Dominique Cappelletti, Luigi Mittone, and Matteo Ploner Language and intergroup discrimination. Evidence from an experiment CEEL Working Paper 4-15 Cognitive and Experimental Economics Laboratory Via Inama, 5 38100 Trento, Italy http://www-ceel.economia.unitn.it tel. +39.461.282313 Language and intergroup discrimination Evidence from an experiment Dominique Cappelletti |⇤ Luigi Mittone | Matteo Ploner CEEL, University of Trento, Italy |Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy Abstract Language is one of the most salient dimensions of ethnocultural iden- tity and clearly marks who is and who is not a member of the group. We conduct an experiment to investigate the role of language in intergroup discrimination in the creation of social capital, here operationalised as a measure encompassing trust, trustworthiness, cooperation, and coordina- tion. We observe the behaviour of the members of a minority language community when they receive the instructions written in their own id- iomatic language and when they receive them written in the surrounding language. We find a language e↵ect on behaviour, but this e↵ect is gen- der specific. When deciding in the surrounding language, participants do not treat ingroup and outgroup members di↵erently. When deciding in their own idiomatic language, females show intergroup discrimination and treat ingroup members more favourably compared to how they treat them when deciding in the surrounding language. We also observe that the behaviour participants exhibit in the experiment positively correlates with their attitudes as measured by the standard trust survey question used as a proxy for social capital. JEL Classification:C9 Keywords: language, intergroup discrimination, social capital, experiment ⇤Corresponding author: Dominique Cappelletti E–mail address:
[email protected] 1 1 Introduction Intergroup discrimination is one of the most documented findings in psycholog- ical and economic research.