Encouraging engagement with outgroup perspectives is a popular strategy to improve intergroup relations. But in conflict settings, individuals often actively avoid or resist such engagement. A set of studies conducted by Alexandra Scacco and co-authors in Israel and Nigeria investigates the impact of exposure to various forms of media TV dramas, radio programs, and social media about outgroups on intergroup attitudes, norms and behaviors in in deeply divided societies.
Encouraging engagement with outgroup perspectives is a popular strategy to improve intergroup relations. But in deeply divided societies, individuals often actively avoid outgroup members. In a Facebook field experiment, we embedded Palestinian posts in Jewish Israelis Facebook timelines for a period of 14 days. We find no effect on attitudes toward the outgroup and a modest decrease in subsequent consumption of outgroup content, a pattern we attribute to participants avoidance of constructive engagement. To better understand this avoidance, we conducted a set of survey-embedded behavioral tasks. Results suggest that outgroup avoidance online is widespread, associated with outgroup prejudice, explained by feelings of discomfort, anger, mistrust in outgroups, and pessimism, and challenging to overcome. Our findings indicate that avoidance is a barrier to constructive intergroup engagement in naturalistic settings, rendering many interventions that may be effective in controlled environments difficult to implement or scale in practice.
@unpublished{scacco_2025,author={Weiss, Chagai M. and Siegel, Alexandra and Scacco, Alexandra},title={Outgroup Avoidance},journal={forthcoming, The Journal of Politics},year={2025},status={WP},proj={media},keywords={horizontal contestation},proj.1={covid}}