![[PDF]](https://webarchiv.lib.cas.cz:443/wayback/20210515020340im_/https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/Icons/adobe-pdf-icon-1498649896243.png){kind=icon}
Abstract
In suggesting that new nations often coalesce in the decades following war, historians have posed an important psychological question: Does the experience of war generate an enduring elevation in people’s egalitarian motivations toward their in-group? We administered social-choice tasks to more than 1,000 children and adults differentially affected by wars in the Republic of Georgia and Sierra Leone. We found that greater exposure to war created a lasting increase in people’s egalitarian motivations toward their in-group, but not their out-groups, during a developmental window starting in middle childhood (around 7 years of age) and ending in early adulthood (around 20 years of age). Outside this window, war had no measurable impact on social motivations in young children and had only muted effects on the motivations of older adults. These “war effects” are broadly consistent with predictions from evolutionary approaches that emphasize the importance of group cooperation in defending against external threats, though they also highlight key areas in need of greater theoretical development.
References
|
Alexander, R. D. (1987). The biology of moral systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter Google Scholar | |
|
Almås, I., Cappelen, A. W., Sørensen, E. Ø., Tungodden, B. (2010). Fairness and the development of inequality acceptance. Science, 328, 1176–1178. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Bauer, M., Chytilová, J., Pertold-Gebicka, B. (2013). Parental background and other-regarding preferences in children. Experimental Economics. Advance online publication. Google Scholar | ISI | |
|
Bellows, J., Miguel, E. (2009). War and local collective action in Sierra Leone. Journal of Public Economics, 93, 1144–1157. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Blattman, C. (2009). From violence to voting: War and political participation in Uganda. American Political Science Review, 103, 231–247. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Blattman, C., Miguel, E. (2010). Civil war. Journal of Economic Literature, 48, 3–57. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Bornstein, G. (2003). Intergroup conflict: Individual, group, and collective interests. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7, 129–145. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
|
Bornstein, G., Ben-Yossef, M. (1994). Cooperation in intergroup and single-group social dilemmas. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 30, 52–67. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Bowles, S. (2006). Group competition, reproductive leveling, and the evolution of human altruism. Science, 314, 1569–1572. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Bowles, S. (2009). Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors? Science, 324, 1293–1298. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Campbell, D. T. (1965). Ethnocentric and other altruistic motives. In Levine, D. (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 13, pp. 283–311). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Choi, J.-K., Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. Science, 318, 636–640. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Darwin, C. (2012). The descent of man. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace. (Original work published 1873) Google Scholar | |
|
Dawes, C. T., Fowler, J. H., Johnson, T., McElreath, R., Smirnov, O., Dawes, C. (2007). Egalitarian motives in humans. Nature, 446, 794–796. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., Spinrad, T. L. (2006). Prosocial development. In Eisenberg, N. (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology, Volume 3: Social, emotional, and personality development (6th ed., pp. 646–718). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Google Scholar | |
|
European Union . (2009). Independent international fact-finding mission on the conflict in Georgia. Retrieved from http://www.ceiig.ch/pdf/IIFFMCG_Volume_I.pdf Google Scholar | |
|
Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism in young children. Nature, 454, 1079–1083. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Fehr, E., Rützler, D., Sutter, M. (2011). The development of egalitarianism, altruism, spite and parochialism in childhood and adolescence (IZA Discussion Paper No. 5530). Bonn, Germany: Institute for the Study of Labor. Google Scholar | |
|
Forge, A. (1972). Normative factors in the settlement size of Neolithic cultivators (New Guinea). In Ucko, P., Tringham, R., Dimbelby, G. (Eds.), Man, settlement and urbanisation (pp. 363–376). London, England: Duckworth. Google Scholar | |
|
Gächter, S., Renner, E., Sefton, M. (2008). The long-run benefits of punishment. Science, 322, 1510. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Giedd, J. N., Blumenthal, J., Jeffries, N. O., Castellanos, F. X., Liu, H., Zijdenbos, A., . . . Rapoport, J. L. (1999). Brain development during childhood and adolescence: A longitudinal MRI study. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 861–863. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Gneezy, A., Fessler, D. M. T. (2012). Conflict, sticks and carrots: War increases prosocial punishments and rewards. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279, 219–223. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Hamilton, W. D. (1975). Innate social aptitudes of man: An approach from evolutionary genetics. In Fox, R. (Ed.), Biosocial anthropology (pp. 133–156). London, England: Malaby Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Harbaugh, W. T., Krause, K. (2000). Children’s altruism in public good and dictator experiments. Economic Inquiry, 38, 95–109. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Heine, S. J., Proulx, T., Vohs, K. D. (2006). The meaning maintenance model: On the coherence of social motivations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 88–110. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
|
Henrich, J. (2008). A cultural species. In Brown, M. (Ed.), Explaining culture scientifically (pp. 184–210). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavior & Brain Sciences, 33, 1–23. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Henrich, J., McElreath, R., Ensminger, J., Barr, A., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., . . . Ziker, J. (2006). Costly punishment across human societies. Science, 312, 1767–1770. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Hohman, Z. P. (2011). Fear and uncertainty in the face of death: The role of life after death in group identification. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 751–760. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Human Rights Watch . (2009). Up in flames: Humanitarian law violations and civilian victims in the conflict over South Ossetia. Retrieved from http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/01/22/flames-0 Google Scholar | |
|
Humphreys, M., Weinstein, J. M. (2006). Handling and manhandling civilians in civil war. American Political Science Review, 100, 429–447. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Kaplan, H., Hill, K., Lancaster, J., Hurtado, A. M. (2000). A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity. Evolutionary Anthropology, 9, 156–185. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Keeley, L. H. (1997). War before civilization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Kollack, P. (1994). The emergence of exchange structures: An experimental study of uncertainty, commitment, and trust. American Journal of Sociology, 100, 313–345. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Minoura, Y. (1992). A sensitive period for the incorporation of a cultural meaning system: A study of Japanese children growing up in the United States. Ethos, 20, 304–339. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Navarrete, C. D., Kurzban, R., Fessler, D. M. T., Kirkpatrick, L. A. (2004). Anxiety and intergroup bias: Terror management or coalitional psychology? Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 7, 370–379. Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI | |
|
Sherif, M. (1988). The Robbers Cave experiment: Intergroup conflict and cooperation (1st Wesleyan ed.). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Silk, J. B., Brosnan, S. F., Vonk, J., Henrich, J., Povinelli, D. J., Richardson, A. S., . . . Schapiro, S. J. (2005). Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members. Nature, 437, 1357–1359. Google Scholar | Crossref | Medline | ISI | |
|
Sokoloff, K. L., Engerman, S. L. (2000). History lessons: Institutions, factor endowments, and paths of development in the New World. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14, 217–232. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Tilly, C., Ardant, G. (1975). The formation of national states in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google Scholar | |
|
Turchin, P. (2005). War and peace and war: The life cycles of imperial nations. New York, NY: Pearson Education. Google Scholar | |
|
Tuzin, D. (2001). Social complexity in the making: A case study among the Arapesh of New Guinea. London, England: Routledge. Google Scholar | |
|
Voors, M. J., Nillesen, E. E. M., Verwimp, P., Bulte, E. H., Lensink, R., Van Soest, D. P. (2012). Violent conflict and behavior: A field experiment in Burundi. American Economic Review, 102, 941–964. Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI | |
|
Wilkinson, R. G., Pickett, K. (2010). The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press. Google Scholar |
