Scholarlink

<p>This study examines how exposure to armed conflict affects group-specific trust, focusing on individuals exposed during military service. Our identification strategy exploits a population-level natural experiment generated by Turkey’s strict military conscription system and its long-running civil conflict. We combine this setting with an original field survey to identify causal effects and examine individual-level mechanisms while minimizing contextual confounding. We find that men exposed to the armed conflict during their conscription service exhibit elevated ingroup trust, with no corresponding increase in trust toward outgroups or in generalized trust. In contrast, those with battlefield traumas display lower trust overall. Exposed veterans also display stronger ingroup-biased attitudes like nationalism, intolerance, religiosity, and adherence to social norms. These results suggest that conflict exposure shifts social preferences toward ingroup favouritism without strengthening broader forms of trust, a pattern that is likely to hinder the accumulation of social capital and, in turn, adversely affect long-run economic development and institutional quality.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Armed conflict exposure and trust: evidence from a natural experiment*

  • 期刊论文

  • 出版模式：

    开放获取

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月20日

查看全文
  • Lena Gerling,
  • Arzu Kibris

摘要

This study examines how exposure to armed conflict affects group-specific trust, focusing on individuals exposed during military service. Our identification strategy exploits a population-level natural experiment generated by Turkey’s strict military conscription system and its long-running civil conflict. We combine this setting with an original field survey to identify causal effects and examine individual-level mechanisms while minimizing contextual confounding. We find that men exposed to the armed conflict during their conscription service exhibit elevated ingroup trust, with no corresponding increase in trust toward outgroups or in generalized trust. In contrast, those with battlefield traumas display lower trust overall. Exposed veterans also display stronger ingroup-biased attitudes like nationalism, intolerance, religiosity, and adherence to social norms. These results suggest that conflict exposure shifts social preferences toward ingroup favouritism without strengthening broader forms of trust, a pattern that is likely to hinder the accumulation of social capital and, in turn, adversely affect long-run economic development and institutional quality.