Intergroup psychological interventions: The motivational challenge.

Abstract

Social scientists have increasingly applied insights from descriptive research to develop psychological interventions aimed at improving intergroup relations. These interventions have achieved marked success-reducing prejudicial attitudes, fostering support for conciliatory social policies, and promoting peacebuilding behaviors. At the same time, intergroup conflict continues to rage in part because individuals often lack motivation to engage with these promising interventions. We take a step toward addressing this issue by developing a framework of approaches for delivering interventions to an unmotivated target audience. Along with (a) directly motivating targets by increasing their values and expectancies for addressing intergroup conflict, researchers can deliver interventions by (b) satisfying other psychological motivations of the target audience, (c) providing an instrumental benefit for engaging with the intervention, (d) embedding the intervention in a hedonically captivating medium, or (e) bypassing motivational barriers entirely by delivering the intervention outside of targets' conscious awareness. We define each approach and use illustrative examples to organize them into a conceptual framework before concluding with implications and future directions.

Beyond personal emotions: How emotion norms shape policy support in the context of violent conflict.

“…Accordingly, our findings have implications also for a new, rapidly growing field of emotion-focused conflict resolution interventions, which examines how personally experienced emotions can be changed to promote peace (see Čehajić-Clancy et al, 2016; Halperin, 2015). They show a positive but limited impact because people need to be motivated to change their emotions in the first place (Landry & Halperin, 2023). Our results suggest that social motivations, grounded in the perception of relevant others’ emotions, may be an important pathway toward changing personal emotions and attitudes.…”