Does ethnicity affect normal people in non-political times?

Abstract

The intention with this study is to contribute to the field of research that looks at the impact of ethnic divergence in a country. More specifically, I investigate social cooperation in an ethnic diversified society by mainly analyzing how people contribute to the funding of public goods through an economic experiment. By doing this, I want to be able to answer if “ethnicity matter for normal people in non-political times?” In the analyses, I have tried to invoke a co-ethnic bias in behavior both by letting players play identified games, where I changed the ethnic composition of the other group members, and by use of priming, intended to make different social categories more salient. The results shows that I do not find that people contribute more to the funding of public goods in a homogenous co-ethnic setting than in a mixed ethnic setting or that people is significantly affected by the treatment primes. I do not find any evidence in this study that people have co-ethnic preferences and that there is a negative effect of ethnicity on peoples willingness to contribute to the funding of public goods. Somewhat surprisingly I find that people contributes less in all games when primed with national identity treatment prime.