Paradoxical Thinking Interventions: A Paradigm for Societal Change

Abstract

Social problems such as intergroup conflicts, prejudice, and discrimination have a significant effect on the world's population. Often, to facilitate constructive solutions to these problems, fundamental attitude change is needed. However, changing the beliefs and attitudes to which people strongly adhere has proven to be difficult, as these individuals resist change. In this article, we offer a new and unconventional approach, termed paradoxical thinking, to promote the change of attitudes relevant to social realities. Paradoxical thinking refers to a process of exposing individuals to amplified, exaggerated, or even absurd messages that are still congruent with their held societal beliefs. In our research program, we focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and found that paradoxical thinking interventions led to attitude moderation among those who were the most adamant in their held attitudes and beliefs, even in the challenging context of a harsh and prolonged intergroup conflict. We then discuss how paradoxical thinking can be utilized to facilitate attitude change in this context and provide two brief examples as preliminary evidence that this approach might work in other important societal contexts, (i.e., attitudes toward refugees and asylum seekers, and gender-based discrimination), and conclude with policy recommendations.The world is plagued by social problems that often have destructive effects on the lives of individuals, collectives, and the international community more broadly.

Interventions for Softening Can Lead to Hardening of Opinions: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

“…For instance, Bruneau and colleagues [9,10] demonstrated that collective blame of Muslims for individual acts of violence, and thereby anti-Muslim hostility, could be reduced by highlighting hypocrisy (e.g., by making a Christian who collectively blamed Muslims realize that they would not collectively blame Christians for acts of violence committed by individual Christians). Similarly, Hameiri and colleagues [23,24] have demonstrated the effectiveness of paradoxical thinking interventions for softening extreme opinions.…”

Flexibility mindsets: Reducing biases that result from spontaneous processing

“…Previous research found another, less subtle way of inducing cognitive conflicts via communication to reduce the impact of dominant attitudes in intergroup conflicts: so-called paradoxical thinking interventions (for an overview, see Hameiri et al, 2019). Different from conventional interventions using stereotype-inconsistent communication (e.g., Weber & Crocker, 1983), the messages conveyed through paradoxical interventions are in principle consistent with the recipients' beliefs but amplify and exaggerate these -sometimes even in an absurd form.…”

Psychological Barriers to Resolving Intergroup Conflict: An Extensive Review and Consolidation of the Literature

“…While much of the research on psychological barriers has sought to identify them or to evaluate their impact, there have also been numerous efforts aimed at identifying the means by which these barriers might be overcome (Gayer et al ; Paluck ; Paluck and Green ; Shnabel et al ; Bruneau and Saxe ; Vasiljevic and Crisp ; Hameiri and Halperin ; Bruneau, Kteily, and Falk ; Hameiri, Bar‐Tal, and Halperin ). While many articles (directly or incidentally) provide theoretical or conceptual guidance on how to address the problem of psychological barriers, here we review the empirical literature.…”

“…Prior work on the scaling of interventions suggests that there is cause for both skepticism and optimism. At a minimum, the creation of consistently effective, evidence‐supported interventions requires painstaking work, with past efforts having required years of pilot testing, data collection, and iterative design (Hameiri, Bar‐Tal, and Halperin ). Ditlmann, Samii, and Zeitzoff () have also pointed out that for interventions to have an impact on large‐scale conflict dynamics, they must have a discernable impact on the behavior of individuals, such as increasing in‐group policing, public advocacy, or political action.…”

“…Yet there are examples of barrier reduction techniques that have proven to be robust at various scales (Goldenberg et al ; Hameiri, Bar‐Tal, and Halperin ). In addition, while not all attenuation techniques seem equally amenable to successful scaling, a number of the interventions we reviewed could ostensibly be used as seeds for the development of larger‐scale interventions, as was done with the “paradoxical thinking intervention” (Hameiri, Bar‐Tal, and Halperin ). Hameiri et al () developed this intervention into a multimedia ad campaign utilizing billboards, online ads, and fliers to target a small Israeli city.…”