A new study finds that collaborative interaction across caste lines, like in cricket leagues, can reduce caste divisions in India.

India is a cricket-crazy country, and now a new study gives us more reasons to celebrate the sport.

An academic paper by a PhD scholar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) finds that collaborative interaction across caste lines, like in cricket leagues, can reduce caste divisions in India.

For the research, 1,261 men were recruited from different castes in Uttar Pradesh to participate in eight month-long cricket leagues, playing 640 matches in total.

The study has three main findings:

1. Participation in the leagues increased cross-caste friendships and teammate choice, and cross-caste trade.

2. These effects are largely driven by exposure to other-castes as teammates.

3. In contrast, exposure to other-caste opponents had either null or negative effects (with important qualifications).

Here is an edited excerpt from the paper titled ‘Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration’:

My first set of findings considers players’ willingness to interact and own-caste favouritism. Collaborative and adversarial contact has opposite effects on self-reported cross-caste friendships. Having all other-caste teammates instead of none increases the number of other-caste friends by 1.2, while having all other-caste opponents instead of none decreases the number of other-caste friends by 5.5. The negative effect is not due to contact with opponents in general – exposure to own-caste opponents has a small positive effect on the number of own-caste friends.

Cross-caste interactions with opponents are 50 percentage points more likely to be hostile (arguments or insults), as opposed to friendly (high-fives, compliments, and hugs), than cross-caste interactions with teammates. To the extent that players attribute such behaviour of other-caste players to their caste, rather than the situation created by the experiment, these interactions naturally lead to tastes shifting in opposite directions.

In the voting, taste-based and statistical discrimination jointly determine favouritism – players vote partly based on social preferences (taste-based), and partly based on beliefs about cricket ability (statistical), ranking more talented players higher. I find that collaborative contact reduces own-caste favouritism in voting by up to 33 per cent, while adversarial contact has no effect.

Collaborative contact enhances efficiency in two ways. First, it increases the quality of teammates chosen for the future match with a cash prize for the winner, as measured by their predicted probability of winning the match. Though both types of contact increase the number of other-caste teammates chosen, only collaborative contact affects team quality. This finding suggests that collaborative contact could reduce one important cost of discrimination emphasised in labour economics: efficiency losses in hiring that occur when employers overlook talented outgroup candidates in favour of less-talented ingroup candidates (Hsieh et al.(2013)).

Second, collaborative contact increases cross-caste trade by up to 11 percentage points and trade payouts by 11 per cent, as measured in a trading exercise in which gains from cross-caste trade were introduced. Consistent with the results on team quality, the effect for adversarial contact on cross-caste trade and payouts is statistically insignificant. The collaborative contact effect is driven by the behaviour of the highest castes, with contact increasing their cross-caste trade by up to 30 percentage points.

These results show that collaborative contact asymmetrically reduces social barriers to trade: the highest castes can now trade with those below them in the caste hierarchy, but the opposite is not true, despite relatively symmetric effects on willingness to interact socially across caste.

Taken together, my findings demonstrate that the type of contact mediates its impact: collaborative contact increases willingness to interact with men from other castes, reduces own-caste favouritism, and increases efficiency.

My findings have implications for policy questions such as how to integrate refugees into society, reconcile groups in the aftermath of conflict, and reduce long-running inter-group prejudices. Integrative sports programmes exist for these purposes, but evidence on their impact is scarce.

This is an edited extract from the report titled “Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration”. You can read the full report here.