The coevolution of cultural groups and ingroup favoritism

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serval:BIB_3349730A2242
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
The coevolution of cultural groups and ingroup favoritism
Journal
Science
Author(s)
Efferson C., Lalive R., Fehr E.
ISSN
0036-8075
Publication state
Published
Issued date
09/2008
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
321
Number
5897
Pages
1844-1849
Language
english
Abstract
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.
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Create date
21/08/2008 15:22
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20/08/2019 13:19
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