War exposure, altruism and the recalibration of welfare tradeoffs towards threatening social categories

Jonathan Hall,Dennis T Kahn,Eric Skoog,Magnus Öberg

doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104101

Jonathan Hall, Dennis T Kahn + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104101

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Abstract

How does war shape human altruism? Some find warfare increases generosity within groups only. Others maintain that war's prosocial effects extend to outgroup members as well. To make sense of these disparate findings, we offer a theoretical framework that highlights the role of threat sensitivity in altruism. Refugees from Syria and Iraq (N = 1521) completed a welfare tradeoff task and threat perceptions scale where the other's group identity, gender and age were experimentally varied. We found that individuals belonging to social categories associated with more threat (outgroup members, males, and younger individuals) were afforded less altruism compared to individuals belonging to non-threatening social categories (ingroup members, females and the elderly). War exposure enhanced bias against threatening social categories through increased threat-sensitivity. Our results have implications for understanding how warfare shapes altruism and welfare tradeoffs in light of cross-cutting social categories and for policies promoting post-conflict cooperation.

Highlights

How does war shape human altruism? Some find warfare increases generosity within groups only
We hypothesize that social categories associated with more threat will be met with lower degrees of altruism compared to social categories associated with less threat
We present the mean values for threat and altruism per social category of the target and by degree of exposure in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3

Summary

Introduction

How does war shape human altruism? Some find warfare increases generosity within groups only. Natural selection is likely to have created learning mechanisms that assess cues to those who posed a potential threat as well as affective and behavioral responses that mitigated such threats (Neuberg & Schaller, 2016) Such selection pressures are likely to have given rise to a “better safe than sorry”approach when it comes to the assessment of threat cues associated with social categories, since the cost of failing to detect a significant threat is greater than the cost of misattributing threat to a non-threatening in dividual. In a situation where no indications are given that generosity would prevent hostile behavior from the other, benefitting a threatening individual would essentially increase his/her ability to cause you harm On this basis, we hypothesize that social categories associated with more threat (e.g., outgroup members, males and young individuals) will be met with lower degrees of altruism compared to social categories associated with less threat (ingroup members, females and the elderly). Since we base this hypothesis on the differing levels of threat associated with different social categories, we hypothesize that the effects of group mem bership, gender and age on altruism will be mediated by perceptions of threat

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