Researchers have found that war has a remarkable and miraculous effect
Their conclusion is that the experience of wartime violence somehow changes people for the better, making them more cooperative and more trusting. And they have some theories explaining why.
.. In Sierra Leone, researchers found that people who had been exposed to more wartime violence were more generous — they shared more money in the dictator game than neighbors who hadn’t seen much violence.
.. Certain lab games found that exposure to war violence made people nicer toward members in their own village but not necessarily toward people outside their own community.
.. In recent years, evolutionary psychologists have argued that war may have played an important role in making us more cooperative. We know that humanity has a bloody past; constant conflict between different tribes would have extinguished any groups where people couldn’t work together or sacrifice themselves for the common good. At the same time, it doesn’t make sense to be indiscriminately kind toward others. If war made us nicer to our neighbors, it did not make us any more trusting of outsiders.