How can we remedy prejudiced, polarized, and violent intergroup relations?
From minority prejudice to polarized democracies to active war, intergroup tension is a defining feature of the current global moment, not a fading one.
A theoretical gap in how context shapes psychology means interventions are regularly deployed outside the settings where they were validated, without evidence they'll hold up.
Rather than one more single-context study, INTERVENE aims to give researchers and practitioners worldwide a data-driven way to choose the right intervention for their context.
Most social psychology — including most intervention research — comes from WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). Interventions validated in one setting are routinely assumed to transfer elsewhere. INTERVENE tests that assumption directly, at scale, with the purpose of promoting a less prejudiced and polarized and more peaceful world.
INTERVENE is an ERC-funded, large-scale, multi-cultural global study testing how prejudice, polarization, and violent conflict contexts shape individual-level intergroup socio-psychological variables, and building the evidence base for interventions that hold up across contexts.
The core idea. Psychologists have spent decades designing and testing interventions against intergroup prejudice, polarization, and violence — but almost always in a single context at a time. A comprehensive model of how context shapes the psychology these interventions are trying to change has never been tested at scale, which limits how far any single intervention can be trusted to travel.
The method. A coordinated global study will collect matched data from opposing groups across a deliberately wide range of contexts, use it to identify which psychological variables interventions should actually target, then test interventions first online and then in the field.
"[Psychological intergroup interventions are] based on psychological theory that deliberately attempt to alter attitudes, emotions, perceived norms, or behavior that constitute barriers to — or that can facilitate the promotion of — tolerant, peaceful, and equal relations between members of different social groups."
Halperin, Hameiri & Littman, 2023Each phase builds on data and findings from the one before it — from global modelling, to identifying intervention targets, to testing online, to real-world field deployment.
Survey design and an open call for collaborators, followed by large-scale, multi-cultural data collection across contexts and initial analysis.
After a data-driven step to identify which psychological variables interventions should target, four intervention tournaments test interventions head-to-head, running in parallel across diverse contexts, with cross-context analysis of the results.
Field study design, followed by a large-scale, longitudinal field study deploying and evaluating the winning interventions directly in live conflict settings.
INTERVENE is building a global network of collaborators to extend the study to new contexts around the world.
Identify a clear intergroup tension in your country — based on prejudice, polarization, or violent/de-escalating conflict — collect local data, and become our collaborator. Collaborators can translate the survey, fund their own data collection, and have access to data collected elsewhere. Additional funding is set aside to support participant sampling in low- and middle-income countries.