Legacies of Conflict : Experiences, Self-efficacy and the Formation of Conditional Trust

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 civilwar and surveyed 14 years later. First, the paper introduces the notion of conditional trust, whereby individuals neitheroutright distrust nor outright trust others, but can use their perceived self-efficacy to raise the cooperativenessof others. This takes ideas from the psychology literature documenting survivors of trauma can go through a process ofposttraumatic growth generating perceived self-efficacy. The paper develops a framework to make precise how conditionaltrust depends on beliefs over others, gains from cooperation, risk aversion, and the key mediating role ofself-efficacy in linking conflict and trust. Second, the paper constructs a granular typology of experiences ofconflict combining information on a geo-coded measure of exposure to conflict, self-reported memories/recall ofvictimization, and ages of exposure to conflict. This distinguishes individuals who are traumatized, those withdirect first-hand accounts of conflict, and those with second-hand narratives. Empirically, the analysis shows thatexposure to conflict—either by being in the vicinity of conflict or through specific experiences of conflict—leadsrespondents to be significantly more likely to conditionally trust others. The findings show that perceived self-efficacyis higher among those exposed to conflict and this mediates the impact of conflict on trust preferences. By consideringthe role of memories, narratives/socialization in shaping experiences of conflict, generating self-efficacy and thusdriving trust preferences, the paper provides new avenues for research on how psychological legacies of trauma earlyin life shape the long run formation of economic preferences.