The Coevolution of Cultural Groups and Ingroup Favoritism
Charles Efferson,1,2*
Rafael Lalive,3
Ernst Fehr1,4
Cultural boundaries have often been the basis for discrimination, nationalism, religious wars, and genocide. Little is known, however, about how cultural groups form or the evolutionary forces behind group affiliation and ingroup favoritism. Hence, we examine these forces experimentally and show that arbitrary symbolic markers, though initially meaningless, evolve to play a key role in cultural group formation and ingroup favoritism because they enable a population of heterogeneous individuals to solve important coordination problems. This process requires that individuals differ in some critical but unobservable way and that their markers be freely and flexibly chosen. If these conditions are met, markers become accurate predictors of behavior. The resulting social environment includes strong incentives to bias interactions toward others with the same marker, and subjects accordingly show strong ingroup favoritism. When markers do not acquire meaning as accurate predictors of behavior, players show a markedly reduced taste for ingroup favoritism. Our results support the prominent evolutionary hypothesis that cultural processes can reshape the selective pressures facing individuals and so favor the evolution of behavioral traits not previously advantaged.
1 Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zürich, Blümlisalpstrasse 10, 8006 Zürich, Switzerland.
2 Santa Fe Institute, NM 87501, USA.
3 Department of Economics, University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
4 Collegium Helveticum, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: efferson{at}iew.uzh.ch
