Subjective Insecurity and Cooperation: Evidence from Field Experiments
Abstract: Violence may elicit heterogeneous responses among people due to subjective differences in the way they experience such situations. Specifically, individuals experiencing similar conditions of violence in their environment may develop different perceptions of insecurity. Although the literature contains studies on subjective perceptions of insecurity as a variable that could affect different aspects of well-being and associativity, the influence of subjective insecurity on pro-social preferences has not been examined. Recent studies have explored a direct relationship between exposure to violent acts and pro-social behaviors, yet conclusions are divergent. We argue that subjective insecurity is a key determinant of cooperative behavior. We investigated how individual perceptions of insecurity affect cooperation using public good field experiments with 320 farmers in rural Colombian municipalities exposed to different levels of violence over recent years. To do this, we developed a cognitive-affective measure of subjective insecurity. We found that subjective insecurity has a negative effect on cooperation. This result persisted when we controlled for objective violence level and community effects. In fact, we found that objective violence level is positively associated to participation. These research findings pose new challenges for social interventions aimed at recovering individual agency and fostering community cooperation to overcome collective action problems. Our results suggest that when violence is relatively low, the potential of a community to engage in collective action still depends on subjective insecurity. Consequently, peace and crime reduction programs should consider an eventual lag between actual violence reduction and effective decrease of subjective insecurity, and implement policies ensuring that perceptions of threats to security and safety, both present and future, are reduced.
