Territorial Out-Group Prejudice Reduction Through Reciprocity

Does cooperative contact reduce territorial out-group animosity? As polarization increasingly shapes various aspects of social coexistence in contemporary democracies, dislike toward inhabitants of other meso-level territorial units has become a growing phenomenon in federal and decentralized countries. This paper draws on existing research on prejudice reduction to examine the potential for indirect positive reciprocity in contexts characterized by high levels of territorial affective polarization. To this end, we analyze evidence from an online survey experiment conducted following the October 29, 2024, catastrophic flood in the region of Valencia. Occurring amidst high political polarization and glaring multilevel coordination failures in disaster management, the tragedy spurred a significant civic response and horizontal inter-regional solidarity. Among the most notable examples was the large-scale mobilization of firefighters from across Spain. Their massive deployment to the hardest-hit areas of Valencia was widely praised by local residents and quickly gained media attention. In this context, our pre-registered hypotheses focus on whether individuals who directly or indirectly benefited from cooperative actions attributed to firefighters from a territorial out-group are more likely to reciprocate by engaging in cooperative behavior with other members of that same out-group.