How does recalling violent conflict affect prosocial behaviour? Evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment in Uganda

Abstract This study investigates how recalling a time of violent conflict affects prosocial behaviour. We study this using a lab-in-the-field experiment (N = 700) in northern Uganda. The experiment advances previous literature by experimentally varying whether participants recall an experience from a time of conflict (the treatment group) or a non-conflict experience (the control group). We find mixed effects across prosocial behaviours, measured through incentivized behavioural games: the treatment increases altruism in a dictator game and demand for fairness in an ultimatum game (by 0.17 and 0.36 standard deviations), but does not affect cooperation in a fragile public goods game. A prominent theoretical explanation states that conflict increases prosociality by strengthening in-group prosocial norms. However, this cannot explain mixed effects across prosocial behaviours, or how conflict can promote prosociality in contexts where conflict has plausibly undermined such norms, including northern Uganda. We offer a new, inductively derived, theoretical explanation: individual prosocial behaviour can serve as a signal that increases in strength as in-group norms are less prosocial. Evidence from qualitative interviews and participants’ classification of their recalled experience—although not conclusive—is consistent with individual prosocial behaviour as a signalling device.