Discrimination, Voice & Trust: An Experimental Approach

Abstract

Discrimination threatens the manifestation of cohesion in society and can create inefficiencies in market outcomes. Studying trust is important in this context because it can be used to infer discrimination and it can also be used to reveal mechanisms that motivate the decision to trust. We implemented a trust game with three treatments in a lab-in-field experiment in Qatar to study whether interacting with a counterpart by listening to their accent and knowledge of their nationality impacted the levels of trust. In our control group, subjects played the trust game with no information about their counterpart. In the first treatment, they are directly informed that their counterpart is Egyptian before making their decision. In the second treatment, they hear a voice recording from their counterpart speaking in a distinct Egyptian dialect before making their decision. Our results show that hearing a voice increases trust between strangers, and that increased trust also depends on the vocal attributes of the counterpart. We find no evidence of discrimination against Egyptians in Qatar, as knowledge of nationality did not decrease the amount sent on average.