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In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase social cooperation at the local level, including community participation and prosocial behavior. Thus while war has many negative legacies for individuals and societies, it appears to leave a positive legacy in terms of local cooperation and civic engagement. We discuss, synthesize, and reanalyze the emerging body of evidence and weigh alternative explanations. There is some indication that war violence enhances in-group or “parochial” norms and preferences especially, a finding that, if true, suggests that the rising social cohesion we document need not promote broader peace.

In suggesting that new nations often coalesce in the decades following war, historians have posed an important psychological question: Does the experience of war generate an enduring elevation in people's egalitarian motivations toward their in-group? We administered social-choice tasks to more than 1,000 children and adults differentially affected by wars in the Republic of Georgia and Sierra Leone. We found that greater exposure to war created a lasting increase in people's egalitarian motivations toward their in-group, but not their out-groups, during a developmental window starting in middle childhood (around 7 years of age) and ending in early adulthood (around 20 years of age). Outside this window, war had no measurable impact on social motivations in young children and had only muted effects on the motivations of older adults. These \"war effects\" are broadly consistent with predictions from evolutionary approaches that emphasize the importance of group cooperation in defending against external threats, though they also highlight key areas in need of greater theoretical development.

The study deals with films made at the beginning of the 1960s by Jan Němec and Dušan Klein, then students at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), based on short stories by Arnošt Lustig from the books Démanty noci (Diamonds of the Night) and Ulice ztracených bratří (Street of Lost Brothers) — namely Sousto, Králíček and Ďábelská jízda na koloběžce (Mouthful, Little Guinea Pig and Devilish Ride on a Scooter). These student films represent not only the beginnings of the artistic careers of both directors and a search for the form of their future creative path, but are also a document of the gradual emancipation of artists from the power relations and the search for possibilities of an individual existence within the framework of the totalitarian regime. They attempted to create timeless images of humanity within history, images which have a negative form of fear, anxiety, solitude, pain and loss, but also at the same time the endurance of humanity, which — in accordance with the conception of the writer Arnošt Lustig — is expressed through a specific action and the preservation of hope.

Interethnic conflicts often escalate rapidly. Why does the behavior of masses easily change from cooperation to aggression? This paper provides an experimental test of whether ethnic hostility is contagious. Using incentivized tasks, we measured willingness to sacrifice one’s own resources to harm others among adolescents from a region with a history of animosities toward the Roma people, the largest ethnic minority in Europe. To identify the influence of peers, subjects made choices after observing either destructive or peaceful behavior of peers in the same task. We found that susceptibility to follow destructive behavior more than doubled when harm was targeted against Roma rather than against coethnics. When peers were peaceful, subjects did not discriminate. We observed very similar patterns in a norms-elicitation experiment: destructive behavior toward Roma was not generally rated as more socially appropriate than when directed at coethnics, but the ratings were more sensitive to social contexts. The findings may illuminate why ethnic hostilities can spread quickly, even in societies with few visible signs of interethnic hatred.

Other-regarding preferences are important for establishing and maintaining cooperative outcomes. In this paper, we study how the formation of other-regarding preferences during childhood is related to parental background. Our subjects, aged 4–12 years, are classified into other-regarding types based on simple binary-choice dictator games. The main finding is that the children of parents with low education are less altruistic, more selfish, and more likely to be weakly spiteful. This link is robust to controlling for a rich set of children’s characteristics and class fixed effects. It also stands out against the overall development of preferences, as we find children to become more altruistic, less selfish, and less likely to be weakly spiteful with increasing age. The results, supported by a complementary analysis of World Values Survey data, suggest an important role of socialization in the formation of other-regarding preferences.

Heterogeneity in time discounting may reinforce the existing barriers to save and invest faced by rural populations in developing countries. We elicit a subjective discount rate for a varied sample of Ugandan villagers. In accordance with other studies, we have found the discount rate to decrease with education. We examine this correlation further by testing the causal effect of education and exploit two different sources of its variation: school frequency across villages and the number of the respondents’ school‐going years that overlap with the era of the dictator Idi Amin’s rule. For men, we find that education has a significant impact on their discount rate, similar in magnitude for both types of instruments and robust to observable characteristics. This finding highlights the importance of education in development.

The reluctance of people to get vaccinated represents a fundamental challenge to containing the spread of deadly infectious diseases 1 , 2 , including COVID-19. Identifying misperceptions that can fuel vaccine hesitancy and creating effective communication strategies to overcome them are a global public health priority 3 – 5 . Medical doctors are a trusted source of advice about vaccinations 6 , but media reports may create an inaccurate impression that vaccine controversy is prevalent among doctors, even when a broad consensus exists 7 , 8 . Here we show that public misperceptions about the views of doctors on the COVID-19 vaccines are widespread, and correcting them increases vaccine uptake. We implement a survey among 9,650 doctors in the Czech Republic and find that 90% of doctors trust the vaccines. Next, we show that 90% of respondents in a nationally representative sample ( n  = 2,101) underestimate doctors’ trust; the most common belief is that only 50% of doctors trust the vaccines. Finally, we integrate randomized provision of information about the true views held by doctors into a longitudinal data collection that regularly monitors vaccination status over 9 months. The treatment recalibrates beliefs and leads to a persistent increase in vaccine uptake. The approach demonstrated in this paper shows how the engagement of professional medical associations, with their unparalleled capacity to elicit individual views of doctors on a large scale, can help to create a cheap, scalable intervention that has lasting positive impacts on health behaviour. Correcting public misperceptions about the views of doctors on the COVID-19 vaccines can have lasting impacts on public uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines.

The stability of many post-conflict societies rests on the successful reintegration of former soldiers. We use a set of behavioural experiments to study the effects of forced military service for a rebel group (the Lord's Resistance Army) on trust and trustworthiness in Northern Uganda. We present evidence that soldiers did not self-select nor were systematically screened by rebels. We find that the experience of soldiering increases individual trustworthiness and community engagement, especially among those who soldiered during early age. These results suggest that the impact of child soldiering on social behaviour is not necessarily detrimental.