We use experimental methods to study coordination games analogous to voting games over fixed divisions of a pie. We find that players use the ethnic or gender identities of other players, rather than other payoff irrelevant features of a game’s description, to achieve coordination. Coordination along or across gender lines, we show, can be attributed in part to the presence of social norms rath...

Present study attempts to interrogate the dominant trait based approach of leadership and tried to relook it from group perspective. Investigation was conducted in two phases where teachers were asked about the quality of ideally effective leader they would prefer. The obtained responses were thematically transformed into broader variable which were factor analyzed. Under social identity tradit...

Foundational to this discussion are two papers on “identity” by George A. Akerlof and Rachel Kranton [2000, 2005]. We contribute to their development of this issue with additional factors that are arguably essential to the analysis of identity formation. While they indicate the importance of norms as the bases of identity, we suggest additionally the relevance of independence, individual creati...

Women are widely under-represented in top-level social positions. While several potential reasons may explain this fact (Goldin and Rouse, 2000, Altonji and Blank, 1999), recent findings have emphasised one specific cause as particularly relevant: women are less likely to self-select into competitions (Gupta et al., 2005, Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007, Niederle et al., 2008). Dargnies (2009) sh...

In this chapter, we examine the self and identity by considering the different conditions under which these are affected by the groups to which people belong. From a social identity perspective we argue that group commitment, on the one hand, and features of the social context, on the other hand, are crucial determinants of central identity concerns. We develop a taxonomy of situations to refle...

Third party punishment is crucial for sustaining cooperative behavior. Still, little is known about its determinants. In this paper we use laboratory experiments to investigate a long-conjectured interaction between group identification and bystanders’ punishment preferences using a novel measure of these preferences. We induce minimal groups and give a bystander the opportunity to punish the p...

Primates depend for their survival on their ability to understand their social environment, and their behavior is often shaped by social circumstances. We report that the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in motivation and reward, is tuned to social information. Macaque monkeys worked to collect rewards for themselves and two monkey partners. Behaviorally, monkeys discriminated betw...