Crime-related exposure to violence and prosocial behavior: Experimental evidence from Colombia

Victims of violence appear hypersensitive to cues and their brain reacts to triggers as if the past events were happening in the present. We assess to what extent recalling these negative experiences increases prosociality. We conduct two artefactual field experiments in Bogotá (Colombia) to test this hypothesis. Our methodological strategy is to experimentally manipulate the recall of violence, either through a direct question or through a monetary loss in participants’ experimental endowment. We interact these treatments with the degree of exposure to violence. We find that victims recalling experiences of urban violence act more prosocially in terms of trust, trustworthiness, and cooperation. The increase in prosociality favors residents in the same city district as the participant (ingroup bias). However, the ingroup bias holds in trust decisions but not in cooperation games decisions.