Publication: Legacies of Conflict: Experiences, Self-efficacy and the Formation of Conditional Trust
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Date
2022-11
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2022-11
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An established literature finds that those exposed to conflict are more pro-social later in life. This paper builds on this work in two directions using a sample of 4,200 women born during the Sierra Leonean civil war and surveyed 14 years later. First, the paper introduces the notion of conditional trust, whereby individuals neither outright distrust nor outright trust others, but can use their perceived self-efficacy to raise the cooperativeness of others. This takes ideas from the psychology literature documenting survivors of trauma can go through a process of posttraumatic growth generating perceived self-efficacy. The paper develops a framework to make precise how conditional trust depends on beliefs over others, gains from cooperation, risk aversion, and the key mediating role of self-efficacy in linking conflict and trust. Second, the paper constructs a granular typology of experiences of conflict combining information on a geo-coded measure of exposure to conflict, self-reported memories/recall of victimization, and ages of exposure to conflict. This distinguishes individuals who are traumatized, those with direct first-hand accounts of conflict, and those with second-hand narratives. Empirically, the analysis shows that exposure to conflict—either by being in the vicinity of conflict or through specific experiences of conflict—leads respondents to be significantly more likely to conditionally trust others. The findings show that perceived self-efficacy is higher among those exposed to conflict and this mediates the impact of conflict on trust preferences. By considering the role of memories, narratives/socialization in shaping experiences of conflict, generating self-efficacy and thus driving trust preferences, the paper provides new avenues for research on how psychological legacies of trauma early in life shape the long run formation of economic preferences.
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“Buehren, Niklas; Goldstein, Markus; Rasul, Imran; Smurra, Andrea. 2022. Legacies of Conflict: Experiences, Self-efficacy and the Formation of Conditional Trust. Policy Research Working Papers;10238. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/38480 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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