Replication package: Dataset and stata-do-file for analysis in "Does the Disclosure of Group Members' Identities Affect Cooperation? Evidence from an Artefactual Public Good Field Experiment"

This dataset was used for the analysis in "Does the Disclosure of Group Members’ Identities Affect Cooperation?  Evidence from an Artefactual Public Good Field Experiment". The data was collected in Namibia in 2017 as part of the SASSCAL research project by Nils Christian Hoenow as a member of the Chair for Development and Cooperative Economics at the University of Marburg. Funded by the Southern African Science Service Center for Climate Change and Adaptive Land-UseManagement (SASSCAL) through the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (Grant No. 01LG1201B).

Article Title: Does the Disclosure of Group Members’ Identities Affect Cooperation?  Evidence from an Artefactual Public Good Field Experiment

Authors: Nils Christian Hoenow

Affiliation: RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, Essen, Germany and & School of Business and Economics, University ofMarburg, Marburg, Germany

Abstract

Social dilemmas in the real world, such as pollution and the extraction of resources, often differ regarding the visibility of involved parties and their behavior. While publicly disclosing individual decisions in social dilemma situations is known to result in more cooperation, there is little research on whether it makes a difference if individual identities are revealed or not. This study uses an artefactual public good field experiment conducted in rural Namibia with 144 villagers, who are randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: One that does not disclose group members’ identities and one that does. Individual contributions to the public good remain private in both cases, so the difference between the two conditions only lies in whether participants get to see who their group members are. In addition, the experiment’s setting in village communities entails pre-existing social ties between participants, which likely amplify potential effects that revealing identities can have on cooperation and allow investigating the role of group composition, such as the share of friends and family members. Results show that contributions to the public good are significantly higher in the condition that does not allow group members to identify each other, which can be explained by theories of social identity and depersonalization, specifically the “social identity model of deindividuation effects” (Reicher et al. 1995). The variability of contributions, however, does not differ across the two experimental conditions. Exploratory analyses further reveal that contributions in the identified condition are distinctly lower when group members are socially distant to each other.

Keywords: anonymity, cooperation, artefactual field experiment, public good, social identity, depersonalization