FORDIS

The world is currently facing and will need to deal with an alarming number of forced displacements of populations, resulting from religious, political, ethnic conflicts, civil unrest, or climate change. Forced displacements, especially when caused by violence between groups, may seriously disrupt the cognitive and emotional development of children by creating an unpredictable environment. This poses substantial hurdles to the future of democracy and necessitates proactive measures to be taken by governance institutions. Indeed, childhood is the period of life when the roots of prosociality and trust are built under the influence of education, culture, and social interactions. Understanding how and to what extent exposure to forced internal displacement during childhood and adolescence alters or calibrates these processes is crucial to provide evidence-based guidance for policy interventions. This project examines the development of social preferences, trust, and social norms in children exposed to forced displacement in Burkina Faso due to intergroup conflicts. It evaluates fairness, trust, cooperation, and trustworthiness in a first Work Package, and the perception of gender social norms (specifically, genital mutilations and forced child marriage) in a second Work Package. We will conduct in Burkina Faso behavioral experiments (Work Packages 1 and 2) and a Randomized Controlled Trial experiment (Work Package 3) with children, young adolescents and parents who have or not been displaced due to terrorist attacks. We include parents to understand social preferences and social norms, as parents play a fundamental role in transmitting them to children. This project is crucial to contribute to our understanding of the development of social preferences and how they can be affected by forced displacement and the increased uncertainty it generates. It will be used to inform interventions to foster prosocial motivations, trust, and social norms that discourage violence, promote cooperation, and sustain democracy. This project involves a collaboration between higher education institutions in the U.S.A. (University of Chicago), France (GATE, Lyon), and the U.K. (University of Lancaster), with a multidisciplinary approach that includes education, behavioral economics, and developmental psychology.