Religious fragmentation, social identity and conflict: Evidence from an artefactual field experiment in India
Chakravarty, S; Fonseca, MA; Ghosh, S; et al.Marjit, S
Date: 21 October 2016
Journal
PLoS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Publisher DOI
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Abstract
We examine the impact of religious identity and village-level religious fragmentation on
behavior in Tullock contests. We report on a series of two-player Tullock contest
experiments conducted on a sample of 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural West
Bengal, India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the ...
We examine the impact of religious identity and village-level religious fragmentation on
behavior in Tullock contests. We report on a series of two-player Tullock contest
experiments conducted on a sample of 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural West
Bengal, India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of
religious fragmentation in the village where subjects reside. Our main finding is that
the effect of social identity is small and inconsistent across the two religious groups in
our study. While we find small but statistically significant results in line with our
hypotheses in the Hindu sample, we find no statistically significant effects in the
Muslim sample. This is in contrast to evidence from Chakravarty et al. (2016), who
report significant differences in cooperation levels in prisoners’ dilemma and stag hunt
games, both in terms of village composition and identity. We attribute this to the fact
that social identity may have a more powerful effect on cooperation than on conflict.
Economics
Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy
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