Wartime Violence, Empathy, and Intergroup Altruism: Evidence from the Ivoirian Refugee Crisis in Liberia

This paper presents new theory and evidence on the link between intergroup violence and altruism in diverse post-conflict context. Theory from political science and psychology predicts that intergroup conflict causes ingroup solidarity and outgroup aggression that may persist after conflict’s end. In contrast, we argue that empathy born from violence can cause greater ingroup and outgroup altruism: the experience of hardship and trauma during violence increases empathetic concern; empathetic concern transcends identity boundaries and motivates altruistic behavior toward both ingroup and outgroup others. We test our theory in the context of the 2010-2011 Ivorian refugee crisis in Liberia using observational and survey experimental data on the support provided by host communities to a diverse population of refugees. In contrast to theories of parochial altruism, we find that individuals and communities with high levels of exposure to violence during the Liberian civil war are less biased against outgroup refugees and more responsive to refugee distress. We also find that violence-affected individuals and communities host more refugees, do so for longer, host more outgroup refugees — even those co-ethnic to their wartime rivals — and host a higher share of refugees with health problems or fleeing direct violence. Lastly, we provide support for the generalizability of the mechanism by using external data to show that past experience of violence is associated with greater altruism within diverse communities in rural Liberia. ∗Alexandra C. Hartman, Yale Department of Political Science. Email:[email protected] †Benjamin S. Morse, MIT Department of Political Science. Email: [email protected]. Acknowledgements: This project was conducted in collaboration with the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Danish Refugee Council. We thank Greg Kitt the collaboration and David Lamah, Princess Kular and Prince Williams for invaluable research assistance. We received valued comments from Sebastian Schutte and seminar participants at MIT, the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN) Conference, the American Political Science Association annual meeting, and the Working Group of African Political Economy.