When Are Neighbors Nasty? In-Group Trust and Prosocial Behavior in Cooperative vs. Competitive Task Settings

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Peace, War, and Social Conflict Roundtable #2: Collective Violence

Abstract

How does in-group favoritism shape the formation of initial connections in competitive settings? Social and behavioral scientists consistently find that actors treat others who share a salient social category more favorably. Shared identities heighten trust, encourage tie formation with in-group members, and generate both rational and emotional motivations for intergroup conflict. These findings motivate a common presumption in group processes research: when faced with resource dilemmas, people will prefer in-group over out-group others. Yet some scholars suggest otherwise, for example Faris et al. 2020, arguing that empirical results are less clear than theory implies. Non-human models document a “nasty neighbor” phenomenon, a tendency to denigrate rather than cooperate with closer conspecifics when resources are scarce. Although one recent study finds support for this hypothesis in humans, Romano et al. 2024, it remains unclear whether heightened in-group competition reflects homophilous sorting that increases conflict through proximity, or whether people actively prefer and seek out in-group others as both collaborators and competitors. Evidence for the latter would suggest that initial trust may intensify both in-group favoritism and in-group conflict. We conduct an experiment to adjudicate between these possibilities. We randomly assign perceived similarity of interaction partners via a trivial identity manipulation so participants are paired with a categorically similar or dissimilar other. After completing activities designed to induce initial trust, each participant selects a new partner from a set that includes their prior partner, unmet in-group others, and unmet out-group others for a final high-stakes task randomized to be cooperative or competitive. This design allows us to estimate the effect of perceived similarity on tie formation, test whether perceived and behavioral trust mediate this relationship, and examine how these processes vary across cooperative and competitive settings.

Authors

• Joseph M. Quinn, University of South Carolina-Columbia

• Valerie Barron, University of South Carolina-Columbia