When societies are involved in long-term, intractable conflicts, individuals tend to develop highly polarized views about how to resolve them, which can make it even harder to reach agreements. But it’s possible that making things seem worse could make them a bit better.

A recent study published in PNAS showed that when people who hold extreme opinions are exposed to even more extreme opinions, they tend to moderate their views. Unfortunately, exposing moderates to these same intervention messages makes them more extreme in their opinions, so this technique may be a double-edged sword.

The authors of the study examined attitudes of people living in a conflict-ridden region of Israel. The Israeli conflict has been going on for decades, and individuals’ opinions on it are closely tied to their political beliefs and level of religiosity. The authors attempted to use a model called “paradoxical thinking” to change people’s perspectives on this deeply entrenched conflict.

The authors defined paradoxical thinking as an attempt to change attitudes by exposing subjects to beliefs similar to their own, but much more extreme. The idea is that exposure to more extreme attitudes would cause people to step back, effectively moderating their attitudes. This approach was based on the classic debating technique of reduction ad absurdum, in which debaters carry their opponent’s arguments to their most absurd and extreme conclusions in order to undermine them.

(A common example of this type of argument was made by people opposed to gay marriage: “if you let two men marry each other, before you know it, people will be marrying their dogs.”)

The authors set up a large-scale intervention aimed at an entire Israeli city. They delivered their paradoxical thinking intervention (which they named “The Conflict”) to residents of this city using Internet advertisements, including online banners and YouTube ads. The Internet campaign was six weeks long and was accompanied by physical billboards, which were placed in 20 central locations throughout the city.

Slogans used for “The Conflict” intervention campaign included pro-conflict messages, such as “Without it, we would not have united against a common enemy… For unity we probably need the conflict,” and “Without it, we wouldn’t have had heroes… We probably need the conflict." In addition to this intervention, the researchers also did eighteen days of field work, during which they distributed T-shirts, balloons, and brochures to residents.

After this extensive intervention, the authors determined if conflict-supporting attitudes were affected. They found that paradoxical thinking led participants to feel less attached to conflict-focused attitudes after controlling for the participants’ baseline political orientation or level of religiosity. Controlling for these two covariates was an important step in their analysis because of their influence on attitudes, as noted above.

The authors found that participants who were initially more hawkish in their views about the conflict became less supportive of aggressive political policies and more supportive of conciliatory efforts intended to guide the region toward peace. This shift suggests that paradoxical thinking interventions may be effective on individuals with the most extreme views.

In comparison, participants whose initial views were more centrist were not significantly affected by the paradoxical thinking intervention, perhaps because their initial perspectives were not extreme enough for the intervention to be meaningful. These centrists, however, showed a slight, non-significant preference for more aggressive policies after the intervention. This result surprised the authors, who suspect that these participants may have viewed the paradoxical thinking messages literally rather than paradoxically.

These results seem to show that paradoxical thinking has a promising ability to change people’s minds. But these types of messages clearly must be used very carefully or their effect on moderates may be the opposite of that intended. More research will be needed to ensure that paradoxical messaging is interpreted in the intended way.

Designing interventions to manipulate people’s psychology is very tricky and could easily backfire, so this type of research must proceed with caution—especially before using it in conflict situations where the stakes are already extremely high.

PNAS, 2016. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1606182113 (About DOIs).

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