Understanding post disaster prosociality: Comparing post earthquake cooperation and fairness in two Italian regions

Abstract

Natural disasters put an enormous strain on communities' ability to cooperate. Community resilience, which heavily depends on individuals’ prosocial attitudes, reduces the effects of disasters, determining completely different dynamics even in neighboring regions. We designed an exploratory empirical study in which we collected empirical data on behavior in two games together with survey data in seven municipalities located in two Italian regions affected by two major earthquakes. We measured contributions in the Public Goods Game and fairness in a modified Dictator Game, with the aim of testing for the effects of damage suffered, and embeddedness in the community on prosociality. We compared two different explanations, damage suffered and embeddedness, and we concluded that, in our sample, embeddedness was not related to differences in contributions, while damage suffered by the individuals was. This study contributes to the literature on post-disaster prosociality by presenting a unique lab–in-the-field experiment, and showing the differential impact of the same disaster in neighboring regions.