When Syria was in Egypt’s land: Egyptians cooperate with Syrians, but less with each other

With the number of people fleeing Syria since 2011 exceeding 5 million, and unclear prospects regarding the country’s future, Syrians currently residing outside their homeland are not expected to return any time soon. The question of their integration into their respective hosting countries is, therefore, directly policy relevant. We focus on Syrians who fled to Egypt. Cultural, religious and linguistic differences between those two countries are minor, which is expected to facilitate integration. We ran three incentivized lab-in-the-field experiments pairing 114 Syrian refugees residing in Egypt with 194 Egyptian nationals to measure various behavioral dimensions such as altruism, cooperation and reciprocity, while varying the partner in each game to be either a refugee or an Egyptian. Our findings indicate that Egyptians treat Syrians more favorably than they treat each other across all games, whereas the behavior of Syrians does not depend on the identity of their interaction partner.