News

New ERC CZ grant

4 July, 2023

New ERC CZ grant "Discrimination, the Desire to Harm and the Role of Hardship" at CERGE-EI . Supported by the ERC CZ Public Call for Research, Experimental Development and Innovation MŠMT. Congratulations !

Abstract: The proposed research will develop and apply new tools to measure discriminatory preferences and desire to harm in unparalleled depth and breadth. The funding will cover a set of inter-linked projects, including new data collections and analysis of novel data, in order to provide novel empirical evidence about prevalence and predictors of desire to harm and discriminatory preferences against out-group members and identification of factors that can magnify or attenuate such anti-social behavior behavior, including experience of various forms hardship. A desire to harm members of ethnic minorities or people with different political views or religious beliefs represents a strong form of preference-based discrimination which can contribute to inequality, political disagreements and even violent inter-group conflicts. In this project, we will develop and apply a cutting-edge discrimination measurement tool, using economic experiments. We will use consequential money-burning tasks, designed to be easily integrated into large-scale data collections among relevant samples and linked to economic theory. We will deploy them on nationally representative and diverse samples, in order to: (i) estimate the prevalence of desire to harm and discriminatory preferences in various domains (such as ethnicity, religion, age or nationality), (ii) identify which social and economic groups are most likely to discriminate, (iii) test several key conceptual questions, including whether discriminatory preferences are driven by biases in altruism or by a desire to harm, and (iv) identify causal factors that can magnify or to reduce discrimination and anti-social behavior.