Discrimination against different individuals can emerge on the basis of the most
meaningless of distinguishing features, according to research by Shaun Hargreaves-
Heap and Yanis Varoufakis, published in the latest issue of the Economic Journal.
Their experimental testing of the behaviour of 640 volunteers reveals that people can
quickly sort themselves into rigid hierarchies, that discrimination is maintained by the
complicity of its victims and that victims are more likely to behave co-operatively than
the powerful are. The research seems to confirm Aristotle’s famous dictum: ‘The
weaker are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay heed to neither.’
Most people suspect that power is not always distributed fairly: those at the top of ‘the
pyramid’ do not always deserve to be there, towering over the rest and reaping the
better rewards. Yet most people also believe this to be the exception; that systematic
differences in socio-economic status and power must reflect systematic differences in
intelligence and/or diligence; that most powerful people have earned their success,
even if some acquired it through the mysterious operation of serendipity. These
researchers argue that the conventional wisdom is too kind on hierarchies!
A laboratory experiment involving 640 volunteers shows that rigid hierarchies might
emerge even among people who are identical. Of course, discrimination cannot emerge
unless there is at least some distinguishing feature (e.g. some are ‘left-hookers’ or have
green eyes). In this experiment, the researchers ensured that subjects seemed identical
to each other except for a tiny and wholly arbitrary difference: half of the subjects were
initially allocated randomly the label ‘blue’ and the rest the label ‘red’. Would it make a
difference?
Subjects interacted repeatedly in the context of a simple two -person game in which the
aggressive player gained $2, the submissive player nothing, mutual aggression meant
that both lost $2 and mutual acquiescence rewarded each with $1. Subjects never met
the same opponent twice in a row and played 32 times. The question was: would the
colour labels make a difference? And would one of the two colours emerge as
dominant?
The answer is affirmative on both counts: colour labels did influence behaviour greatly
and, yes, one of the two colours emerged as the dominant one, in the sense that
subjects of that colour would claim, and be granted, the better reward when paired with
a subject of the opposite colour.
The reason why this is remarkable is that all of them knew that the colours were
arbitrary and, thus, meaningless! In effect, within 20 or 30 minutes, highly discriminatory
conventions became established and determined whether a subject would get the $2 or
receive nothing on the basis of his/her meaningless colour (as opposed to their
personal characteristics, e.g. intelligence, aggression).
We now know that, at least in interactions in which an urge to be aggressive coexists
with a mutual fear of conflict (e.g. any negotiation, or work environment, in which
individual aggression brings significant gains as long as the other side backs down but,
at the same time, conflict-avoidance is important), discrimination can emerge quickly
even among ‘identical’ people and be as systematic as it is arbitrary.
Discrimination starts because people are fearful of conflict and, when caught in
unpredictable interactions, they try to condition their behaviour on any information that
comes to hand – even meaningless information (e.g. on the relative aggression of ‘blue’
players). Once they do so, an initial, random difference in the behaviour of the ‘reds’
and the ‘blues’ gets a bandwagon rolling, leading to stable discrimination that succeeds
in minimising costly conflict despite being non-rational (why should the ‘blues’ be
dominant over the ‘reds’ or vice versa?).
One striking result of this research is that discrimination, and its conflict-minimising
impact, was maintained primarily due to the complicity of its victims. Another striking
result was that, when the victims of discrimination met one another, they co-operated
90% of the time in ways that the economist’s standard analysis of self-interested
behaviour cannot explain.
By contrast, when the dominant coloured people met, they behaved as the economists
would have expected. It is almost as if the subjects wanted to confirm Aristotle’s famous
dictum.
ENDS
Notes for Editors: 'Some Experimental Evidence on the Evolution of Discrimination,
Co-operation and Perceptions of Fairness’ by Shaun Hargreaves-Heap and Yanis
Varoufakis is published in the July 2002 issue of the Economic Journal.
Hargreaves-Heap is at the University of East Anglia; Varoufakis is at the University of
Athens.
For Further Information: contact RES Media Consultant Romesh Vaitilingam on 0117-
983-9770 or 07768-661095 (email: romesh@compuserve.com); or Yanis Varoufakis via
email:yanisv@econ.uoa.gr.