Minderheit vs. Mehrheit: Strukturelle Determinanten von Konflikten und Kooperation in heterogenen Gesellschaften
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Minority groups in our societies often face prejudice and discrimination. Majority group members regularly view minorities as a threat to their social identity, culture, and even resource management. It is this last aspect of the minority/majority dynamic that this project explored in greater depth. Put simply, the goal of the project was to understand whether, and to what extent, prejudice and discrimination against minority groups are related to the issues facing heterogeneous communities when it comes to generating and maintaining common resources. The current project relies on two core observations: minority and majority groups living in modern societies are usually part of a common, superordinate group (e.g., ethnic minorities and majorities living in a nation-state), and they share common resources (e.g., tax-based social services and benefits). Despite this, previous experimental work often depicted minority/majority groups as distinct groups of unequal size, sharing neither common identity nor resources. Recognizing the dilemmas inherent in common resource management is crucial to understanding both anti-minority discrimination and the loss of cooperation we sometimes record in heterogeneous societies. I began by a mathematical analysis of the motivations for behaviour in a typical common resource management dilemma. This analysis showed that minority groups might view freeriding (benefitting from common resources without contributing to their maintenance) as more tempting, while majority groups might view (minority) freeriding as more threatening. Having found this asymmetry in how common resource management “works” for minority versus majority group members, I wondered whether this translated into intuitions about group members’ contributions. Indeed, I found that people regularly assumed minorities will exploit the common resource, and underperform in other tasks. This intuition was the main motive for anti-minority discrimination. These findings were recorded in the laboratory and in surveystudies dealing with prejudice against different, real minority groups. What about cooperation? Testing the willingness of participants to contribute to common resources, I found no significant differences in cooperation between experimental conditions. It seems that heterogeneity itself is not a trigger for a loss of cooperation. Instead, other structural or psychological factors must be present. However, to the extent some individual participant anticipated that minority group members (in particular) would freeride on common resource management, they would themselves fail to cooperate. Put simply, intuitions about minority freeriding motivated both minority and majority freeriding in heterogeneous groups, although for slightly different reasons. Majority group members failed to cooperate out of a fear of exploitation, while minority ones failed to cooperate both out of fear of exploitation and the desire to exploit others. However, I note here that I recorded no tendency for minority group members to actually freeride: instead, I could show that minority contributions were underestimated by both minority and majority group members.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
-
Robotics Labs and Other Hands-On Teaching During COVID-19: Change Is Here to Stay?. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 28(4), 92-102.
Birk, Andreas & Simunovic, Dora
-
Minority v. Majority: Conflict and Cooperation in Heterogeneous Societies. Presented at 19th International Conference on Social Dilemmas. Copenhagen, Denmark.
Simunovic, D.
-
Fear, Greed and Group Composition: How Heterogeneity Impacts Expectations and Cooperation in the Public Goods Game.
Simunovic, Dora; Kühnen, Ulrich; Spadaro, Giuliana; Bandlow-Raffalski, Steffen & Wilhelm, Adalbert
-
Helping the ingroup versus harming the outgroup: Evidence from morality-based groups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 105, 104436.
Grigoryan, Lusine; Seo, San; Simunovic, Dora & Hofmann, Wilhelm
-
Minority v. Majority: Bad Intuitions. Presented at The Cognition, Behaviour and Evolution Network. Utrecht, Netherlands
Simunovic, D.
-
“More” or “enough”? Rural-urban differences in maximizing: The case of India. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 5, 100140.
Srivastava, Ajita; Kühnen, Ulrich; Simunovic, Dora & Boehnke, Klaus
-
Exploring motivated reasoning in polarization over the unfolding 2023 judicial reform in Israel. Communications Psychology, 2(1).
Simunovic, Dora; Dorfman, Anna & Katzir, Maayan
-
To Share or to Freeride? Public Goods in Heterogeneous Societies. 20th International Conference on Social Dilemmas. Leiden, Netherlands
Simunovic, D.
-
To Share or to Freeride? Public Goods in Heterogeneous Societies. International Association of Cross Cultural Psychology conference in Bali, Indonesia
Simunovic, D.
-
Us and Ours. Social Psychology, 55(2), 63-75.
Šimunović, Dora; Grigoryan, Lusine; Boehnke, Klaus & Šimunović, Damir
