Hannes Rusch

Costs, Needs, and Integration Efforts Shape Helping Behavior Toward Refugees

Significance The recent flow of refugees around the world evokes diametrically opposed reactions by the host countries’ citizens. Many people are willing to help refugees, whereas many others are not. Yet, the underlying mechanisms that lead to refugee helping versus rejection are not well understood. We use an economic game to investigate how economic and psychological factors shape citizens’ helping behavior toward refugees. We find that costs associated with refugee helping are a key determinant of citizens’ willingness to do so. It is especially people with a higher degree of prosociality that are willing to bear the personal cost of helping. Emphasizing the neediness of refugees as well as their integration efforts increases the willingness among citizens to provide help. Recent political instabilities and conflicts around the world have drastically increased the number of people seeking refuge. The challenges associated with the large number of arriving refugees have revealed a deep divide among the citizens of host countries: one group welcomes refugees, whereas another rejects them. Our research aim is to identify factors that help us understand host citizens’ (un)willingness to help refugees. We devise an economic game that captures the basic structural properties of the refugee situation. We use it to investigate both economic and psychological determinants of citizens’ prosocial behavior toward refugees. In three controlled laboratory studies, we find that helping refugees becomes less likely when it is individually costly to the citizens. At the same time, helping becomes more likely with the refugees’ neediness: helping increases when it prevents a loss rather than generates a gain for the refugees. Moreover, particularly citizens with higher degrees of prosocial orientation are willing to provide help at a personal cost. When refugees have to exert a minimum level of effort to be eligible for support by the citizens, these mandatory “integration efforts” further increase prosocial citizens’ willingness to help. Our results underscore that economic factors play a key role in shaping individual refugee helping behavior but also show that psychological factors modulate how individuals respond to them. Moreover, our economic game is a useful complement to correlational survey measures and can be used for pretesting policy measures aimed at promoting prosocial behavior toward refugees.

Spoils division rules shape aggression between natural groups

Violent intergroup conflicts cause widespread harm; yet, throughout human history, destructive hostilities occur time and time again1,2. Benefits that are obtainable by victorious parties include territorial expansion, deterrence and ascendency in between-group resource competition3–6. Many of these are non-excludable goods that are available to all group members, whereas participation entails substantial individual risks and costs. Thus, a collective action problem emerges, raising the question why individuals participate in such campaigns at all7–9. Distinguishing offensive and defensive intergroup aggression provides a partial answer: defensive aggression is adaptive under many circumstances10–14. However, participation in offensive aggression, such as raids or wars of conquest, still requires an explanation. Here, we focus on one condition that is hypothesized to facilitate the emergence of offensive intergroup aggression: asymmetric division of a conflict’s spoils may motivate those profiting from such inequality to initiate between-group aggression, even if doing so jeopardizes their group’s welfare15–17. We test this hypothesis by manipulating how benefits among victors are shared in a contest experiment among three Ethiopian societies whose relations are either peaceful or violent. Under equal sharing, between-group hostility increased contest contributions. By contrast, unequal sharing prompted offensive contribution strategies in privileged participants, whereas disadvantaged participants resorted to defensive strategies, both irrespective of group relations. Contest experiments among natural groups demonstrate that unequal sharing of contest spoils can override the effects of preexisting intergroup relations, prompting privileged individuals to choose considerably more offensive strategies, whereas disadvantaged group members resort to defensive strategies.

Ethics, Morality, and Game Theory

Ethics is a field in which the gap between words and actions looms large. Game theory and the empirical methods it inspires look at behavior instead of the lip service people sometimes pay to norms. We believe that this special issue comprises several illustrations of the fruitful application of this approach to ethics.

Order Ethics—An Experimental Perspective

In this chapter, we present supporting arguments for the claim that Order Ethics is a school of thought within ethics which is especially open to empirical evidence. With its focus on order frameworks, i.e., incentive structures, Order Ethical advice automatically raises questions on implementability, efficacy, and efficiency of such recommended institutions, all of which are empirical questions to a good extent. We illustrate our arguments by presenting a small selection of experiments from economics that we consider highly informative for Order Ethics. These experiments vary in their details but share one common theme: individual decision-making and its aggregate results are tested against the background of incentive structures. In particular, these studies provide first insights on how unregulated markets influence moral behaviour over time, how trial-and-error experiences convince subjects to migrate to more efficient institutions , and how default rules can influence fundamental choices of people. We argue that Order Ethics, for which implementability of any moral claim is an essential requirement, can largely benefit from the use of such experimental methods. Finally, we suggest the provision of self-commitment devices as one example of smart policy design that avoids paternalistic intrusions into individual liberty.