Violence, Empathy and Altruism: Evidence from the Ivorian Refugee Crisis in Liberia

42 Pages·2017·0.5 MB·English

Violence, Empathy and Altruism: Evidence from the
Ivorian Refugee Crisis in Liberia
July 2017
Abstract
In regions plagued by reoccurring periods of war, violence, and displacement, how
does past exposure to violence a↵ect altruism toward members of di↵erent ethnic or
religious groups? Drawing on theories of empathy-driven altruism in psychology, we
propose that violence can increase individuals’ capacity to empathize with others, and
that empathy born of violence can transcend group boundaries, motivating helping be-
havior toward ingroups and outgroups alike. We test this hypothesis using data on the
hosting behavior of nearly 1500 Liberians during the 2010-2011 Ivorian refugee crisis in
easternLiberia,aregionwithalonghistoryofcross-border,inter-ethnicviolence. Con-
sistent with our theoretical predictions, we find that those who experienced violence
during the Liberian civil war host greater numbers of refugees overall, exhibit stronger
preferences for distressed refugees and less bias against outgroup refugees, and host
a higher proportion of non-coethnic, non-coreligious and distressed refugees. We fur-
ther find that asking respondents to consider their own experiences with violence and
displacement strengthens preferences for distressed refugees and reduces bias against
non-coethnic and non-coreligious outgroups. These findings suggest that violence does
not necessarily lead to greater antagonism toward outgroups, as is often assumed, and
that in some circumstances it can actually promote inter-group cooperation.
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1 Introduction
In the past decade, more than 30 million people have fled their home country because of
violence (UNHCR 2016). Globally, the total number of refugees is now more than 25 mil-
lion, the highest it has been since the end of World War II. As humanitarian agencies and
host-country governments struggle to meet the needs of historic numbers of displaced people,
they have increasingly called on ordinary citizens to welcome refugees into their homes and
communities through resettlement and local integration programs (UNHCR 2013). Build-
ing support for these e↵orts, however, is a daunting challenge. Particularly in developing
countries, large inflows of refugees deplete scarce resources (Berry 2008; Betts and Collier
2017), exacerbate ethnic tensions (Gleditsch and Salehyan 2006), and increase the risk of
civil conflict (Whitaker 2003).
Prior research shows that cultural ties and humanitarian concern play an important role
in motivating individuals to welcome refugees despite the costs and risks associated with
doing so (Bansak et al. 2016; Sturridge 2011). Conversely, a lack of cultural ties and ethnic
divisionscanmakeindividualsreluctanttowelcomerefugees(Harildetal.2013), particularly
during times of economic scarcity. In this paper, we extend this literature by evaluating how
past experience with violence influences individuals’ willingness to host refugees. We focus in
particular on how violence moderates the relative importance of cultural and humanitarian
considerations.
Our analysis is motivated by the observation that the vast majority of refugees flee
to countries or regions that experienced civil war or conflict in the past quarter century
(UNHCR 2016). In these settings, many of those called on to host or otherwise assist
refugees will have themselves been a↵ected by violence and displacement in the recent past.
Do these experiences make individuals less willing to assist refugees from ethnic or religious
‘outgroups’? Or do they develop sympathies that transcend group boundaries and motivate
helping behavior regardless of the ethnic or religious identity of those in need?
In considering these questions, we engage with a small but growing body of research on
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the social legacies of violence in regions recovering from conflict (e.g.Kijewski and Freitag
(2016); Mironova and Whitt (2016); Wong (2016)). This literature o↵ers two competing
perspectives. First, consistent with theories of “parochial altruism” in psychology, several
studies have suggested violence increases ingroup allegiance and hardens hostilities towards
rivalorpotentiallythreatening‘outgroups’(Baueretal.2014;Beberetal.2014;Rohneretal.
2013). Insofar as refugees come from ethnic groups that have previously been in conflict with
local communities, or insofar as they heighten competition over scarce resources, activating
a sense of group-based threat, this literature implies that prior exposure to violence will
reduce support for outgroup refugees.
An alternative perspective links violence to potentially generalized improvements in al-
truism(Voorsetal.2012), communityengagement(Bateson2012;BellowsandMiguel2009),
and political participation (Blattman 2009). To account for these findings, these studies in-
voke the theory of post-traumatic growth (post-traumatic growth theory or PTGT), which
posits a prosocial (re-)orientation of goals, priorities, and perspectives in the aftermath of
traumatic events. However, how these changes might influence behavior toward refugees
or other outgroups, however, remains unclear — the theory of post-traumatic growth does
not address outgroup behavior, nor does it specify which motivations for prosocial behavior
might be a↵ected by violence, making it di�cult to know. And because these studies largely
come from settings where ethnic divisions are muted, it is possible that their results actually
capture parochial rather than general prosocial behavior.
We address this gap by identifying empathy born of violence as a mechanism by which
prior exposure to violence can motivate prosocial behavior. Drawing on psychological theo-
ries of empathy-driven altruism, we argue that violence can increase individuals’ capacity to
empathize with others, motivating altruistic behavior toward ingroup and outgroup others
alike. Recognizing a similar experience of violence in others can create a bridging iden-
tity that motivates generous behavior across group boundaries. In contrast to theories of
parochial altruism, our argument predicts that violence-a↵ected individuals will be more
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responsive to humanitarian considerations and less responsive to material or cultural con-
siderations when deciding whether to assist those in need.
We test this argument using data on the hosting behavior of nearly 1500 individuals
during the 2010-2011 Ivorian refugee crisis in Liberia. During the crisis, more than 150,000
Ivorians fled into eastern Liberia, a region itself deeply a↵ected by civil war from 1990-2003.
With humanitarian actors unprepared and overwhelmed, Ivorian refugees were forced to
find refuge in Liberian towns and villages. The ethnic composition of the refugees mapped
onto salient ethnic divisions in Liberia: some shared ethnic and religious ties with the local
population, others lacked cultural ties, and some came from groups that had a history of
conflict with local communities.
We provide four main results in favor of the empathy born of violence hypothesis. First,
we show that individuals who directly or indirectly experienced violence during the Liberian
civil war host more refugees overall — including those co-ethnic to their wartime rivals.
Second, we show that violence-a↵ected individuals host a higher proportion of non-coethnic
andMuslimrefugees, aswellashigherproportionsofrefugeeswhohadhealthproblemsupon
arrival or had fled direct violence. Third, we employ a conjoint experiment to show that
although biases against outgroup refugees are strong overall, individuals who experienced
violence exhibit less bias and have stronger preferences for refugees in distress. And fourth,
by randomizing the survey module on past violence experiences to come immediately before
or after the conjoint experiment, we show that preferences for the distressed are greater and
outgroup biases are lower when individuals are primed to think about their own experiences
with violence and displacement.
We also conducted a series of semi-structured field interviews to explore how Liberians
reflected on their experience hosting refugees, finding that sympathies rooted in the shared
experiences of hardship and displacement feature prominently in Liberians’ reflections on the
crisis. More broadly, we document overwhelming generosity toward refugees amid extreme
resource scarcity, consistent with the idea that empathy born of hardship can motivate
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helpingbehavioracrossgroupboundaries, eveninthepresenceofsevereresourceconstraints.
This paper makes four contributions to existing research. First, we contribute to the
literature on immigration, migration, and forced displacement, which despite the fact that
more than 90 per cent of those forcibly displaced flee to developing rather than developed
countries (UNHCR 2016), has hitherto focused largely on Western attitudes and behaviors
towards refugees and asylum seekers. Moreover, while this literature highlights economic
and cultural threat as important drivers of individuals’ reluctance to support refugees or
progressive immigration policies more generally (Adida 2014), it largely overlooks the po-
tential for past experiences with conflict or hardship to overcome these concerns (Bansak
et al. 2016; Brader et al. 2008). We speculate that empathy born of past experiences with
conflict, displacement, and other hardships may underlie the impressive degree of hospitality
toward refugees observed in many of the world’s poorest countries as compared to wealthy
countries, where hardships are less common.
We also contribute to the literature on post-traumatic growth, which has struggled to
both pinpoint the mechanisms by which violence influences prosocial behavior and to discern
whether or when these mechanisms motivate prosocial behavior between di↵erent social
groups. Addressing these limitations, we build on PTGT and show that empathy born of
violence can motivate altruistic behavior across group boundaries, even those hardened by
wartime violence. Of course, our argument does not foreclose the possibility that violence
may sometimes have parochial e↵ects on prosocial motivation, as many have argued. Rather,
we show that violence can also (and perhaps simultaneously) a↵ect prosocial motivation in
ways that bridge identity boundaries, and that in some settings, these countervailing e↵ects
can dominate.
This reasoning has important implications for our broader understanding of violence and
prosocial behavior in diverse settings. In particular, it highlights the importance of under-
standing the potentially numerous mechanisms by which violence may influence behavior,
and considering how each may (or may not) influence behavior in a given post-conflict set-
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ting. Whileimpossibletogeneralizefrom thefindingsofasinglestudy, ourfocusonempathy
suggests the legacies of violence are relatively less likely to be parochial in situations where
empathetic motivations for behavior are salient.
The third contribution of our study is empirical. Hitherto, identifying the e↵ects of vio-
lence on intergroup behavior has been complicated by the di�culty of measuring intergroup
behavior in post-conflict settings — or more specifically, by the fact that our ability to ob-
serve intergroup behavior is endogenous to how violence influences outgroup preferences.1
Prior research employs lab experiments to overcome these challenges, but these methods are
subject to concerns about measurement validity, as several studies have shown that behavior
in context-free experiments has no meaningful correlation with real-world behavior (Levitt
and List 2007; Voors et al. 2012). Our study avoids these hazards by examining real-world (if
self-reported) behavior in a setting where concerns about endogenous interaction are signif-
icantly ameliorated by forced displacement resulting from exogenous political developments
in a neighboring country. We complement these measures with a survey experiment and
an empathetic prime, showing consistent results across all three analyses. To the best of
our knowledge, we are the first to show that violence can motivate prosocial behavior across
group boundaries.
Lastly, our study provides important policy lessons for humanitarians and scholars con-
cerned with helping the world’s most vulnerable. In response to the growing incidence of
protracted refugee crises and a push to avoid ‘warehousing’ refugees in crowded camps,
humanitarian actors have increasingly turned to local integration (UNHCR 2013). This ap-
proach has also been seized upon as a way to o↵er support when refugee flows are variable
or unpredictable and established refugee camps are unavailable.2 However, despite the chal-
1A notable exception is Hjort (2014)’s analysis of productivity among ethnically mixed
and homogeneous teams in Kenyan flower plants as a function of temporal proximity to the
2007 Kenyan election crisis, when despite political turmoil and growing tensions between
ethnic groups, workers were still obliged to go to work.
2See Polzer (2009) for a discussion of the politics limiting refugee camps (anti-
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lenges that policymakers face in building support for these policies (Bansak et al. 2016),
there has been little research on what might motivate individuals to support this approach.
Our results suggest that framing generosity towards displaced people in terms of shared ex-
periences and common humanity may be e↵ective at generating support for these and other
progressive refugee policies.
2 Violence, altruism, and support for refugees
A large literature in political science and psychology suggests that conflict strengthens norms
of ingroup allegiance and hardens hostilities towards rival or potentially threatening “out-
groups” (Forbes 1997; Petersen 2011; Posen 1993; Sambanis and Shayo 2013). Consistent
with this view, recent research at the micro-level documents a strong association between
exposure to wartime violence, hostile attitudes toward outgroups, and prosocial behavior
within but not between ethnic groups (Bauer et al. 2013; Beber et al. 2014; Rohner et al.
2013; Rozenas et al. 2017).3
While this literature has generally focused on behavior within war-torn countries, there
are several reasons to expect the parochial legacies of violence to influence intergroup behav-
ior during refugee crises. First and most generally, refugee crises often occur in regions where
patterns of migration, trade, cultural exchange, and conflict transcend national boundaries.
In these settings, national ‘borders’ are but one of the many factors that govern the scope of
interaction between individuals, communities, and ethnic groups in the course of everyday
life. As a result, in some circumstances the forcibly displaced may have little choice but
to flee to regions where they have a history of antagonistic relations with local groups. In
addition, in regions where national borders partition ethnic homelands, local communities
may associate refugees with domestic groups with whom they have a history of conflict. Both
dynamics were at play in our setting, as we discuss below.
warehousing) and the politics of local integration
3For an overview of this literature, see Bauer et al. (2016).
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Refugees may also introduce the threat of renewed conflict to the host population, acti-
vating a sense of group-based threat (Whitaker 2003). Gleditsch and Salehyan (2006), for
example, show that refugees tend to increase the risk of conflict in host countries by spread-
ing arms, altering the ethnic composition of host regions, and exacerbating competition over
scarce resources.
And finally, there is evidence to suggest the parochial e↵ects of violence may apply gen-
erally to all ‘outgroups’, regardless of their involvement in the conflict. Studying cooperative
behavior in post-war Sierra Leone, Bauer et al. (2013) find that exposure to war has a last-
ing, positive e↵ect on willingness to contribute to ‘ingroups’ from the same village despite
having no e↵ect on willingness to contribute to ‘outgroups’ from a distant village.4
Violence and post-traumatic growth
Not all research is pessimistic about the legacies of violence. A growing body of micro-
level research shows that violence can lead to greater political participation (Bateson 2012;
Blattman 2009), engagement in community activities (Bellows and Miguel 2009), and altru-
ism (Voors et al. 2012). Many of these studies invoke the theory of post-traumatic growth
to account for their findings, which posits positive change after highly challenging life crises
or traumatic events that alter an individual’s understanding of the world. According to
this perspective, individuals’ tend to undergo a period of intense cognitive processing and
life-appraisal after trauma, leading to a renewed appreciation for life, an enhanced sense of
personal strength, and greater pro-social orientation (Tedeschi and Calhoun 2004, p. 12).
In framing their results as evidence of ‘positive’ change after trauma, these studies im-
plicitly assume that survivors’ preferences for prosocial behavior are general rather than
parochial. This may reflect the fact that post-traumatic growth theory is itself silent about
4Some research finds that priming subjects about past inter-group conflict reduces altru-
ism to all groups, see Zeitzo↵ (2016).
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whether patterns of growth after trauma are parochial or general.5 It also may reflect the
fact that studies linking violence to post-traumatic growth tend to come from homogeneous
settings where identity boundaries are not particularly salient. Or it may simply reflect the
di�culty of collecting data on intergroup behavior in post-conflict settings, where antago-
nistic groups are often segregated due to patterns of targeted displacement that may have
occurred during the war (Balcells and Steele 2016).
But at a more fundamental level, uncertainty about whether patterns of prosocial growth
after trauma are general rather than parochial may also be a consequence of the failure of
existing theory to identify precisely which motivations for prosocial behavior are a↵ected by
hardship and how, since this makes it di�cult to deduce whether such changes should pro-
mote cooperation across or within group boundaries. This gap in the literature is important
because the distinction between parochial versus general changes in prosocial orientation
has profound implications for patterns of recovery, reconciliation, and relapse after violence
conflict.
In this paper, we address this gap by focusing on one specific psychological mechanism
through which violence may influence intergroup cooperation: empathy. We argue that
experiencingviolenceandtraumaduringwarincreasesthecapacitytoempathizewithothers,
andthatsuch‘empathybornofviolence’caninturnmotivatealtruismbehavioracrossgroup
boundaries.
While intuitive, our argument builds on post-traumatic growth theory in several impor-
tant ways. Most notably, our argument is conceptually narrower and more precise than
the theory of post-traumatic growth. Whereas post-traumatic growth specifies neither the
psychological changes that lead to growth nor how they influence behavior in diverse set-
tings, our theory of empathy born of violence identifies a specific psychological response to
5Ofcourse, thislimitationisunderstandable, giventhattheytheoryemergedfrom studies
of survivors of car accidents, cancer, house fires, and other traumatic experiences in the U.S.,
where identity boundaries are relatively less salient (Calhoun and Tedeschi 2014).
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violence and explains how it in turns influences intergroup behavior in diverse settings. In
addition, by virtue of its specificity about the operative mechanism, our argument provides
clear implications regarding the conditions under which the legacies of violence are more or
less likely to be parochial, as we discuss in the conclusion.
Itisimportanttonote, however, thatwhileourargumentaboutempathybornofviolence
is narrower and more precise that the theory of post-traumatic growth, the two are not
incompatible. To the contrary, we suspect that empathy may contribute to the phenomenon
of post-traumatic growth, and that some of behavioral patterns previously attributed to
post-traumatic growth may be more precisely interpreted as evidence of empathy born of
violence.
In the remainder of this section, we outline our argument in greater detail, starting
with a discussion of empathy’s constituent processes and their relevance to various forms of
prosocial behavior.
Violence, empathy and altruism
While empathy may be particularly influential during refugee crises, it is also critical to
a wide range of cooperative endeavors relevant to everyday matters. Often credited with
helping to overcome social dilemmas associated with social insurance in “stateless” societies
(Scott 1977), empathy is also an important complement to formal institutions. Individuals
whoareempatheticaremorelikelytovoluntarilycontributetopublicgoodsandlesslikelyto
harm others for personal gain, reducing the need for institutional mechanisms of enforcement
(Ostrom 2000). They are also more likely to contribute to state-led e↵orts to care for the
downtrodden through co-productive arrangements such as fosterage or state-assisted hosting
of refugees (Ostrom 1996).
Our argument linking violence to empathy builds on the theory of empathy-driven al-
truism (Batson and Powell 2003; De Waal 2008), which positions empathy as a primary
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