Behavioral Measure of Intergroup Polarization

Description

Behavioral Games let participants in a lab or respondents in ausrvey decide how to allocate a monetary endowment to another individual, other individuals or groups of individuals. Recipients are randomly assigned a political or social group affiliation, allowing researchers to compare participants’ behavior toward in-group versus out-group members.

Polarization is operationalized as systematic differences in allocation behavior depending on the recipient’s group identity. Lower transfers, reduced cooperation, or diminished trust toward out-group members relative to in-group members are interpreted as evidence of polarization, reflecting social distance, discrimination, or lack of trust across group lines.

By relying on incentivized choices rather than self-reported attitudes, this approach captures behavioral manifestations of polarization, revealing how group divisions translate into tangible differences in cooperation and resource allocation.

Operationalization

There are multiple variations of Behavioral Games.

Dictator Game

In the simplest version, the ‘Dictator Game’ – applied for example by Hahm, Hilpert and König (2023) and Sambanis and Lee (2026), participants decide whether to allocate part of a given endowment to another person and, if so, how much. The ‘Trust Game’ – used by Westwood et al. (2018) or Broockman, Kalla and Westwood (2023) - extends the concept: The sender first decides how much of an initial endowment to transfer to the receiver, knowing that the transferred amount is multiplied before reaching the receiver, who then decides how much, if any, to return to the sender. By varying the dimension of interest (e.g. party identification) and holding the remaining attributes constant or filling them with irrelevant demographic information, researchers can examine whether allocation decisions differ across recipient characteristics. Differences in the amount transferred are interpreted as an indicator of affective polarization. The role assigned to participants determines what the game measures. In most applications participants act as the allocating party, so that their own decisions constitute the outcome. If instead they are placed in the receiving role and confronted with scripted, group-justified allocations by a purported counterpart, the game ceases to be a measurement and becomes a manipulation used to induce polarization (Broockman et al. (2023).

Public Goods Game

The ‘Public Goods Game’ – applied for example by Whitt et al. (2021) - shifts the setting from a dyad to a group. Individuals receive an endowment and decide how much of it to contribute to a shared pool, which is multiplied and then divided equally among the group, so that withholding is individually profitable while contributing is collectively optimal. By manipulating the composition of the group - e.g. by ensuring that the majority of the group are supporters of a particular party - researchers can examine how group divisions impact cooperative behavior.

Use cases

Publications that use this measure: