North Hall News, Spring 2023

Using Education Programs to Reduce Prejudice in Israel

By Chagai Weiss, UW-Madison Ph.D. 2022

Chagai Weiss is a postdoctoral fellow at the Conflict and Polarization Lab at Stanford University. He defended his dissertation in summer 2022, after spending two years as a Middle East Initiative predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Based on the understanding that social attitudes are acquired at a young age and that education systems are powerful socializing institutions, in the past two years, I have been working on a project that translates psychological theories into a prejudice reduction education program. With two Israeli collaborators (Eran Halperin and Shira Ran) and a local research center (aChord center), I designed an education program to reduce Jewish Israeli students’ prejudice towards social outgroups, including Arabs, immigrants, kids with disabilities, and increase their appreciation of diversity.

Perhaps the most intellectually rewarding component of this project was my interdisciplinary collaboration with social psychologists and practitioners to create a curriculum that would persuade Israeli children to adopt more inclusive intergroup attitudes. After much thought and inspired by the Israeli web series “You can’t ask That,” which depicts children from minority groups discussing taboo topics at the core of intergroup relations, we decided to develop our education program to help children discuss taboo questions relating to diversity in the classroom. Our monthlong program had children watch episodes of the web and engage in follow-up classroom discussions unpacking the different themes of the show.

After six months of intense collaboration, we finally had a curriculum that we all believed could shape students’ prejudice and appreciation of diversity for the better. However, as empirically minded scholars and practitioners, we wanted to rigorously test whether and how our curriculum effectively shapes students’ attitudes and behaviors. To do so, we implemented two field experiments in Israel in the Spring of 2021 and the Spring of 2022 with over 50 classrooms and 1,000 students.

A field experiment is a methodological approach that uses the basic principles of experimentation in a realistic environment rather than an artificial laboratory context to evaluate the effects of a policy or program. Our choice to implement field experiments was motivated by two different factors. First, we wanted to know whether and how education programs can shape students’ attitudes in the long run in a context where students’ might be exposed to other dynamics that impair intergroup prejudice. Second, given our collaboration with practitioners, we wanted to be able to share with school principals and teachers tangible results that show that our program can be implemented at scale, leading to better intergroup relations.

And indeed, after two years of intense experimentation in Israeli schools, that is precisely what we found. The program we designed had sizeable effects on students’ attitudes and behaviors. Participation in our program increased students’ warm feelings towards outgroups, intergroup contact intentions, and appreciation of diversity. These effects lasted more than three months after participation in our curriculum. However, we show that participation in our curriculum affected not only students’ attitudes but also shaped their behaviors. Indeed, three months after concluding the curriculum, students participating in our surveys were offered compensation for their participation – a bracelet with either a self-affirming or pro-diversity statement. Our analyses show that students exposed to our educational curriculum were more likely to select the pro-diversity bracelet signaling to their friends that “this school is open to all different social groups.”

So what did we learn from this project? I have three main takeaways. First, education is a promising avenue through which we can socialize students to become more inclusive citizens who appreciate diversity’s merits. Second, interdisciplinary collaborations are intellectually rewarding and can translate into impactful policy-relevant research. Third, this project, implemented in Israel during Covid-19, served as a reminder that field work is extremely challenging but that testing our theories in naturalistic contexts is valuable and rewarding for academics, policymakers, and citizens.

You can read Weiss’ paper here. 

By Emily Sellars, UW-Madison Ph.D. 2015

Emily Sellars is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. She came to Yale in 2018 after a postdoc at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and two years on the faculty at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government.

I am happy to hear about the rebirth of “North Hall News”!

I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. I came to Yale in 2018 after a postdoc at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and two years on the faculty at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government. All of these places have been wonderful in different ways, but I miss Madison. (Yale’s campus is beautiful, but it is not adjacent to a lake, and there’s nothing quite like the Memorial Union Terrace anywhere else.)

Most of my current projects build on ideas that I was working on while at Wisconsin. I am finishing a book on the politics of emigration, building on my dissertation research on rural politics in Mexico. The book examines how the possibility of individual emigration from Mexico complicated community collective action, making it easier for the government to avoid undertaking difficult political and economic reforms. This project benefited greatly from the feedback of Badgers from across campus during my time in Madison. In addition to the amazing grad students and faculty in North Hall, I owe a debt of gratitude to scholars in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics and at LACIS for getting me interested in studying Mexico.

A different stream of research started in Madison has proven more topical than I anticipated in the intervening years. In a series of papers with Jennifer Alix-Garcia, a former Wisconsin faculty member now at Oregon State, we explore the long- and short-run implications of pandemics on political and economic institutions in Mexico from the sixteenth century to the present. One of the things that our research illustrates is that the long-term economic and demographic legacies of disease outbreaks evolve over time as a result of subsequent political choices, an important lesson for today. In a related paper with Francisco Garfias of UCSD, we examine how epidemics can create opportunities for official corruption, another sadly relevant lesson.

In a third set of projects, Francisco and I have been examining the connection between domestic conflict, economic shocks, and state building, focusing on colonial and postcolonial Mexico. Though this research agenda started after my time at Wisconsin, I actually met Francisco at a workshop organized by Jennifer in Madison when he and I were grad students, so there is a UW connection there, too.

One thing that unites these projects is the historical focus. It has been fun to see the growth of historical political economy research since I graduated, something that I did not anticipate when I was spending late nights with dusty books in my beloved “cage” in Memorial Library. In the last couple of years, I have had a lot of fun contributing to the Broadstreet blog alongside my excellent co-editors (including another former Badger, Scott Gehlbach). Those who overlapped with me at Wisconsin will probably recognize a few names of contributors of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy.

In terms of personal news, Andrew and I welcomed a son in mid-March 2020 in a locked-down hospital in New Haven. Isaac is a true pandemic baby. Though he has not yet had the pleasure of visiting Madison, we have been showing him videos of Bucky dancing at basketball games and doing push-ups at football games to prepare for a future trip.

Now that I have spent time in a few other departments, I am even more grateful for the time that I spent in North Hall and in Madison. It is hard to find an environment that is both as welcoming and as intellectually challenging as the one that I enjoyed in grad school. I learned so much from my committee members, colleagues, classmates, and friends. I enjoyed catching up with some of you at APSA last fall and hope to see others of you soon.

By Xinzhi Zhao, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Theory

Xinzhi Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory. Her research areas include 17^th– to 19^th– century European moral, social, and political thought, the epistemic dimensions of political participation, and the roles of science in producing public knowledge. Her dissertation examines 18^th-century accounts of scientific inquiry and moral psychology, from which she recovers theoretical resources that can enable intellectual elites to become conscious of their biases in social interpretations.

As a scholar in the history of political thought, I am interested in how historical texts can speak to contemporary concerns about two sets of issues in the intersection between epistemology and politics. The first set of issues, whose common theme I call “truth in politics,” concerns the possibilities for citizens to share a basic set of knowledge as “true” so that they can have a shared platform to debate and determine the public affairs of their community. The second set of issues, which I label as “truth about politics,” considers the reasonable grounds that allow political philosophers and social scientists to justify the trustworthiness of what they announce to be true about politics.

I explored the first set of issues in “PS463 Deception and Politics,” an advanced undergraduate seminar I designed and taught in Fall 2021. I started the seminar with a discussion on the problem of “post-truth,” i.e., the growing distrust among citizens in contemporary democracies about the possibility of agreeing on a basic set of facts and convictions by which they can make sense of the reality of their political community. To help students discover the intellectual resources by which they can identify the origins and potential solutions to “post-truth,” I introduced them to theoretical discussions on what constitutes truth in politics and what endangers it in three historical periods of Western political thought. I used the writings of Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau to represent the first period, when the ancient focus on transcendental truth gave way to the early modern concerns on beliefs and knowledge that can bring about stability and prosperity of a political community. I then turned to the second period, which I set between the Enlightenment era to the early 20^th century and represented by the writings of Hume, Kant, Adam Smith, Marx, and Karl Mannheim. The early part of this period witnessed the birth of modern epistemology, which sees the experience of a coherent reality not as something directly given to individuals but as individuals’ mental products of processing sensory data through certain cognitive frameworks. Because many of these cognitive frameworks were shown to be developed in individuals’ interactions with their social environment, social thinkers in the later part of period recognized that individuals situated in different positions of the society would form diverse modes of experiencing and knowing the reality, which might give rise to conflicting world-views and incompatible ideologies. Therefore, how to enable communications between individuals from different social strata and how to prevent the ideologies of privileged social groups from dominating public opinions became the two questions that subsequent political theorists must seek to answer. In my survey of the last historical period, I led students to examine four solutions offered by Arendt, J.S. Mill, Habermas, and Charles Mills for building a set of sharable, consensual, and non-oppressive public knowledge in a pluralistic society characterized not only by diverse identities but also economic, racial, and gender inequalities. I concluded the seminar with three discussion sessions, in which students applied what they learned from historical texts to evaluate the possibilities of saving public knowledge from various contemporary threats, including intentional lying, institutionalized propaganda, and collective ideological illusions.

While I examined “truth in politics” through teaching, my dissertation seeks to address the second set of issues concerning the trustworthiness of the knowledge produced by intellectual elites about politics. Specifically, it examines how “impartiality,” one of the common grounds by which modern intellectuals justify the trustworthiness of their studies of politics, was originally understood and practiced by David Hume and Adam Smith, two 18^th-century thinkers who were retrospectively recognized as first-generation social scientists. The dissertation makes three arguments: First, I argue that when Hume and Smith claimed “impartiality” as a merit of their political and social analyses, they did not understand it as objectivity in terms of “the view from nowhere.” Instead, they saw impartiality as a product of adopting a new scientific method of empirical observations and social interpretations. Second, I argue that although many 18th-century authors were ignorant of their own biases in the application of the scientific method, it is possible to reconstruct from Hume’s and Smith’s accounts of scientific inquiry and moral psychology a debiasing mechanism that allows scientific social inquirers to become self-conscious of their biases and motivates among them an everlasting effort to become less partial. Third, I suggest that while Hume and Smith did not envisage democratic politics, the debiasing mechanism reconstructed from their theories will work most effectively in a democratic society. Through this critical reconstruction of Hume’s and Smith’s theories, I hope to demonstrate how the 18^th-century ideal of “impartiality” can motivate reflections and criticisms on biases in the contemporary production of knowledge about politics instead of covering up the existing prejudices among knowledge producers.