Abstract
Conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation are difficult to achieve because of many social and psychological obstacles, such as people’s belief that members of a social group that is an adversary of their own group are mostly bad and essentially all the same. In this article, we introduce a novel intervention aimed at challenging these beliefs by exposing people to stories about individuals who have risked some important aspects of their lives to save the lives of other social groups’ members (moral exemplars). The effects of this moral-exemplar intervention have been tested with field experiments in several postconflict contexts using members of real antagonistic groups. We discuss the results of these studies and three specific and important aspects of the moral-exemplar intervention: (a) its comparative advantage over existing social-psychological interventions aimed at conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation, (b) its content and conditions, and (c) implications for future theorizing and research targeting prosocial changes in attitudes and intergroup behavior.
During the Nazi German occupation in Poland, providing any help to Jewish people was punished by death. Otto Busse, a devoted member of the Nazi party, ran a contracting office for house painting in Białystok, a Polish city under German occupation. Breaking the occupation rules, Busse paid his Jewish workers the same wages as non-Jewish ones. After the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Białystok, he hid several Jews in his home and adopted a half-Jewish boy whose father was killed in the ghetto. Later on, he started supporting the Jewish underground in Białystok, smuggling German maps, compasses, and pistols. He allowed Jewish partisans to use his office for producing leaflets and storing weapons (Grossman, 1987). Research on moral exemplars has shown that learning about relevant and specific moral exemplars, such as Otto Busse, is an effective approach for changing beliefs and emotions about social groups and thereby improving intergroup relations (Čehajić-Clancy & Bilewicz, 2020).
Perceptions of Social Groups as Obstacles to Successful Conflict Resolution and Intergroup Reconciliation
Even after intergroup conflicts have been politically resolved, the challenge of how to build cooperative and trusting relations between social groups remains (Halperin & Bar-Tal, 2011). A continuing challenge is posed by peoples’ evaluations of social groups. Social-psychological research shows that people tend to evaluate out-groups in a negatively biased and essentialized way, reserving positive distinctiveness for their own group and perceiving others as mostly bad. Such perceptions of social groups form the basis for negative emotional (e.g., hatred) and behavioral (e.g., discriminatory) responses (e.g., Prentice & Miller, 2007) while reducing support for social change, conflict prevention, and successful intergroup reconciliation (e.g., Cohen-Chen et al., 2014). Research efforts in social psychology have produced interventions aimed at overcoming these specific barriers, including human perceptions and emotions. However, the success of these (and other) interventions is contingent on several important factors, such as participants’ attention or lack thereof, their motivation to participate in these interventions, and ultimately their motivation to change their initial beliefs (Bar-Tal & Hameiri, 2020). Additionally, interventions challenging peoples’ beliefs may produce psychological tension that reduces the motivation to change. The purpose of this article is to introduce a new social-psychological intervention aimed at changing intergroup evaluations through teaching people about moral exemplars: the moral-exemplar intervention. We discuss this intervention’s specific comparative advantage in relation to existing interventions and the implications for future theorizing and research on intergroup relations.
Social-Psychological Interventions Aimed at Conflict Resolution and Intergroup Reconciliation
In principle, the goal of most social-psychological interventions is to enable prosocial behavioral changes by altering peoples’ attitudes and/or behavior. Existing interventions aimed at attitude changes in conflict and postconflict environments rely on one of the following working principles: actively engaging people with each other (e.g., contact interventions), exposing people to new information, or instructing people to engage in a specific task (e.g., perspective-taking interventions). Table 1 lists existing social-psychological interventions aimed at conflict resolution or reconciliation, identifying each intervention’s basic working principle and specific goal.
Basic Working Principles and Specific Goals of Social-Psychological Interventions Aimed at Conflict Resolution and Intergroup Reconciliation
Although Table 1 indicates that these interventions have discrete goals, in reality most induce several important processes. However, regardless of the specific working principle or goal, these and other similar interventions require that people are motivated to engage in an intervention, to continue to participate, and to pay attention to new information or precise instructions. Furthermore, the effectiveness of social-psychological interventions is contingent on participants’ motivation to change their beliefs or behavior (Bar-Tal & Hameiri, 2020). Furthermore, exposure to members of adversary groups (e.g., intergroup contact) or novel information aimed at challenging existing beliefs often produces psychological tension, which can further undermine the success of such interventions. The moral-exemplar intervention addresses this particular concern, as we discuss below.
Development and Comparative Advantage of the Moral-Exemplar Intervention
As do some of the interventions listed in Table 1, the moral-exemplar intervention uses the strategy of exposing people to new and unexpected information. More specifically, people are exposed to stories about members of relevant social groups who have risked some important aspects of their lives (e.g., safety, property, family) to save the lives of other social groups’ members (moral exemplars). This focus on stories about groups’ morality is grounded in the research showing that morality is the primary dimension on which individuals and groups are evaluated (Brambilla et al., 2013). Furthermore, in intergroup-conflict environments, people tend to perceive out-groups as predominantly immoral and evil (Leach et al., 2015). Morality tends to be attributed more to the in-group and is often stripped away from out-groups. Such attributions further feed into the vicious cycle of destructive emotions (e.g., hatred) and behavior (e.g., avoidance). At the same time, fear of their own immorality is a key obstacle to reconciliation in the case of members of groups that have perpetrated mass crimes (Shnabel et al., 2009) and breeds defensive reactions to reminders about the burden of the in-group’s immoral behavior. The main idea underlying the moral-exemplar intervention is that changing judgments about group morality can be an important way to effectively facilitate prosocial intergroup responses.
We designed the moral-exemplar intervention to expose people to unexpected information so that they would perceive an inconsistency with their existing beliefs about the out-group’s morality. This idea was inspired by research in social and emotional learning indicating that violation of expectations (prediction error) is a mechanism for driving changes in attitudes and behavior. Hein and colleagues (2016) showed that unexpected prosocial behaviors by an out-group individual, compared with those by an in-group individual, elicited a greater increase in empathic responses and positive emotions toward members of the out-group. Also, a recent review demonstrated that prediction-error signals constitute the fundament on which new social learning occurs (Olsson et al., 2020).
Development of the moral-exemplar intervention was also inspired by research in education (Han et al., 2017) demonstrating that stories can serve as models that are powerful facilitators of changes in behavior. Moreover, learning stories about morally admirable behavior appears to elicit a sense of moral elevation (Haidt, 2000) and a positive emotional response (Čehajić-Clancy & Bilewicz, 2020; Janković & Čehajić-Clancy, 2021), and we reasoned that presenting such stories would minimize the risk of the psychological tension that is usually triggered by violation of expectations. Such tension can be a concern in most other interventions relying on the principle of exposing people to new and unexpected information.
Finally, we believed that a successful intervention for conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation could benefit from utilizing narrative structure. People’s understanding of the meaning and the role of their own national or ethnic group is often dependent on existing narrative structures and personifications (Hilton & Liu, 2017), but such metaphors are sometimes challenged by individual life stories and counternarratives (Bilali, 2013). Therefore, we decided to base our intervention on presenting stories of individuals who opposed the immorality of the out-group’s majority.
Drawing on these approaches and existing research evidence, we developed an intervention that provides high inconsistency between the presented information and participants’ held beliefs about other people (in order to “unfreeze” those beliefs) in a way that does not cause tension (usually produced by information inconsistency) but rather induces a positive emotional response (Janković & Čehajić-Clancy, 2021). Induction of such positive affective states produced by violation of expectations might sustain not only participants’ attention but also their motivation to learn. In addition, our intervention is easy to implement, has high external validity, and can be easily used by practitioners. So far, the effectiveness of this intervention has been tested with nine experimental studies, set in five different postconflict societies (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, Armenia, Poland, and Hungary), that examined important intergroup reconciliation processes between members of real adversary groups (Beneda et al., 2018; Bigazzi et al., 2019; Čehajić-Clancy & Bilewicz, 2017, Janković & Čehajić-Clancy, 2021; Witkowska et al., 2019).
In these studies, the researchers used text materials, as well as visual ones (pictures, films), to present participants with moral exemplars from national in-groups and out-groups (e.g., a Turkish bureaucrat rescuing Armenians during the genocide, a German officer offering help to a Polish-Jewish musician, a Bosniak hiding a Serbian soldier in his house). A diverse set of reconciliation-related dependent variables captured the effects of such exposure on postconflict intergroup attitudes and behavioral tendencies.
This research showed that learning about moral-exemplar stories facilitated several key psychological processes required for successful conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation (see Figs. 1a and 1b). Longitudinal tests of this kind of intervention in a Polish-Israeli context (Bilewicz & Jaworska, 2013) yielded results consistent with these findings.
The effects of the moral-exemplar intervention on (a) intergroup attitudes and (b) intergroup behavioral tendencies. The graphs show mean scores (scale from 1 to 7) of participants in moral-exemplar and control conditions, with error bars representing ±1 SE. Studies 1 and 5 were reported in Beneda et al. (2018); Study 2 was reported in Janković and Čehajić-Clancy (2021); Studies 3, 8, and 9 were reported in Witkowska et al. (2019); Studies 4 and 7 were reported in Čehajić-Clancy & Bilewicz (2017); and Study 6 was reported in Bigazzi et al. (2019).
Content and Conditions of the Moral-Exemplar Intervention
On the basis of research in the fields of attitude change (e.g., Deutsch & Fazio, 2008), education (Han et al., 2017), and emotional learning (Hein et al., 2016; Olsson et al., 2020), as well as the published initial evidence (Čehajić-Clancy & Bilewicz, 2020), we propose that the moral-exemplar intervention’s effectiveness relies on the following specific content and criteria:
Use of real stories: Research in education has shown that using real moral-exemplar stories, rather than conceptual stories, is more effective for promotion of moral emotional and behavioral responses (Han et al., 2017). Note that no artificial materials were presented in any of the moral-exemplar intervention studies: In all cases, the interventions were based on factually correct historical information. In the longitudinal studies (Bilewicz & Jaworska, 2013), participants met with living rescuers who shared their stories from the times of the Holocaust.
Use of relevant stories set in a relevant sociopolitical context and focusing on social groups in a meaningful (psychological or structural) relationship. Again, research in the field of education has shown that context relevance is the foundation for the effectiveness of such moral-exemplar stories. For example, Han and colleagues (2017) demonstrated that stories of relevant individuals (peers) promoted greater emulation and change in behavior compared with stories of irrelevant individuals (historic figures). Moral-exemplars research in the Turko-Armenian context showed that exposure to moral exemplars from another context (Holocaust committed by Nazi Germans) did not affect intergroup attitudes and behavioral tendencies (Witkowska et al., 2019). Additionally, exposure to moral exemplars did not affect attitudes toward other unrelated groups (no secondary transfer effects were observed; Witkowska et al., 2019).
Use of extreme counterinformation in order to facilitate the arousal and attention required for the desired attitude change (Deutsch & Fazio, 2008): Furthermore, although counterinformation about the in-group has not been tested, we believe that it can also be effective. In societies where the in-group’s morality is not threatened, perceptions of in-group heroism could actually be used as a national alibi for committed crimes and increase prejudice (Bilewicz & Babińska, in press). In such cases, we argue, exposure to moral exemplars can lead to reconciliation if the information runs counter to the socially shared representation of the history (Hilton & Liu, 2017) or an individual’s existing belief about the group’s morality.
Use of positive information to avoid tension and consequent psychological defenses and to produce positive emotional responses in the form of moral elevation (Haidt, 2000). This approach induces or sustains motivation to learn. Furthermore, interventions in which participants were confronted with negative information about in-group victimization prior to being presented with a film on moral exemplars (Čehajić-Clancy & Bilewicz, 2017) showed more modest effects than other interventions.
Presentation of out-group moral exemplars as relatively common and typical to avoid subtyping (Ensari & Miller, 2002): A moral-exemplar intervention that presented rescuers in the Armenian genocide as extremely marginal proved less effective in eliciting forgiveness and changing perceptions of current Turks than an intervention that was identical except for presenting rescuers as being more prototypical (Beneda et al., 2018).
Previous interventions aimed at changing attitudes by presenting information counter to held beliefs have often suffered from poor generalizability due to subtyping, tension provoked by incongruent information, or a lack of attention. The moral-exemplar intervention overcomes these particular challenges by providing highly unexpected information that evokes not only attention but also a positive emotional response (e.g., moral elevation), qualities reminiscent of positive prediction error in formal models of successful learning (Olsson et al., 2020).
Moral Exemplars for Prosocial Regulation of Intergroup Emotions
When trying to understand the psychological mechanisms at work in this model of reconciliation, we consider the emotion-regulation perspective useful for elucidating the appraisal processes underlying learning about moral exemplars. Conceptualizing conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation as an emotion-regulation process (Čehajić-Clancy et al., 2016), we argue that the focus of regulation can be on two distinct, yet related, appraisal processes: changing perceptions about social groups (e.g., morality judgments) and changing one’s level of social categorization (e.g., by facilitating perceptions of more inclusive social identities).
Figure 2 summarizes the proposed cognitive changes associated with learning about moral exemplars, as seen through the theoretical prism of the emotion-regulation process. The figure outlines the potentially different mechanisms triggered by learning about in-group versus out-group moral exemplars. We argue that exposure to information that counters existing beliefs about the out-group’s immorality might violate expectations about who “they” are while at the same time producing a sense of moral elevation associated with prosocial outcomes. On the other hand, information that counters beliefs about the in-group’s immorality, when the in-group is a perpetrator, might provide (psychologically needed) affirmation and consequently lead to less destructive and defensive forms of emotion regulation (Bilewicz, 2016). Moral emotions such as guilt or shame, which seem fundamental for reconciliation processes, are effectively downregulated through defensive attributions such as denial or contact avoidance (Leach et al., 2013). We hypothesize that presentation of in-group moral exemplars, in the context of threats to the in-group’s morality, could constrain destructive regulation of these group-based moral emotions. The focus on in-group moral diversity could simultaneously trigger the desired attentional deployment and cognitive change (social recategorization). The narratives of in-group moral exemplars could create an alternative social identity (self-categorization to a subgroup that is focused on altruism rather than conflict) and allow participants to focus on the prosocial aspects of their group’s conflict history. Empirical evidence shows that such a focus among historical perpetrators of conflict restores their sense that they are perceived as moral and leads to an increase in positive emotions and reconciliatory intentions (Witkowska et al., 2019). Although the destructive emotion-regulation processes among perpetrator groups might be inhibited by moral-exemplar interventions, the social-psychological conditions under which affirmation of the in-group’s morality could lead to more prosocial intergroup outcomes (rather than to moral licensing) still remain to be investigated.
Theoretical model of prosocial regulation of intergroup relations through learning about moral exemplars. According to this model, prosocial changes at the level of intergroup behavior are enabled through affirmation of the in-group’s morality and violations of expectations of the out-group’s immorality. These processes can trigger cognitive reappraisal of the relevant social groups, induce social recategorization, and create more prosocial emotions.
Conclusion
The moral-exemplars intervention provides a potential alternative to existing approaches to reconciliation in postconflict societies. By modifying mental representation of the in-group or the out-group, it leads to emotional changes that allow upregulation of prosocial intergroup responses and in that way paves the way to reconciliation between adversarial groups. We argue that the moral-exemplars approach is purely group based. Unlike other approaches to heroism (e.g., Zimbardo, 2011), it does not treat such extreme acts of morality as a trait or a schema that can be primed independently of group membership or the context. Moral exemplars provide people with important information about the in-group’s and out-group’s moral variability, which allows transformation of the dominant representation and understanding of the conflict, These cognitive changes ultimately restore positive intergroup relations and establish ground for successful reconciliation.
Recommended Reading
Čehajić-Clancy, S., & Bilewicz, M. (2020). (See References). An article presenting the main tenets of the moral-exemplars model of reconciliation and several applications of that model in current conflict settings.
Oliner, S., & Oliner, P. (1988). The altruistic personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. Free Press. A book presenting a thorough psychological study of moral exemplars’ personalities, assessing the psychological traits of people engaged in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust.
Witkowska, M., Beneda, M., Čehajić-Clancy, S., & Bilewicz, M. (2019). (See References). An empirical article addressing the role of moral-exemplars narratives in restoring intergroup contact after past atrocities in the context of Soviet, Nazi, and Ottoman crimes.
