In 2016, after more than 60 years of war, Colombia seemed poised for peace. The Colombian government negotiated a treaty with the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), the leftist guerilla group who had been at war with the government since 1964. Now it was up to Colombian citizens to approve the treaty in a countrywide referendum.
The conflict between the government, FARC, and other paramilitary groups had caused incredible destruction. Nearly 250,000 people died. Over 20,000 people were kidnapped for ransom, and tens of thousands were recruited as child soldiers. Approximately 8.2 million people were forced to leave their homes. The number of people who suffered sexual violence and torture is still being tallied. Of today’s population of over 50 million people, nearly 1 in 5 (9.2 million) have registered with the government as conflict victims. One of us (Andrés) lived through the conflict and had family members kidnapped by FARC.
With the countrywide referendum, the question was: Were Colombian voters ready to put this violence in the past and accept the peace treaty? Or were the wounds still too fresh and deep to accept it?
Were Colombian voters ready to put this violence in the past and accept the peace treaty? Or were the wounds still too fresh and deep to accept it?
After a fiercely argued campaign by those for the treaty and those against it, Colombian voters chose not to accept the peace deal and the referendum failed. The margin was less than .05 percent; 50.2 percent rejected the peace deal, 49.8 percent were in favor of accepting it. Out of 13 million votes, only about 50,000 separated the two sides.
Fortunately, the referendum wasn’t the end of the peace process. The Colombian government and the FARC leadership revised the peace deal and then sent it to congress for ratification instead of conducting a second referendum. In November of 2016, both houses of congress ratified the revised agreement marking a formal end to the conflict.
FARC demobilized in 2017: 6,804 fighters turned in 8,994 weapons, about 2,250 support militia members reported, and more than 4,000 were released from prison. The government set about reintegrating ex-combatants into society.
Peace, after more than six decades, had an official chance. Whether peace lasted or the country returned to violence depended largely on how the people of Colombia, who were split on the referendum, responded to the reintegration of ex-combatants into society. Politicians may have made the peace deal, but it was up to the public to sustain it.
As behavioral scientists focused on peace building, we felt we could help facilitate the process. Our research team, led by the late Emile Bruneau and including Nour Kteily, designed an intervention (published in Nature Human Behaviour) aimed at helping correct misperceptions of and prejudice toward ex-combatants, particularly the belief that ex-combatants were unwilling or unable to change. In conflict, people develop strong biases about the outgroup, which can hinder reconciliation. But even strongly held intergroup biases—the most commonly ignored post conflict risk—can change.
Politicians may have made the peace deal, but it was up to the public to sustain it.
If our intervention were to help facilitate this change, we felt that our intervention had to achieve two aims. First, we had to tell the stories of people impacted most by the peace process—victims of the conflict, ex-combatants, and those living in the 27 transition zones around the country where ex-combatants were being reintegrated into society after living for years in the forest. By telling their stories, we hoped the majority of Colombians, who lived farther away from where the peace process was most visible and where the most change was happening, would begin to replace stereotypes and assumptions about what was happening with more accurate information. In particular, we hoped telling the stories of ex-combatants would humanize them and correct misperceptions around their willingness to give up violence and return to society.
Second, we knew we needed to reach a large portion of the population. Many debiasing and conflict resolution efforts rely on direct person-to-person interactions. However, these interactions are logistically difficult and hard to scale. We needed a medium that allowed us to achieve scale.
To tell the stories of people most involved in the peace process and to reach people at scale, we developed a media intervention featuring videos of victims, ex-combatants, those living in the transition zones, and others telling their own stories about peace and why it was important to them.
Developing the intervention was a multistep process. First, we interviewed and surveyed non-FARC Colombians about perceptions of ex-combatants. The goal was to understand the most significant cognitive and emotional barriers to accepting them back into society. We found that many non-FARC Colombians believed ex-combatants were unwilling and unable to let go of their violent ways and peacefully reintegrate into Colombian society. This perception was associated with levels of support for various reintegration programs and the levels of dehumanization of ex-combatants.
We hoped telling the stories of ex-combatants would humanize them and correct misperceptions around their willingness to give up violence and return to society.
Next, we traveled to one of the 27 transition areas set up by the Colombian government to serve as a reintegration zone to interview ex-combatants, victims of the conflict, and others involved in the peace process. We collaborated with Colombian film company Pirata Films to record the interviews. We didn’t explicitly ask interviewees to talk about ex-combatants willingness to change, but we suspected they would based on stories we heard about reintegration. For instance, in the first few months of the transition, a local soccer team had formed, one that integrated ex-combatants and local Colombians, and the two groups had come together to fix a road and help raise money for poorer villagers.
The final step of the process was integrating the interviews into a set of five-minute videos that highlighted different messages. In order to experimentally compare several different interventions, we created 10 different evidence-based videos challenging average citizens’ beliefs about FARC. Some specifically targeted the belief about FARC unwillingness and inability to change; others targeted different beliefs about FARC, such as FARC members’ goodwill. Furthermore, we examined what messengers were most effective. For example, in some videos we only showed interviews with FARC members, in others we showed only interviews with non-FARC individuals, and in some we showed both, in a different order.
We tested the 10 video interventions with a representative sample of Colombians using an intervention tournament. In an intervention tournament, a number of interventions are all compared against a single control and use the same outcome measures in order to identify which is the most effective.
We found that the video that targeted the belief that FARC ex-combatants are unwilling and unable to change, and first showed ex-combatants and then non-FARC Colombians, was the most effective. It humanized FARC ex-combatants and increased support for peace and reintegration, effects that persisted at least 10 to 12 weeks post exposure. The video (below) started with a positive narrative based on the examples and images on how ex-combatants were already building peace in the area and was followed by corroboration provided by the local populations previously victimized by FARC and two cultural authorities—an indigenous police officer and a university instructor helping FARC members prepare to take validation exams to complete their primary and secondary education.
Finally, we deployed two large-scale preregistered replication studies. In two independent, representative samples of Colombians, we found that the most effective video affected both attitudes and behavior. It reduced dehumanization of FARC ex-combatants, increased support for peace and reintegration policies, and participants donated more to an organization that was established by FARC ex-combatants to promote peace and reintegration. Our analysis showed that the intervention worked by changing conflict-associated cognitions—reducing the belief that ex-combatants are unwilling and unable to change—beyond affective pathways, like increased empathy or reduced prejudice. In other words, participants updated their knowledge about what ex-combatants were actually like rather than just caring for them more.
As we try to shift from conflict to peace in a number of places around the world, a key lesson we take from our research is that media-based interventions can provide a powerful and scalable alternative to face-to-face interventions. More people have the opportunity to be exposed to the outgroup in a positive way, which can help correct misperceptions and humanize the “enemy.”
In a separate project building off of this work, we created a virtual reality intervention designed to help expose people to life in the reintegration zones for the victims of the conflict, ex-combatants, and people helping build peace in the region. We developed the tool in partnership with the United Nations in order to help transport people to the reality on the ground.
One group we targeted with the intervention were policymakers at the UN, who sit thousands of miles away from the conflict yet must make policy decisions about it. Another group we targeted was everyday Colombians who hadn’t been involved in the conflict and who often live far away from it, yet whose lives are impacted by the peace process and the politics surrounding it.
This VR work is still in process, but early experimental results suggest an increase in empathy and understanding unique to VR as a delivery mechanism. For a deeper look at why and how we developed it, how we’re deploying it, and its impact, watch the short documentary below.
One important nuance of this work is understanding when to deploy it. Colombia was on a trajectory to peace, and the intervention aimed to bolster that momentum. In places where there is not yet a viable peace process, we wouldn’t expect the intervention to have the same effect, as people will not have motivation and willingness to be exposed to information that challenges their views regarding their “enemy” or the conflict. We’d expect more foundational efforts to establish peace to be required first. In places where there is a path to peace, extending this work could be a viable option to help ensure communities take that path rather than return to violence.
Through our current work in Colombia and around the world, we seek to extend the late Emile Bruneau’s research philosophy of advancing the use of behavioral science to facilitate peace and security.
“If [Colombia] can teach the world something about how this can be done effectively, it’s not just [Colombia] who might benefit. It’s the rest of the world who might benefit,” Emile said, reflecting on the project before he passed away. “What we learn here can echo forward … what an incredible opportunity.”
