CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Onurcan Yilmaz

Title: Threat, Context, and Cooperation: Field Evidence on the Behavioral Effects of Terrorism and Earthquakes

Abstract: The causal impact of collective threats on moral behavior remains ambiguous, partly due to methodological limitations in prior research—small samples, weak treatments, WEIRD samples, and intention-based measures. We address these gaps through two preregistered longitudinal field studies in Turkey, using real-world threats (terrorism and earthquakes) and incentivized behavioral games. Study 1 tracked participants before (N=620) and after (N=222) the 2022 Istanbul terrorist attack; Study 2 followed participants 10 months before (N=1075), two months after (N=388), and six months after (N=232) the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes. Post-event waves included random assignment to threat or control primes. The terrorist attack causally reduced cooperative behavior. By contrast, the earthquake increased actual cooperation but decreased cooperative intentions, revealing an intention–behavior gap without clear causal attribution. These findings underscore the importance of threat type and ecological context in shaping moral behavior and challenge the external validity of lab-based results.

Onurcan Yilmaz is visiting CeDEx from the Kadir Has University Psychology Department.