Anticipation of Discrimination, Misperceptions, and Trust: Application to Affective Polarization

738/2024 Devesh Rustagi, Matthias Schief

Does anticipation of discrimination, beliefs individuals have about the discriminatory behavior of others toward them, undermine trust and cooperation? We develop a new design to isolate the role of anticipation of discrimination in co-operation dilemmas using a trust game. We capture the effect of anticipation on trust as the double difference between the amount transferred by trustors to outgroup vs. ingroup trustees when their own identity is revealed vs. concealed. We apply our design in the context of active polarization in the UK using a large representative sample. We find that anticipation of discrimination undermines inter-partisan trust and cooperation by the same magnitude as the combined effect of taste-based and statistical discrimination. However, this anticipation is misperceived because trustees rarely discriminate along partisan lines, resulting in cooperation failure. Our design can be used to study anticipation of discrimination across different societal divisions including gender, ethnicity, religion, and caste.

(Revised April 2025)

Culture, behaviour and development