Implicit Ingroup Favoritism,Outgroup Favoritism,and Their Behavioral Manifestations

Three broad themes that emerge from the social psychological research on unconscious or implicit prejudice and stereotypes are highlighted in this article. First, individuals who belong to socially advantaged groups typically exhibit more implicit preference for their ingroups and bias against outgroups than do members of socially disadvantaged groups. This research suggests that intergroup preferences and prejudices are influenced by two different psychological forces—people's tendency to prefer groups associated with themselves as a confirmation of their high self-exteem versus their tendency to prefer groups valued by the mainstream culture as a confirmation of the sociopolitical order in society. Second, these inplicit prejudices and stereotypes often influence people's judgements, decisions, and behaviors in subtle but pernicious ways. However, the path from implicit bias to discriminatory action is not inevitable. People's awareness of potential bias, their motivation and opportunity to control it, and sometimes their consciously held beliefs can determine whether biases in the mind will manifest in action. Finally, a new line of research suggests that implicit biases exhibited by individuals who belong to socially disadvantaged groups towards their own group may have unintended behavioral consequences that are harmful to their ingroup and themselves.     

Between-group contests over group-specific public goods with within-group fragmentation

We model a contest between two groups of equal sized populations over the division of a group-specific public good. Each group is fragmented into subgroups. Each subgroup allocates effort between production and contestation. Perfect coordination is assumed within subgroups, but subgroups cannot coordinate with one another. All subgroups choose effort allocations simultaneously. We find that the group that is more internally fragmented receives the smaller share of the public good. Aggregate rent-seeking increases when the dominant subgroups within both communities have larger population shares. Any unilateral increase in fragmentation within a group reduces conflict and increases the total income of its opponent. Strikingly, the fragmenting community itself may, however, increase its total income as well, even though its share of the public good declines. Hence, a smaller share of public good provisioning cannot be used to infer a negative income effect on the losing community.     

Structural and Behavioural Characteristics of Informal Service Employment: Evidence from a Survey in New Delhi

This article argues that at least two distinct categories within the informal sector - informal services and informal manufacturing - exhibit different structural and behavioural characteristics. While some segments of informal manufacturing may indeed be 'dynamic' as noted by some recent studies, the hypothesis is tested for the informal service employment on the basis of a survey by the author in New Delhi, India. It examines investment, earnings, returns to human capital, socio economic characteristics and scope for upward mobility of informal service employment. It finds formal education does not explain differences in earnings in the sample but background characteristics do; earnings in the informal service sector are neither the lowest in the economy nor are they comparable to wages in the urban formal unskilled sector, when differences between migrants and non-migrants are taken into account. On the basis of these results, the paper reflects on the nature of growth and structural change in the Indian economy and draws some analytical and policy implications.