Plain-tailed wrens coordinate with each other to sing duets by inhibiting motor circuits in the brain.
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Edited by Linda Skitka, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, and accepted by the Editorial Board June 18, 2014 (received for review April 17, 2014)
Significance
The premise of most interventions that aim to promote peacemaking is that information that is inconsistent with held beliefs causes tension, which may motivate alternative information seeking. However, individuals—especially during conflict—use different defenses to preserve their societal beliefs. Therefore, we developed a new paradoxical thinking intervention that provides consistent—though extreme—information, with the intention of raising a sense of absurdity but not defenses. We examined our hypotheses in a longitudinal field experiment and found that participants who were exposed to the intervention expressed more conciliatory attitudes regarding the conflict, even 1 y after the intervention, which also manifested in their voting (self-report measure) to more dovish parties in the Israeli 2013 elections.
Abstract
In societies involved in an intractable conflict, there are strong socio-psychological barriers that contribute to the continuation and intractability of the conflict. Based on a unique field study conducted in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, we offer a new avenue to overcome these barriers by exposing participants to a long-term paradoxical intervention campaign expressing extreme ideas that are congruent with the shared ethos of conflict. Results show that the intervention, although counterintuitive, led participants to express more conciliatory attitudes regarding the conflict, particularly among participants with center and right political orientation. Most importantly, the intervention even influenced participants' actual voting patterns in the 2013 Israeli general elections: Participants who were exposed to the paradoxical intervention, which took place in proximity to the general elections, reported that they tended to vote more for dovish parties, which advocate a peaceful resolution to the conflict. These effects were long lasting, as the participants in the intervention condition expressed more conciliatory attitudes when they were reassessed 1 y after the intervention. Based on these results, we propose a new layer to the general theory of persuasion based on the concept of paradoxical thinking.
Footnotes
↵1B.H. and R.P. contributed equally to this work and are listed in alphabetical order.
- ↵2To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: eranh75{at}hotmail.com.
Author contributions: R.P. and E.H. designed research; R.P. and E.H. performed research; B.H. analyzed data; B.H., R.P., D.B.-T., A.B., and E.H. wrote the paper; and R.P., A.B., and E.H. designed intervention.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. L.S. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1407055111/-/DCSupplemental.
Paradoxical thinking
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