ICES Seminar in Experimental Economics and Game Theory
Cognitive Consequences of Insecure National Belonging
Friday, February 17, 2023 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST
Vernon Smith Hall (formerly Metropolitan Building), 5183
The ICES Seminar in Experimental Economics and Game Theory of the Spring 2023 semester will feature:
University of Louvain
Cognitive Consequences of Insecure National Belonging
Abstract
A growing literature demonstrates that a scarcity mindset can lead to suboptimal decisions. This might explain some of the association between poverty and counterproductive economic behaviors. Papers in this literature often focus on how a lack of financial resources triggers a scarcity mindset. We use an online labor market experiment to test whether ethnic minorities who lack a secure sense of belonging in a nation face a similar scarcity mindset with respect to their national identity; and importantly, we test whether this scarcity mindset also leads to suboptimal economic decisions and behaviors. We hire 500 online workers in India and assign them basic data-processing tasks associated with building a corpus of social media images for a separate research project. We vary exposure to everyday social media posts that emphasize the exclusion of national minorities. We tentatively find that exposure to posts with exclusionary content is associated with scarcity induced outcomes that have been found elsewhere in the literature. Treated individuals perform worse on cognitive tasks associated with mental bandwidth and they are less productive in incentivized tasks. Interestingly, they appear more patient over money.
For more information about the Seminar Series, please visit the Seminar Schedule homepage.
