Study offers a path to compromise

In a world studded with intractable conflicts, none seems more nettlesome than he one between Israelis and Palestinians. In this and many other conflicts, people are often trained to believe the worst about the other side, who are variously stereotyped as immoral occupiers or immoral terrorists.

These conflicts, as history has shown, are not ideal for peacemaking based on compromise, and yet the conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa have come to peaceful resolutions.

But during the conflict, even mentioning the opposing side can backfire, says Eran Halperin, a professor of political psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya Israel. “When you try to tell an Israeli something positive about a Palestinian, or vice versa, the immediate reaction is defensive. In many cases, they are not willing to hear positive information about the other side.”

A sideways approach, however, may be more effective at changing attitudes and creating a willingness to compromise. In a study just published in Science¹, Halperin and co-authors demonstrated that simply reading a few sentences about the successful resolutions of historic conflicts elsewhere made Israelis and Palestinians more amenable to compromise.

“There are positive pieces of information that the parties could absorb, that could lead to a change in positions,” says Halperin, “but people in almost every group involved in a conflict are not willing to hear it. But if you try to go more indirectly … to talk in a general way, you hope they will apply these beliefs to the other group, and this is what our results show.”

Testing tolerance

In a series of experiments, Halperin and colleagues asked Palestinians and Jewish and Arab Israelis to read a few paragraphs in a supposed “reading comprehension” test. Then, as part of a supposedly different study, the same people were asked about their attitudes toward the opposing side.

The tested paragraphs that contained a more positive interpretation of history strongly affected willingness to compromise to resolve conflicts.

Instead of confronting the subjects by stressing that the other side could change its views, Halperin says, the test paragraphs “say that people in other conflicts went through meaningful change in their positions and behavior, and we expect people to understand by themselves that this can happen here.”

The study opens a crack in the despair aroused by prolonged conflicts, says Halperin. “We have now the first indication of what kind of message we should convey to people, to make them more open to the other side. And we already have preliminary data showing that the exact same pattern occurs in other long-term intractable conflicts around the world.”

Still to come, he acknowledges, is “the biggest challenge, using a larger scale intervention to make these changes.” Using the education system and mass media, he proposes a “simple message: Groups change, and behavior that is violent and immoral is a result of a specific situation, leaders and economics. They are not the result of a long-term culture with a fixed character.”

The intervention was focused on hope, Halperin says. “One of the biggest barriers to peace is because people don’t have hope, they don’t believe that the other group can change. If you don’t believe the other side can change its attitude, and as a result its behavior, there is no reason to offer a gesture or compromise, to take a risk in negotiation, and then you can’t make any progress in any intergroup conflict.”

– David J. Tenenbaum