Elizabeth Levy Paluck

Changing climates of conflict: A social network experiment in 56 schools

Significance Despite a surge in policy and research attention to conflict and bullying among adolescents, there is little evidence to suggest that current interventions reduce school conflict. Using a large-scale field experiment, we show that it is possible to reduce conflict with a student-driven intervention. By encouraging a small set of students to take a public stance against typical forms of conflict at their school, our intervention reduced overall levels of conflict by an estimated 30%. Network analyses reveal that certain kinds of students (called “social referents”) have an outsized influence over social norms and behavior at the school. The study demonstrates the power of peer influence for changing climates of conflict, and suggests which students to involve in those efforts. Theories of human behavior suggest that individuals attend to the behavior of certain people in their community to understand what is socially normative and adjust their own behavior in response. An experiment tested these theories by randomizing an anticonflict intervention across 56 schools with 24,191 students. After comprehensively measuring every school’s social network, randomly selected seed groups of 20–32 students from randomly selected schools were assigned to an intervention that encouraged their public stance against conflict at school. Compared with control schools, disciplinary reports of student conflict at treatment schools were reduced by 30% over 1 year. The effect was stronger when the seed group contained more “social referent” students who, as network measures reveal, attract more student attention. Network analyses of peer-to-peer influence show that social referents spread perceptions of conflict as less socially normative.

The Promising Integration of Qualitative Methods and Field Experiments

Randomized field experiments should take a more central place in qualitative research. Although field experimentation is often considered a quantitative enterprise, this paper illustrates the compatibility of field experimentation with various types of qualitative measurement tools and research questions. Integrating qualitative and quantitative data within field experiments allows investigators to move past simple average treatment effects and explore mechanisms of the identified causal effect. A more novel proposal is to use field experimentation as the organizing methodological framework for archival, ethnographic, or interpretive work, and to use ethnographic methods as the primary source of measurement in “experimental ethnography.” Sustained research and theoretical specificity can address some of the seemingly incompatible features of qualitative and field experimental methods. For example, small sample sizes are acceptable as part of a research program, and some theories of historical patterns or ...Randomized field experiments should take a more central place in qualitative research. Although field experimentation is often considered a quantitative enterprise, this paper illustrates the compatibility of field experimentation with various types of qualitative measurement tools and research questions. Integrating qualitative and quantitative data within field experiments allows investigators to move past simple average treatment effects and explore mechanisms of the identified causal effect. A more novel proposal is to use field experimentation as the organizing methodological framework for archival, ethnographic, or interpretive work, and to use ethnographic methods as the primary source of measurement in “experimental ethnography.” Sustained research and theoretical specificity can address some of the seemingly incompatible features of qualitative and field experimental methods. For example, small sample sizes are acceptable as part of a research program, and some theories of historical patterns or rare events could be disaggregated into smaller cause-and-effect linkages to test with field experiments in theoretically relevant contexts.

How to overcome prejudice

A brief conversation can have a lasting effect on prejudice [Also see Report by Broockman and Kalla] What do social scientists know about reducing prejudice in the world? In short, very little. Of the hundreds of studies on prejudice reduction conducted in recent decades, only ~11% test the causal effect of interventions conducted in the real world (1). Far fewer address prejudice among adults or measure the long-term effects of those interventions (see the figure). The results reported by Broockman and Kalla on page 220 of this issue are therefore particularly important (2). The authors show that a 10-min conversation with voters in South Florida reduced prejudice against transgender people and increased support for transgender rights for at least 3 months.

The Effect of a Supreme Court Decision Regarding Gay Marriage on Social Norms and Personal Attitudes

We propose that institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court can lead individuals to update their perceptions of social norms, in contrast to the mixed evidence on whether institutions shape individuals’ personal opinions. We studied reactions to the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. In a controlled experimental setting, we found that a favorable ruling, when presented as likely, shifted perceived norms and personal attitudes toward increased support for gay marriage and gay people. Next, a five-wave longitudinal time-series study using a sample of 1,063 people found an increase in perceived social norms supporting gay marriage after the ruling but no change in personal attitudes. This pattern was replicated in a separate between-subjects data set. These findings provide the first experimental evidence that an institutional decision can change perceptions of social norms, which have been shown to guide behavior, even when individual opinions are unchanged.

Stopping the Drama: Gendered Influence in a Network Field Experiment

Drawing on theories of social norms, we study the relative influence of female and male students using a year-long, network-based field experiment of an anti-harassment intervention program in a high school. A randomly selected subset of highly connected students participated in the intervention. We test whether these highly connected females and males influenced other students equally when students and teachers considered the problem of “drama”—peer conflict and harassment—to be associated with girls more than with boys. Exposure to male, but not female, intervention students caused decreased perceptions of the acceptability of harassment and decreased participation in negative behavior. Status beliefs became activated through the intervention program: gender differences in influence stem from higher levels of respect afforded to highly connected males in the program. The results support an account of social influence as it occurs across time in conjunction with other group processes.

Does Product Placement Change Television Viewers' Social Behavior?

To what extent are television viewers affected by the behaviors and decisions they see modeled by characters in television soap operas? Collaborating with scriptwriters for three prime-time nationally-broadcast Spanish-language telenovelas, we embedded scenes about topics such as drunk driving or saving money at randomly assigned periods during the broadcast season. Outcomes were measured unobtrusively by aggregate city- and nation-wide time series, such as the number of Hispanic motorists arrested daily for drunk driving or the number of accounts opened in banks located in Hispanic neighborhoods. Results indicate that while two of the treatment effects are statistically significant, none are substantively large or long-lasting. Actions that could be taken during the immediate viewing session, like online searching, and those that were relatively more integrated into the telenovela storyline, specifically reducing cholesterol, were briefly affected, but not behaviors requiring sustained efforts, like opening a bank account or registering to vote.

Ignoring alarming news brings indifference: Learning about the world and the self ☆

The broadcast of media reports about moral crises such as famine can subtly depress rather than activate moral concern. Whereas much research has examined the effects of media reports that people attend to, social psychological analysis suggests that what goes unattended can also have an impact. We test the idea that when vivid news accounts of human suffering are broadcast in the background but ignored, people infer from their choice to ignore these accounts that they care less about the issue, compared to those who pay attention and even to those who were not exposed. Consistent with research on self-perception and attribution, three experiments demonstrate that participants who were nudged to distract themselves in front of a television news program about famine in Niger (Study 1), or to skip an online promotional video for the Niger famine program (Study 2), or who chose to ignore the famine in Niger television program in more naturalistic settings (Study 3) all assigned lower importance to poverty and to hunger reduction compared to participants who watched with no distraction or opportunity to skip the program, or to those who did not watch at all.

The Audio Check: A Method for Improving Data Quality and Detecting Data Fabrication

Data quality and trust in the data collection process are critical concerns in survey research, particularly when surveyors are needed for reaching “diverse and inconvenient subject pools.” In response to irregularities in a smartphone-based pilot survey data collection in Nigeria, we developed an audio check method that unobtrusively recorded surveyors reading aloud questions to participants. We present evidence that this method detected wholesale data fabrication in 14% of our surveys, prevented further fabrication, and improved data quality through provision of regular feedback to surveyors. Using simulation, we demonstrate that undetected fabrication would have introduced significant bias in our analyses. The audio check performs well compared to more traditional methods of detecting fabrication, and a comparative cost–benefit analysis reveals a savings of more than US

Confronting Hate Collectively

1,500 per surveyor by relying on the audio check. The audio check is a viable tool for psychologists who work with survey teams.

The salience of social referents: a field experiment on collective norms and harassment behavior in a school social network.

© American Political Science Association, 2017 doi:10.1017/S1049096517001123 ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................