Reducing Intergroup Prejudice and Conflict with the Media: A Field Experiment in Rwanda

This report uses a field experiment to measure the impact of a radio soap opera in Rwanda, which deals with two communities in conflict and features messages about reducing intergroup prejudice, violence, and trauma. The report argues that radio can communicate social norms and influence behaviours that contribute to intergroup tolerance and reconciliation. The research focused on the media’s impact on three key areas of change: personal beliefs, perceptions of social norms, and behaviour. The field experiment was designed to measure the causal impact of the radio programme in the most naturalistic manner possible within a stratified sample of the population and along meaningful outcomes using various tools of measurement.

Methodology

The author randomly assigned a balanced cross-section of Rwandan communities to listen to one of two radio programmes: a reconciliation radio soap opera and a health soap opera. The reconciliation soap opera aimed to influence beliefs about intergroup prejudice, mass violence, and trauma with a series of educational messages, and its fictional characters portrayed positive social norms regarding intergroup behaviour and trauma healing. Study participants listened to the programmes over the course of one year, during which the author collected observational data on their discussions and emotional reactions to the programmes. At the end of the year, the author measured outcomes with standardised questionnaires, focus groups, and behavioural observations.

Key Findings

According to the report, the reconciliation programme’s educational messages did not substantially change listeners’ personal beliefs about the etiology and dynamics of intergroup prejudice, violence, and trauma. If anything, the few significant changes in personal beliefs were contrary to the programme’s messages, such as the greater belief in “evil” rather than ordinary people bringing about mass violence. On the other hand, the programme did substantially influence listeners’ perceptions of social norms. Reconciliation listeners (as opposed to the control group who listened to the health series) were more likely to endorse positive social norms regarding intermarriage, trusting people, open dissent, and the discussion of trauma. Moreover, reconciliation listeners were more likely to voice their privately held opinions in front of their peers regarding the sensitive issue of community mistrust, to dissent with other group members’ suggestions regarding a community resource, and to express confidence in their ability to cooperate as a group.

According to the report, one reasonable implication of this finding is that pursuing social norms instead of individual beliefs may be more fruitful for prejudice reduction interventions, particularly given independent concurrent findings that social norm perception is more reliably tied to behaviour, including prejudiced behaviour. The report also states that the impact of the radio intervention is inseparable from the impact of listening to the programme in a group. Alone, listeners become aware of ideas communicated in radio programmes, but in groups they also became aware of other people’s awareness of those ideas. Moreover, when group members react positively, their endorsement creates another vector of social influence on each listener. Thus, positive endorsement of fictional norms gives birth to actual group norms.

The report concludes that the results of this year-long experiment in Rwanda reveal the utility of psychological perspectives on social norms, empathy, and peer discussion for reducing real-world intergroup prejudice and conflict. Many of these findings, based upon observations and activities in participants’ actual community environments, would have been impossible to obtain in a laboratory setting. Future research should continue to gauge the media-prejudice-conflict relationship with real world experiments, while parsing the basic social psychological mechanisms that seem to drive its effects. The authors view this particular study as part of a growing body of “psychology that matters,” in which field interventions feed psychological theory, and psychological theory informs field interventions.