The Price of Exclusion, and the Value of Inclusive Policies

Societies, communities, groups, and teams must often decide to exclude or to include other individuals. This article studies, firstly, the consequences of exclusion on the subsequent behavior of excluded individuals in the resulting segregated public good games, providing evidence that excluded individuals tend to behave in a more prosocial manner towards other excluded individuals. With respect to those responsible for exclusion, the use of majority voting to enforce exclusion led to a pronounced reduction in the contributions of those who voted for inclusion, but who were outvoted by a majority voting for exclusion. Secondly, this article studies the effect of two distinct kinds of policies that re-integrate excluded individuals, providing evidence that a policy that re-includes the excluded back in the same group from which they were excluded, and together with the perpetrators of exclusion, is counter-productive and reduces prosocial behavior because of negative reciprocity. In contrast, a policy that re-includes the excluded in another, different group does not activate the norm of reciprocity, and is apt to restore prosocial behavior of previously excluded individuals. In the end, the robustness of the findings when confronted to existing evidence from other sciences, as well as implications for public policies to overcome segregation and for legal instruments to redress exclusion are discussed.