Abstract
This paper provides experimental evidence showing that members of a majority group systematically shift punishment on innocent members of an ethnic minority. We develop a new incentivized task, the Punishing the Scapegoat Game, to measure how injustice affecting a member of one's own group shapes punishment of an unrelated party ("a scapegoat").
We study interactions between the majority group and the Roma minority in Slovakia. By experimentally manipulating the ethnic identity of the scapegoats, we show that the punishment "passed" on innocent individuals more than doubles when they are from the minority, as compared to when they are from the dominant group.
These results illuminate a mechanism how individualized tensions can be transformed into a group conflict, dragging minorities into conflicts that are completely unrelated to their behavior.