Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Competition and Cooperation in the Aftermath of Conflict

Abstract

We investigate the possibility that females and males had a distinct path in the evolution of prosociality and competitiveness. We collected experimental data measuring preferences for individual competition and in-group cooperation for a randomly selected sample of 751 individuals in Sierra Leone (aged 18-85) to contrast the behavioural consequences of victimization during the 1991-2003 civil war across gender and parental roles. Our data shows that conflict exposure, in general, tames competitive tendencies, but has the opposite effect for mothers. Victimization increases egalitarianism towards the in-group among non-parents, especially for non-parent males, who are the least egalitarian to start with. Our results imply that the behavioural consequences of conflict close sex and parental gaps in behavioural preferences. To the extent that group harmony may be enhanced by more equal in-group outcomes and more homogenous preferences, these results further lend credence to the idea that the behavioural effects of conflict prime individuals towards group survival. It also suggests that escaping perils and the harshness of resource constraints enables group differences in pro-social preferences (across genders and parental status) that may be detrimental to group harmony and group survival, a fate perhaps currently affecting societies with rising trends of inequality and polarization.