Prejudice is a blight on humanity. How to reduce prejudice, thus, is among the most important social scientific questions. In the latest assessment of research in the area, a follow-up to the 2009 Annual Review article, Betsy Paluck et al., however, paint a dim picture. In particular, they note three dismaying things:
Publication Bias
Table 1 (see below) makes for grim reading. While one could argue that the pattern is explained by the fact that lab research tends to have smaller samples and has especially powerful treatments, the numbers suggest—see the average s.e. of the first two rows (it may have been useful to produce a $sqrt(1/n)$ adjusted s.e.)—that publication bias very likely plays a large role. It is also shocking to know that just a fifth of the studies have treatment groups with 78 or more people.
Light Touch Interventions
The article is remarkably measured when talking about the rise of ‘light touch’ interventions—short exposure treatments. I would have described them as ‘magical thinking’ for they seem to be founded in the belief that we can make profound changes in people’s thinking on the cheap. This isn’t to say light-touch interventions can’t be worked into a regime that affects profound change—repeated light touches may work. However, as far as I could tell, no study tried multiple touches to see how the effect cumulates.
Near Contemporaneous Measurement of Dependent Variables
Very few papers judged the efficacy of the intervention a day or more after the intervention. Given the primary estimate of interest is longer-term effects, it is hard to judge the efficacy of the treatments in moving the needle on the actual quantity of interest.
Beyond what the paper notes, here are a couple more things to consider:
- Perspective getting works better than perspective-taking. It would be good to explore this further in inter-group settings.
- One way to categorize ‘basic research interventions’ is by decomposing the treatment into its primary aspects and then slowly building back up bundles based on data:
- channel: f2f, audio (radio, etc.), visual (photos, etc.), audio-visual (tv, web, etc.), VR, etc.
- respondent action: talk, listen, see, imagine, reflect, play with a computer program, work together with someone, play together with someone, receive a public scolding, etc.
- source: peers, strangers, family, people who look like you, attractive people, researchers, authorities, etc.
- message type: parable, allegory, story, graph, table, drama, etc.
- message content: facts, personal stories, examples, Jonathan Haidt style studies that show some of the roots of our morality are based on poor logic, etc.