"Do the right thing" for whom? An experiment on ingroup favouritism, group assorting and moral suasion

• Main Authors: Ennio Bilancini, Leonardo Boncinelli, Valerio Capraro, Tatiana Celadin, Roberto Di Paolo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Society for Judgment and Decision Making 2020-03-01
• Series: Judgment and Decision Making
• Subjects: moral suasion; ingroup favouritism; dictator game; moral preferences.nakeywords
• Online Access: http://journal.sjdm.org/19/191113/jdm191113.pdf

In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preferences), and morally relevant issues in another treatment (assorting on moral preferences). In the second stage, participants choose how to split a given amount of money between participants of their own group and participants of the other group, first in the baseline setting and then in a setting where they are told to do what they believe to be morally right (moral suasion). Our main results are: (i) in the baseline, participants tend to favour their own group to a greater extent when groups are assorted according to moral preferences, compared to when they are assorted according to non-moral preferences; (ii) the net effect of moral suasion is to decrease ingroup favouritism, but there is also a non-negligible proportion of participants for whom moral suasion increases ingroup favouritism; (iii) the effect of moral suasion is substantially stable across group assorting and four pre-registered individual characteristics (gender, political orientation, religiosity, pro-life vs pro-choice ethical convictions).