UC Berkeley

Understanding the deep drivers of social conflict is crucial for identifying policies that can effectively reduce it. This dissertation studies how intergroup conflict can be driven by hate and fear, and how policy interventions can affect these drivers to increase cooperation between groups. In Chapter 1 I develop a theoretical model of conflict, with hate and fear as primitives. In Chapter 2, I use this model to develop an experimental protocol to empirically estimate the extent to which intergroup conflict is driven by hate vs. fear. I deploy this protocol as a lab-in-the-field experiment in Nigeria, to study the region's ongoing conflict between Christians and Muslims. I find that fear explains 76% (and hate 24%) of the non-cooperative behavior between Christians and Muslims. Moreover, this fear is mostly unwarranted, as non-cooperators grossly exaggerate the percentage of hateful people in the outgroup. In Chapter 3, I turn to policy and study why policies currently trusted to promote intergroup cooperation may or may not be effective at doing so. To this end, I do an RCT in which I provide participants access to a radio drama that promotes intergroup cooperation. Using my experimental protocol, I find that the radio drama decreases hate but not fear and that this decrease in fear does not translate into increased cooperation.