Poster #21 - Why Step in? Shifting Justifications for Bystander Behaviors Among Youth in the Middle-East Through Interventions

• In Event: Poster Session 04

Abstract

Intergroup social exclusion (ISE) is a form of prejudice-based victimization involving social exclusion based on outgroup membership (Cooley, Elenbaas, & Killen, 2016). Prosocial bystander intervention (e.g., support victim; challenge victimizer) is highly effective in stopping (ISE) and its consequences (Salmivalli, 2014) Yet, some bystanders choose to react passively (e.g., ignore the situation) or even negatively (e.g., join in; Brewster & Tucker, 2016). The Social Domain Model (Turiel, 2015) asserts that when individuals evaluate ISE, their prioritization between three domains of social thought determines what—or whether—bystander action should be taken to intervene (Brenick & Halgunseth, 2017; Palmer & Abbott, 2017). The competing domains are: moral considerations of justice, welfare, and empathy; social conventions, group norms, and stereotypes; and psychological constructs of personal choice. Social-emotional skills and intergroup contact interventions increase prosocial and decrease negative bystander response selection for ISE (Brenick et al., 2020). Research has yet to examine if these interventions also impacted justifications related to the bystander response choices.
To assess whether 12-month-long skills- or contact-based interventions affected intergroup justifications for bystander response choices, 148 Israeli-Palestinian and 154 Israeli-Jewish schoolchildren (52.3% girls; Mage=10.55) were assigned to either the 1) social-cognitive/emotional skills intervention (skills) (e.g., empathy, perspective-taking, compassion building); 2) skills and contact intervention (skills+contact) in which students had social-cognitive/emotional skills training and engaged in structured contact with ethnic outgroup peers; or 3) social studies course control group (control). Contact-based interventions are fundamental to prejudice reduction (Beelmann & Heinemann, 2014), yet, incendiary contact can yield unintended consequences, especially in high-conflict environments. To better facilitate positive contact and intergroup reasoning, we supplemented our contact intervention with social-cognitive/emotional skills training (skills+contact).
Participants completed surveys prior to and upon completion of the intervention, as well as at a 6-month follow-up. Within the scenarios a) parents would not let their child invite an outgroup peer to a sleepover (parent-context), and b) a child’s friend would not allow an outgroup peer join a soccer game (peer-context). Youth were asked how and why (justifications, see Table 1) they would respond to each ISE if they were a bystander.
A repeated measures ANOVA revealed significant main effects of note for reason which was qualified by the time x treatment group x response interaction (see model and all significant results in Table 2). The skills and skills+contact groups decreased stereotyped and social conventional and increased empathy for the victim justifications significantly from the pretest to the posttest, and follow-up (only skills group maintained social conventional effect at follow-up). The opposite pattern was found for the control group.
These findings suggest that both skills and skills+contact interventions can impact how youth make sense of ISE–a shift in reasoning that corresponds to increased prosocial and decreased negative bystander responses among Palestinian-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli youth, even amidst ongoing protracted conflict. These findings build upon the former results by highlighting the justifications given for bystander behavior. Understanding why behaviors change is necessary for future research promoting positive intervention. Applications of these findings for school-based interventions will be discussed.

Authors

• Malak Zureiqi, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Rui Wu, University of Connecticut

• Megan Clark Kelly, Siena College

• Maisha Seraj, University of Connecticut

• Rony Berger

• Alaina Brenick, University of Connecticut