Situational Appraisals and Decision-making During Violence: Lab-in-the-field Evidence from Kenya

What accounts for variation in the way that different individuals behave when they experience violence? When people encounter violence in their lives, whether as part of a political conflict or as low-level crime, they often have to take action to defend their safety and keep themselves safe. This study investigates the individual-level factors that influence people’s choices over what action to take: Why do some people instinctively prefer to “fight back” against danger, while others would flee, hide, or adapt in the same situation. I experimentally manipulate people’s “situational appraisals” or their interpretations of control and ambiguity/predictability in violence scenarios, and measure their pre-existing beliefs about the causes of violence in order to understand the predictors of risky strategic preferences to fight, flee, hide, or adapt during violence. Findings from the study of civil wars and other high-intensity political violence show substantial variation in the way different people and different communities respond in the face of violence. Studies from the civil war literature on attitudes about victimization (Lyall, Blair, and Imai 2013; Shaver and Shapiro 2016), pathways to mobilization and participation in violence (Costalli and Ruggeri 2015; Garcia-Ponce, Young, and Zeitzoff 2017), and post-conflict outcomes for victims of violence (Blattman 2009; Beber and Blattman 2013; Bonanno and Jost 2006; Hartman and Morse 2020), have shed some light on how people respond to violence in certain contexts where the identity of the belligerents is widely known, their motives are somewhat clear, and violence follows some reasonably clear organizational logic. Even in these contexts, though, the individual-level mechanisms associated with variation in civilian response (i.e., explanations for the different outcomes realized by people with the same “risk profile”) are under-theorized. Outside of high-intensity civil wars even less is known about how civilians make sense of conflict and how they make decisions when facing domestic, criminal, or political violence in putative peacetime. In this study, I test whether situational appraisals of hypothetical violence scenarios affect the choices people select in response to those scenarios. In order to understand more about the forces that structure situational appraisals, I also measure pre-existing beliefs about the causes of victimization (causal beliefs), and study them as a form of decision making heuristic available to people facing hypothetical instances of violence. Beliefs about the causes of particular instances of violence, or of violence generally, vary in two ways: appraisal of the target/victim/survivor’s control over being a target of violence, and understanding of how predictable the evolution of violence (especially targeting logic) is. In this study I analyze both the effect of beliefs developed from previous experiences of violence that participants self-report, and also the effect of experimentally manipulating appraisals of control and ambiguity/predictability in a computerized game. I also test whether time pressure, as a decision-making condition, increases or decreases the predictive power of beliefs (a flip of Lodge and Taber 2005). Drawing on longstanding work in evolutionary psychology (beginning with Pribram 1960; Gray 1987; Stefan Bracha et al. 2004), I test the effect of beliefs on propensity to choose among classical human defensive behaviors in response to threats: fighting, fleeing, and hiding, and adapting.