Anger, Legacies of Violence, and Group Conflict: An Experiment in

Extant research hypothesizes that anger over past intergroup conflict serves as a catalyst for future conflict. However, few studies have experimentally tested this hypothesis on a represen-tative population that has experienced ethnic conflict. I use a behavioral economics experiment to measure how anger over past intergroup conflict influences intergroup relations. Subjects were sampled proportional to population and ethnicity in Acre, Israel—a mixed city of Jews and Palestinian Citizens of Israel (PCIs) that experienced PCI-Jewish riots in 2008. During the experiment, they were randomly primed for anger about the riots or given a neutral ma-nipulation. Subjects then allocated income between themselves and three partners: one from their ingroup, one from their outgroup, and one whose identity was unclear. The main result is counterintuitive: priming anger over the riots does not increase discrimination. Rather, it reduces altruism to all groups, and this result is strongest for “High Aggression ” types. While qualitative interviews suggest that intergroup tensions are high in Acre, blame for the riots falls on both ingroup and outgroup members