Tel-Aviv University researchers have found that agreeing with people on controversial issues causes them to reconsider their opinions, becoming more accepting of differing points of view.
The study, “Paradoxical thinking as a new avenue of intervention to promote peace,” was completed by Boaz Hameiria, Roni Poratc, Daniel Bar-Tald, Atara Bielerb, and Eran Halperinb, and was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month.
The researchers subjected study participants to videos of extreme versions of their beliefs–“consistent, though extreme, information” in the words of the researchers–and found that the participants sometimes came to view their opinions as irrational or absurd.
One hundred and fifty Israelis were repeatedly exposed to video clips that related to Palestinians, from the perspective of an extremist Israeli set of values. A control group watched neutral TV commercials.
The videos illustrated how the conflict with Palestine was consistent with many Israeli beliefs.
“For example, the fact that they are the most moral society in the world is one of the most basic beliefs of Israeli society,” said Eran Halperin, a psychologist at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel and one of the authors of the study. So when the researchers showed participants a video that claimed Israel should continue the conflict so that its citizens could continue to feel moral, people reacted angrily.
“You take people’s most basic beliefs and turn them into something that is absurd. For an outsider, it can sound like a joke, but for them, you are playing with their most fundamental belief.”
After being shown videos over a months-long period, participants were found to exhibit a 30 percent increase in willingness to re-evaluate their opinions on the responsibility for the conflict. The effects persisted one year after the study concluded. The study participants also reported voting more often for moderate parties, suggesting changed behavior in addition to changed opinions.
The researchers noted, however, that some study participants were effected in the opposite way, taking the videos at face value and assimilating the extreme messages into their opinions.
The significance of this work, according to the researchers, lies in a premise of most interventions that aim to promote peacemaking–that information that is inconsistent with held beliefs causes tension, which may motivate alternative information seeking.
The researchers said that they supposed facts were not at the heart of disagreements. “We truly believe that in most intractable conflicts, the real problems are not the real issues,” Halperin said. Although both sides of a conflict may know how to find resolution, “psychological barriers… prevent societies from identifying opportunities for peace.”
By James Haleavy