Intervention(s)
The study will run over two weeks, with two parts. the first part mirrors the lab-in-the-field experiment in Uganda, where across two stages, a participant is both a worker completing tasks, and a manager delegating tasks. In this case, the focus will be on ethnic discrimination in the US among men. Managers in the first stage will be either white or black (signaled by their name), and will either allocate tasks favorably, equally, or unfavorably for the participant. After completing the task, the participant becomes the manager in the next stage, and allocates tasks between two workers: one white and one black. In this setting, I introduce a third stage, where participants will have 1 minute time to solve as many tasks as possible. The name of the manager in this stage is disclosed to the participants. This is to test for micro-foundations of anticipated discrimination.
One week later, participants are invited back for a second round of the game. First, they are asked to recall how many tasks they were assigned last week. Afterwards, they play the game again, this time as a manager.
Subsequently, they are shown 10 allocations across managers and workers, and are incentivized to recall the names of the managers and allocations accordingly. Subsequently, they play the game again, as a manager. Afterwards, they will be assigned one of the rounds of the game, as a worker. Then, then will be randomized across 6 different arms: 1) the normal game; 2) direct retaliation against the previous manager; 3) costly mistakes; 4) inefficient non-even allocation; 5) letting players know there are future rounds; 6) non-white, non-black player.
Afterwards, there will be a PEQ, asking about discriminatory attitudes, and the recall of negative and positive past experiences with managers.
With a different sample, the same setup will be used, however to look at the same setup among white men (with an affirmative action policy component); as well as to look at the role of previous joyful destruction, a dictator game setup, and noisy signals on future discriminatory behavior
Following a pilot study of the previous iteration, the focus has been placed on racial discrimination, rather than gender-based discrimination.
The current experimental design allows to distinguish between four micro-foundations of retaliatory discrimination, which have been pre-registered with this registry.
50% of respondents will fill in detailed beliefs in the first stage of the experiment.