(iPoster) Norms, Attitudes, and Behavior in Post-Conflict Societies: Evidence from Vietnam

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Political Methodology & Foreign Policy I – Great Power Competition and Strategic Rivalry
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Methodology

Abstract

How do social norms shape behavior in post-conflict societies? Existing studies on the legacies of wartime violence have largely overlooked what social norms look like and how they shape people’s attitudes and behavior in these settings. To fill this gap, we investigate three general questions using a formal model and a lab-in-the-field experiment in Vietnam. This study leverages a hard-to-reach sample including Agent Orange victims and employs the placebo-augmented preference-incorporated choice and assignment (PICA-2) design to examine: (i) whether individuals in post-conflict societies hold accurate perceptions of others' opinions regarding how much non-victims should "help" victims and how much victims should "accept" such help; (ii) if these two components of social norms are misperceived, whether correcting these beliefs leads to attitudinal and behavioral changes; and (iii) whether the effect of belief correction varies systematically across observable attributes (e.g., victimhood) and unobservable attributes (e.g., the preference for normative information acquisition). By addressing these questions, this article contributes to the broader literature on the persistent effects of historical legacies and informal institutions, both empirically and theoretically.

Authors

• Gaku Ito, Osaka Metropolitan University

• Hiroto Sawada, Princeton University

• Duc Tran, Hiroshima University

• Ghulam Dastgir Khan, Hiroshima University