Accents, Race and Discrimination: Evidence from a Trust Game

dc.creatorYagman, Ece
dc.creatorKeswell, Malcolm
dc.date2015-10-15T08:26:49Z
dc.date2015-10-15T08:26:49Z
dc.date2015-10
dc.date.accessioned2017-06-06T10:55:52Z
dc.date.available2017-06-06T10:55:52Z
dc.date.issued2017-06-06
dc.descriptionWe investigate discrimination according to accent and race on trust behaviour. Proposers were randomly paired with responders of the same/different race, and asked to play the trust game after looking at a photograph and hearing a 10 second audio clip of the responders reading a standardised script in English. This allows us to check for within and across-group favouritism in both race and accentedness. We find that accentedness is a statistically significant predictor of trust and is strongly non-linear in the race of the paired subjects for males but not for females. In the case of males, offers decrease by 11.3% if the responder has a mother-tongue English accent and does not share the same race as the proposer, but increases by about 6.6% if there is racial similarity. This effect is especially pronounced for Black males who are paired with other Black males: offers are 19.5% higher if responders have a mother-tongue English accent. By contrast, females in general seem less sensitive to the signal package. These large gender differences are not because men behave any more strategically than women.
dc.descriptionYagman: Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, Cape Town; Keswell: Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit & School of Economics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, Cape Town. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Neville Alexander, who devoted his lifetime to advocate mother-tongue based multilingualism in South Africa. We are especially grateful to Justine Burns for helpful guidance and advice. We also thank seminar participants of the Research Unit in Behavioural and Neuroeconomics (Ruben) and the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (Saldru). Funding of this research is gratefully acknowledged from the National Research Foundation of South Africa.
dc.identifierYagman, E., Keswell, M. (2015). SAccents, Race and Discrimination: Evidence from a Trust Game. A Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit Working Paper Number 158 Cape Town: SALDRU, University of Cape Town.
dc.identifier978-1-928281-19-1
dc.identifierhttp://hdl.handle.net/11090/791
dc.identifier.ris TY - Working Paper DA - 2017-06-06 DB - OpenUCT DP - University of Cape Town KW - Experiments KW - Accents KW - Trust KW - Discrimination KW - Race LK - https://open.uct.ac.za PB - University of Cape Town PY - 2017 T1 - Accents, Race and Discrimination: Evidence from a Trust Game TI - Accents, Race and Discrimination: Evidence from a Trust Game UR - http://hdl.handle.net/11090/791 ER - en_ZA
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11090/791
dc.languageen
dc.publisher.departmentSALDRUen_ZA
dc.publisher.facultyFaculty of Commerceen_ZA
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Cape Town
dc.relationSALDRU Working Paper;158
dc.subjectExperiments
dc.subjectAccents
dc.subjectTrust
dc.subjectDiscrimination
dc.subjectRace
dc.titleAccents, Race and Discrimination: Evidence from a Trust Game
dc.typeWorking Paper
uct.type.publicationResearchen_ZA
uct.type.resourceWorking Paperen_ZA
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