries, higher levels of voluntary cooperation could help fill the gap in public goods provision left by cash-strapped governments. In this paper we ask two questions: how could high contributors to public goods in such contexts – the small minority that they are – be encouraged to sustain their contributions against a defecting? Secondly, how can low contributors be lured to increase their contributions without expensive institutional interventions or major structural transformations? To answer these questions, we ran two public good games with 276 participants in Egypt. In the first experiment, we show that priming high cooperators with a message that makes them take pride in being among the minority of cooperators, helps them not only sustain their contributions, but actually almost double them. In the second experiment, we test how far any of three possible punishment messages – emphasizing religious, patriotic, or social harm discourse – could drive low cooperators to increase their contributions. Our results show that using such punishment messages increases contributions significantly