The strategic use of social identity
实验研究个体如何在经济互动中策略性地选择凸显其多重社会身份中的某一维度，发现这种选择可带来高达56%的潜在收益，但实际收益较小，且部分人愿牺牲收益来凸显偏好身份。
• I measure actual and predicted discrimination along multiple identity dimensions. • Responding to expected discrimination, people strategically reveal social identity. • Discrimination allows large potential gains from strategic identity revelation. • Actual gains are lesser, partly due to certain misperceptions about discrimination. • Individuals sacrifice expected payoffs to reveal their preferred characteristics. Individuals often have the power to manipulate which of their multiple dimensions of social identity are salient when entering economic interactions. This paper represents the first empirical exploration of this phenomenon. Experimental results show identity dimension choice is of substantial importance, providing potential earnings gains up to around 56%. Actual gains are smaller: people choose identity dimensions strategically and benefit from broadly accurate beliefs about counterparts’ discriminatory tendencies, but are also hampered by some misperceptions (e.g. overestimating levels of in-group favouritism). Furthermore, many individuals sacrifice expected payoffs to make their preferred dimensions salient, suggesting intrinsic utility derives from social identity.