Post Pandemic Social Division and Conflict: Theory and Experiments

Description

While the COVID-19 pandemic is about to come to an end, it has far-reaching consequences andimplications across various dimensions of our society. Historically, pandemics were typicallyfollowed by stark social division, conflict or even war. Although this chronological correlation isextensively documented in the literature of history and sociology, the potential existence ofcausality between pandemics and social conflict remains to be investigated.This project sets out to rigorously examine whether pandemics indeed cause social conflict and ifso, how it turns a well-functioning society where the public generally finds common consensus,into one that features divided opinions and is plagued by unrest and conflict. In particular, fromthe socio-economic perspective, which specific characteristics of a pandemic will lead to theendogenous formation of in-group identity, which in turn, triggers a “Domino Effect” that setsabout polarized public responses in various social issues? Our study is premised on the identification of the COVID-19 pandemic as one canonical divisivepublic event, where ex-ante non-polarized type distribution of a society can lead to polarizedresponses from the public ex post (Hu et al., 2022). The root cause of the divisiveness, weconjecture, is that the hazard rate of the risk exposure for each individual to catch the virus is nonincreasing. In other words, given that a virus demonstrates Human-to-Human transmission (HHT,henceforth), in a society that features even just infinitesimal degree of heterogeneity, the publicattitudes and responses toward the pandemic will follow a binary pattern, where some favor “safetyfirst”, the others “life as usual”. This polarized behavior pattern toward the pandemic, we hypothesize, has the potential to be thetrigger point for a series of polarized responses over social issues that are, under normalcircumstances, non-divisive. We propose a transfer mechanism that explains this “Domino Effect”through the formation of strong in-group identity in the aftermath of the pandemic (as detailed in4.1-4.3). To identify the real-life condition for such formation from a typical fractionalized but notpolarized society (where heterogenous agents generally feature weak in-group identity), we planto conduct laboratory and field experiments in both Asia (HK Vs. Singapore) and Europe(Germany Vs. The Netherlands). In summary, this project centers around the investigation of the “polarized responses in pandemics→ polarized responses in other non-divisive public events” transfer mechanism. Understandinghow such transfer mechanism functions will provide the first step in designing post-pandemicpolicies that help heal a society.