Is parochial altruism an attribute of individual behavior? This is the question we address with an experiment. We examine whether the individual pro-sociality that is revealed in the public goods and trust games when interacting with fellow group members helps predict individual parochialism, as measured by the in-group bias (i.e., the difference in these games in pro-sociality when interacting with own group members as compared with members of another group). We find that it is not. An examination of the Big-5 personality predictors of each behavior reinforces this result: they are different. In short, knowing how pro-social individuals are with respect to fellow group members does not help predict their parochialism.This network project brings together economists, psychologists, computer and complexity scientists from three leading centres for behavioural social science at Nottingham, Warwick and UEA. This group will lead a research programme with two broad objectives: to develop and test cross-disciplinary models of human behaviour and behaviour change; to draw out their implications for the formulation and evaluation of public policy. Foundational research will focus on three inter-related themes: understanding individual behaviour and behaviour change; understanding social and interactive behaviour; rethinking the foundations of policy analysis. The project will explore implications of the basic science for policy via a series of applied projects connecting naturally with the three themes. These will include: the determinants of consumer credit behaviour; the formation of social values; strategies for evaluation of policies affecting health and safety. The research will integrate theoretical perspectives from multiple disciplines and utilise a wide range of complementary methodologies including: theoretical modeling of individuals, groups and complex systems; conceptual analysis; lab and field experiments; analysis of large data sets. The Network will promote high quality cross-disciplinary research and serve as a policy forum for understanding behaviour and behaviour change.

Experimental data. Our subjects engage in two counterbalanced tasks. The first task consists of two decision making experiments where pro-sociality has typically been revealed in varying degrees across individuals: the PG and Trust (T) games. The second task is the DeYoung et al. (2007) version of the Big 5 personality survey test. These tasks are counterbalanced to enable control for any possible priming effect of one task upon the other. There are two treatments for the PG and T decisions: one with no group affiliations and the other with minimum, artificial group affiliations where subjects belong to either the red or the blue group. We chose the PG and T games and we used a minimal, artificial group affiliation mechanism. In both treatments, subjects anonymously make the PG and T decisions (in a random order) eight times in two separate stages. The decisions are always made with a randomly drawn co-player but in the group treatments the randomness is constrained to ensure equal numbers of interactions with own-group and out-group members.