Sociality is Not Lost with Monetary Transactions within Social Groups

This paper investigates how the group membership fee influences the cooperation rate within the groups formed through the socialization. Our previous findings suggest that socialization, or social interactions in groups, create sociality and, therefore, establish a society with sustained cooperation and fairness. In line with Social Identity Theory, we assert some esteem or value to be gained through group differentiation. What will happen with this additional value once we try to quantify it? For this purpose, we observed two cases: socialized participants should pay the fee to stay in-group; participants should pay the fee to join the group, socialize and stay there. We find that monetary transactions are not determinative on their own; rather the consequences of these transactions can hurt collective action through a forced division of participants into those who paid enough (in-group) and those who did not (out-group). More over, despite the fact that being in-group and out-group is an economically equal situation, participants are willing to pay the fee to stay in their socialized group or pay the fee to join the group before socialization.