Can War Foster Cooperation?

By Michal Bauer, Christopher Blattman, Julie Chytilová, Joseph Henrich, Edward Miguel, T. Mitts. Social Science Research Network, 2016

663 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase social cooperation at the local level, including community participation and prosocial behavior. Thus while war has many negative legacies for individuals and societies, it appears to leave a positive legacy in terms of local cooperation and civic engagement. We discuss, synthesize and reanalyze the emerging body of evidence, and weigh alternative explanations. There is some indication that war violence especially enhances in-group or "parochial" norms and preferences, a finding that, if true, suggests that the rising social cohesion we document need not promote broader peace.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61d790214f2e8ff78c0b424aac9e1afa6ce00bda

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of Violence on Individual Risk Preferences: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2015, background): “Blattman and Miguel (2010) and Bauer et al. (2016) provide detailed discussions of the literature.”
Violence, displacement, contact, and attitudes toward hosting refugees (2019, background): “It seems plausible to expect these experiences might affect respondents’ attitudes toward hosting refugees (Bauer et al., 2016).”
The microeconomics of violent conflict (2019, background): “Households may move into safer areas or activities (for example, by growing food crops rather than cash crops) and may invest more in social networks as a coping strategy (Bozzoli and Brück, 2009; Bauer et al., 2016).”
Violence, Empathy and Altruism: Evidence from the Ivorian Refugee Crisis in Liberia (2018, background): “For an overview of this literature, see Bauer et al. (2016). during refugee crises.”
Catastrophe Compassion: Understanding and Extending Prosociality Under Crisis (2020, neutral): “In their wake, survivors develop communities of mutual aid, engage in widespread acts of altruism, and report a heightened sense of solidarity with one another [3,5,6].”
Social Incentives in Organizations (2018, background): “To investigate what drives social preferences in this context, Bandiera et al. (2017a) tests the hypothesis that conflict generates parochial altruism, namely it increases altruism towards the in-group while at the same time increasing discrimination towards the out group (Bauer et al., 2016).”