Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra (UChicago), "Unbundling Prosociality: Inside the largest Armed Group of the Congo" (with Lewis Dunia Butinda and Hilary Yu)
A growing literature in economics has documented the various ways in which humans are unusually prosocial and cooperative. However, humans also stand out as an extraordinarily violent species, unusually murderous of their own. So, who joins collective violence? The least prosocial? Or, since violence is often a public good, is it the most prosocial? Or both? As a foundation for this study, we tackle two challenges that have made it impossible to answer this question. First, we unbundle prosociality and adapt, and develop, measures of moral preferences of violence, from the field of moral psychology and psychophysiology. Second, we cultivated, during eight years, trust by the largest armed group of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, which allows us to observe who joins it in real time and interview them as well as a random sample of fellow villagers. The group was created in response to thirty years of violence perpetrated by a well-identified enemy originating in Rwanda. We show that, probably as a result of the war, there is a large demand for violence against the enemy. Before onboarding the group, those who join it are more prosocial towards their own community and not less prosocial towards anyone else than their fellow villagers at the same time (they are parochial altruists); they have stronger moral preferences for violence directed against the enemy than their fellow villagers, including violence with genocidarian undertones, yet like the rest they have a strong preference against hurting members of their own community, and the fraction of psychopathy among them is just as high as in the US (they are parochial sadists). Motivated by a simple Roy model, we show that this selection is induced by the fact that altruism towards the community and sadism towards the enemy are (weakly) positively correlated. Furthermore, these moral preferences are not fixed: seven months after joining the armed group, those who started with low anti-enemy sadism catch up with the rest. Everyone tends to support the prosocial mission of the organization, but those who join support it more. Our findings unbundle simple notions of prosociality, emphasize that the most violent are both more prosocial and more sadistic, and able to engage in “moral exclusion” of specific groups. They challenge the notion that “pro-sociality” is socially desirable and counter narratives of conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa as being driven by greed.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
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LOCATION:CGIS Knafel, room K050 (concourse level) STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20230504T203000Z DTEND:20230504T214500Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR