The Effect of Group Identity on Distributive Choice: Social Preference or Heuristic?

Abstract

Group identity can influence significantly people's attitudes towards monetary allocations. In this article, we reassess the representation of group identity using social preference models. First, we show that the influence of group identity varies unsystematically across different types of mini-dictator games and cannot be described using a well-behaved preference function. Second, we demonstrate that the effect is not robust to slightly increasing the complexity of the task, suggesting that group identity is a framing effect that can be easily displaced by alternative decision heuristics.