The cultural Red King effect

Abstract

ABSTRACT Why do minority groups tend to be discriminated against when it comes to situations of bargaining and resource division? In this article, I explore an explanation for this disadvantage that appeals solely to the dynamics of social interaction between minority and majority groups—the cultural Red King effect (Bruner, 2017). As I show, in agent-based models of bargaining between groups, the minority group will tend to get less as a direct result of the fact that they frequently interact with majority group members, while majority group members meet them only rarely. This effect is strengthened by certain psychological phenomenon—risk aversion and in-group preference—is robust on network models, and is strengthened in cases where preexisting norms are discriminatory. I will also discuss how this effect unifies previous results on the impacts of institutional memory on bargaining between groups.