Résumé
This study determines whether the Mastercard Foundation (MCF) Scholarship Program causally influences the creation of cognitive social capital among University of Pretoria scholarship recipients, by using an online lab experiment and a post-experimental survey. Cognitive social capital, which is based on commonly shared norms among members, leads to honest and cooperative behaviour. It is necessary for information flow ease, transaction costs reduction, and allowing communities to deal with social dilemmas, like the management of common pool resources. To capture the impact of the MCF program on cognitive social capital, the study used incentivized economic experiments on two groups of randomly selected subjects: a control group (non-MCF scholars) and a treated one (MCF scholars). The experimental results in the two groups were compared to check the differences in terms of levels of trust, reciprocity, altruism, cooperation, in-group favouritism and outgroup discrimination. Our results show that the scholarship program has significant impact only on levels of in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination. The post-experimental survey showed that MCF and non-MCF subjects were similar in terms of stated pro-social behaviour perceptions, and in-group social capital creation.