In the last 10 years, the number of people who have been forcibly displaced due to war, conflict, and human rights violations has more than doubled. And as of May 2023, the number of refugees worldwide is the highest ever recorded. Conflict-related civilian deaths are on the rise, and 2021 saw the highest number of homicides in the previous 20 years.
Behavioral scientists are among the many working to reverse these trends. Earlier this month, the United Nations Behavioural Science Group convened a panel at their sixth annual Behavioural Science Week to discuss the role of behavioral science in facilitating peace and security. They invited two experts to share their perspectives: Mina Cikara, a professor of psychology at Harvard University who studies intergroup conflict, aggression, and prosocial behavior, and Andrés Casas, the chief scientist at Neuropaz, a peace science initiative based in Colombia.
Peace scientists face a fundamental challenge: “Oftentimes, the things that bring out the worst in humanity come in service of being the best group members,” Cikara explains. “Our interpersonal morality gets cast aside when we are making choices on behalf of our groups.”
Oftentimes, the things that bring out the worst in humanity come in service of being the best group members.
The research itself is also fraught. The available data tends to come at the national level, while the majority of conflicts happen locally. Facilitating friendship across conflict divides can create the illusion of progress but heighten the potential for long-term hostility. And interventions to change individual attitudes run up against powerful propaganda that masks a collective preference for peace.
Cikara and Casas explored these challenges, among others, during the recent event. We’ve curated five of the key takeaways from their conversation below. The full session is available to watch here.
The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The cognitive basis of collective violence
Many cognitive biases—among them our adherence to social norms, stronger recall for negative relative to positive information, and the availability heuristic—make us more susceptible to the propaganda that underlies violence and conflict.
Mina Cikara: “There are fundamental quirks of human cognition that then feed into how quickly propaganda can take root in people’s psychologies and influence their behaviors. People are incredibly attuned to normative information—people basically behave the way they think that they’re allowed to behave on the basis of the preferences of people around them. If you think that there is broad support for violence against a particular entity, that’s a difficult tide to swim against, even if privately that is not exactly your own attitude or preference.
“Conflict entrepreneurs [those who profit by provoking people to violence] and elites understand that there has to be a particular perception in place before we can get people on board with engaging in costly violence. Most people don’t want to be violent most of the time. These leaders have to get people to believe that all alternative means of negotiation are no longer an option.
“People tend to have a very stereotyped distortion of numbers. We tend to overestimate small proportions of things and underestimate large proportions of things. Why does this matter?
“It matters because even very small numbers of, say, immigrants from a particular country will be overestimated as a proportion of the community. To the extent that political elites want to use that mobility and the presence of this new entity as a means of fomenting fear, perceptions of threat—economic, material, symbolic, even pathogenic threat, like they’re bringing with them particular kinds of diseases—all of that puts people in a defensive crouch. The power of that defensive crouch is that almost anything becomes morally acceptable if it’s done in self defense.”
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A mismatch between the data we have and the data we need:
Nation-level data doesn’t help us understand community-level conflict. Without understanding community-level conflict, it becomes much harder to design policies to prevent it.
Cikara: “So much of the data that we have is at the level of the nation, when our effects are all happening at very local levels. You see these reports that say, “In Germany, 14 percent of the population is immigrants.” It doesn’t matter at the national level, because they’re not distributed evenly across the geography. That means that some communities are going to be at greater risk for conflict than others. But that sort of local variation and sensitivity to it, at least heretofore, has really been missing from the conversation on the research side. Even when you’re in the same place, in the same country within the same state, the same canton, there can still be a ton of variation from neighborhood to neighborhood.
Conflict entrepreneurs understand that there has to be a particular perception in place before we can get people on board with engaging in costly violence.
“The other thing that we know matters a lot is not just the diversity of these neighborhoods but the segregation of them. It turns out that these kinds of prejudices and violence are less likely to break out in those places where it’s both diverse and people are interdigitated with how they live. So it’s not just the numbers, it’s also the spatial organization.
“For example, in Singapore, because so much of the real estate is state-owned, they make it so that people who are coming from different countries can’t cluster together because they assign them to live separate from one another in order to prevent these sorts of enclaves. All these structural and meta-level organizational features have really, really important inputs for intergroup dynamics and psychology.”
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After 60 years of guerilla violence, is peace possible?
Behavioral science combined with narrative storytelling has been a powerful tool in the efforts of Casas and his team to support the peaceful reintegration of former FARC combatants in Colombia.
Andrés Casas: “In Colombia, we lived throughout 60 years of war. We were exposed to these ideas about who the good guys or the bad guys were. Basically, people didn’t want the bad guys to be pardoned and forgotten for everything they did throughout the 60 years. That was the story.
“But going out to the field meeting the people who signed the peace agreements in the demobilization camps, talking to the people in the big cities, the ones who were opposing reincorporation and reintegration of these combatants—we learned that it was not just trust, there was something else going on. We found that people basically didn’t have their theory of mind working, they thought that the FARC members were not human. Empathy was not playing a part here because you don’t project your humanity to people that are not human.
“We spent six months with a cinematographer in these communities with the previous enemies, and we used the power of narrative to present people in their humanity. We tried to use the social proof mechanism to present their previous enemies as trustworthy, new possible cooperators, people that they were playing soccer with and building roads.
“We saw that meta-perceptions can open a road to change the way people see other people. First, to present them as humans—we understood that people were avoiding the pain of others, because we know in this situation there’s competitive victimhood going on and other mechanisms that wouldn’t allow your mind to project your humanity to others—but this can be reversed if we see what people are already doing for peace.”
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Intervention weak points: blindspots and backfire
Success depends on more than designing and deploying interventions. Determining whether those initiatives are working, acknowledging designers’ possible blind spots, and proactively avoiding possible backfire are just as essential.
Casas: “The World Bank started this movement with a special report in 2015 under the direction of the great economist Karla Hoff. They started using experiments to understand what biases their own personnel and their own collaborators had in development projects, especially in the global south. I think that sobering type of approach is what we need right now. The UN is trying to do it, but we need to further it.”
If we don’t take what we know about humanity and our ability to adapt and change, if we don’t ignite the prosocial behaviors that we know we’re capable of, then we are lost.
Cikara: “Often, people aren’t necessarily collecting the data to make sure that what they’ve done hasn’t backfired. After some of these summer programs with the kids, [where they brought together kids from different religious backgrounds in Ireland], the potential for betrayal is so much worse. Because what you’ve done is you’ve established a relationship between people across two sides of the conflict divide. Now they think, ‘Well, the next time the conflict breaks out, I expect my friend from summer camp to call and make sure that my family and I are okay.’ But then they don’t.
“They’re back with their family, and they’re back with their community, and they may feel pressure not to call. That engenders even potentially more hostility than would have been there at baseline. I think that there are these incredibly well intentioned interventions, but I don’t know that people have necessarily always thought through some of the unintended consequences of them.”
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Imagining peace science with an unlimited budget
Looking ahead, both speakers imagine an interdisciplinary effort not only to understand and address conflict as it happens but also to predict where tensions are likely to boil over and intervene before they do.
Cikara: “What we really need to do is get a team of people who all have different backgrounds and expertise. We want the historians, we want the sociologists, we want the cultural anthropologists, and of course, core to this team is the local community members with the expertise of this particular conflict.
“Different places are at different points in their dynamic evolution of either pre-conflict, in conflict, post-conflict, or long-term reconciliation. All of these different stages require different interventions. There are different processes that are playing out, whether people were firsthand victims of the violence versus being subsequent generations, children or grandchildren. All of these things matter quite a lot, as well as the narrative that gets carried forward that then reorganizes people’s beliefs about history, and then further legitimizes or delegitimizes the conflict.
“So the historians, the anthropologists, the local community members. But also the political scientists, who understand elite-to-constituent dynamics much better than most. The psychologists who understand constituent-to-elite dynamics. And then, of course, the computational social scientists who understand network dynamics, as well as the physicists who understand fission-fusion models.
“With my big pile of money, what I would do is I would try to start a seed project to bring people with these expertise together. I would pick a particular region and then I would try to see what we could do there.”
Casas: “First, I will put all my money on Nina’s proposal. More specifically, I would bring the power of arts, and especially the power of storytelling. . . If we don’t take what we know about humanity and our ability to adapt and change, if we don’t ignite the prosocial behaviors that we know we’re capable of, then we are lost. In that sense, hope is moving us.”
