Abstract
The erosion of intergroup relations in war-torn societies has important consequences, leading to harmful behaviors
ranging from outgroup avoidance to discrimination to physical attacks. Urgent policy responses are required to
overturn these patterns. In this project, we offer a novel approach. We theorize that a fundamental mechanism that
underlies cooperation across individuals and groups is positive reciprocity. Ethnic wars disrupt mechanisms of
intergroup reciprocal trust by making individuals wary of outgroup members, reinforcing patterns of
intergroup prejudice and discrimination. Thus, we hypothesize that interventions that aim at shaping people’s beliefs
about the cooperative preferences of outgroup members are likely to be effective at building trust and cooperation across
members of opposed ethnic groups in postwar settings. For this purpose, we design and evaluate the effectiveness of a
novel kind of intervention in reducing group-based prejudice in postwar Liberia: inter-ethnic personal transfers. i.e.,
cash transfers between individuals of different ethnic groups.