The Effectiveness of Two Intervention Programs for Promoting Youth Intergroup Prosociality in the Middle-East

• In Event: 2-124 - Children’s Emotions and Prosocial Behavior in the Context of Intergroup Relations

Integrative Statement

Intergroup exclusion—exclusion based on one’s outgroup identity—is a form of prejudice-based victimization justified by social-conventions and stereotypes. However, intergroup exclusion is rejected by youth when they instead prioritize moral concerns of prosociality and fairness over conventions and stereotypes (Social Reasoning Development Perspective: Rutland & Killen, 2015). Numerous interventions work to reduce prejudice—predominantly, contact-based approaches that facilitate positive interactions between groups (e.g., Aboud, et al., 2012) and skills-based approaches that facilitate the development of social-emotional/cognitive skills, such as perspective-taking, compassion, and empathy (e.g., Berger, Brenick, & Tarrasch, 2017). Still, research has yet to explore whether either intervention strategy promotes intergroup prosociality, specifically in youth living amidst ongoing protracted conflict (e.g., the Middle-East).

To assess whether 12-month-long skills- or contact-based interventions increased intergroup prosociality, we assigned 148 Palestinian-Israeli and 154 Jewish-Israeli school- children (47.8% male; M(SD)age=10.55(0.26)) to either a: social-emotional/cognitive skills intervention (skills); a combined skills and contact intervention (skills+contact) in which students received social-emotional/cognitive skills training and engaged in structured contact activities with outgroup peers; or a social studies course control group (control). Although contact-based interventions are the cornerstone of prejudice reduction interventions, incendiary contact between groups can instead exacerbate negative attitudes, especially in high-conflict environments. Thus, we supplemented our contact intervention with social-cognitive/emotional approaches to better facilitate positive contact and intergroup prosociality.
Surveys were administered at pre-test, post-test, and 6-month follow-up, and presented two hypothetical scenarios in which children excluded an outgroup member from a peer activity or a sleepover at home. Prosociality was operationalized as participants’ judgments rejecting exclusion and their use of prosocial moral justifications (e.g., you should be caring toward everyone) in evaluations of the hypothetical scenarios. Judgements assessed exclusion when: no reason for exclusion was specified (undifferentiated), based explicitly on outgroup membership (GBE), encouraged by parents (parentGBE), and encouraged by peers (peerGBE).

Repeated measures ANOVAs—3 (time: pre-test/post-test/follow-up) x 3 (group: skills/skills+contact/control) x 2 (context: peer/home)—were conducted for undifferentiated judgments, for GBE judgments with an additional within-subjects variable: exclusion context (GBE/parentGBE/peerGBE) and for all exclusion contexts with justification (moral-prosocial/excluder empathy/social-conventional/stereotyping/victim blaming; see Figure 1), as well. Gender and ethnicity were included as covariates in all analyses.
Several main and interaction effects emerged. Of note, a significant group by time interaction demonstrated the positive influence of the interventions on prosocial judgments rejecting exclusion (Table 1). Both treatment groups became more rejecting of undifferentiated, GBE, and peerGBE over time, whereas the control group became more accepting of intergroup exclusion. The skills group followed the same pattern for parentGBE. Furthermore, group by time by justification interactions revealed the treatment groups’ effectiveness in promoting prosocial reasoning (Figure 1). Over time, both treatment groups appealed significantly more frequently to prosocial moral concerns rejecting prejudice-based exclusion, whereas the control group decreased.

These findings illustrate the effectiveness of in-school social-cognitive/emotional skills and combined skills+contact approaches in not just reducing outgroup prejudice, but also promoting intergroup prosociality among Palestinian- and Jewish-Israeli youth, even amidst ongoing protracted conflict. Implications of the findings in terms of scalability and generalizability will be discussed.

Authors

• Alaina Brenick, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Daniell Carvalheiro, University of Connecticut
  Non-Presenting Author

• Samantha Lawrence, University of Connecticut
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rony Berger, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
  Non-Presenting Author