What narrative strategies durably reduce prejudice? Omitting analogic perspective-taking and vicarious perspective-giving does not diminish effects; conversations employing only perspective-getting narratives work

Kalla, Joshua, and David Broockman. 2020. “Which Narrative Strategies Durably Reduce Prejudice? Evidence from Field and Survey Experiments Supporting the Efficacy of Perspective-getting.” OSF Preprints. December 28. doi:10.31219/osf.io/z2awt

Abstract: Exclusionary attitudes contribute to social and political challenges worldwide. Previous field experiments have found that interpersonal conversations which employ multiple theoretically-informed narrative strategies can durably reduce exclusionary attitudes. However, studies of these interventions have always assigned three narrative strategies together in a compound treatment: narratives which promote analogic perspective-taking, vicarious perspective-giving, and perspective-getting. This leaves open important theoretical and empirical questions about to what extent each is effective. We present results from two field experiments, a difference-in-differences analysis, and a survey experiment that individually manipulate their presence. Across the field experiments, we find that omitting analogic perspective-taking and vicarious perspective-giving does not diminish effects; conversations employing only perspective-getting narratives durably reduce exclusionary attitudes. We also present results from within-subject analyses and survey experiments that show that perspective-getting consistently reduces exclusionary attitudes and activates multiple mechanisms, whereas the other approaches have less reliable effects. These results support a focus on facilitating perspective-getting in interpersonal conversations that aim to durably reduce exclusionary attitudes.