Traditional economic games such as the Dictator and Public Goods Games are widely used to measure ethnic bias, but these tools can fail to measure the biases they intend to capture. These games are vulnerable to self-presentational concerns and may not detect automatic associative or affective reactions.

🔎 Field Design in Nairobi: Games Versus Misattribution Tasks

• Participants in Nairobi, Kenya completed a series of common economics games (Dictator Game and Public Goods Game) alongside misattribution-based tasks adapted from social psychology.
• Each misattribution task was designed to detect bias toward noncoethnics relative to coethnics while reducing opportunities for deliberate impression management.

🔬 What the Results Show

• Several of the misattribution tasks produced clear evidence of the expected bias, arguably reflecting differences in positive/negative affect and heightened threat perception toward noncoethnics.
• The Dictator and Public Goods Games, by contrast, were unable to detect any behavioral bias toward noncoethnics versus coethnics in this sample.
• The pattern suggests that misattribution measures capture more automatic associative and affective reactions, whereas economic games may be muted by self-presentation or other strategic considerations.

📌 Why This Matters

• Researchers studying ethnic and related biases should consider adding misattribution-based procedures to their measurement tool kit to widen the set of biases to which empirical investigations are sensitive.
• Misattribution tasks adapted from social psychology can complement economic games and reveal affective or threat-based biases that standard behavioral measures may miss.