Intergroup Contact, Empathy Education, and Refugee-Host Integration in Lebanon

Can intergroup contact improve relations between refugees and host communities? If so, are there added returns to combining contact and empathy education? To answer these questions, we conducted a field experiment that brings together 900 Syrian refugees and Lebanese nationals in three localities in Lebanon, where refugees make up a quarter of the national population. Working with a Lebanese NGO, we randomly assigned Lebanese and Syrian youth participants to nationally heterogeneous (Lebanese and Syrian) or homogeneous (Lebanese or Syrian) groups for a 12-week psychosocial support program. We further randomized whether participants in the program received additional empathy education or a placebo curriculum focused on physical health and nutrition.

We find that contact does not meaningfully change attitudes toward the outgroup, and has little effect on participation in future contact, such as attending events celebrating the outgroup's culture 1-2 months after treatment. By contrast, we find that empathy education improves attitudes toward the outgroup and has positive behavioral effects. We find no evidence of positive interaction effects but rather that combining contact and empathy training is no more effective than the empathy treatment alone. Our study points to empathy education as a cheaper, more scalable, and potentially more effective strategy for building social cohesion in conflict settings than intergroup contact.

WZB Talk by  Alexandra Scacco (with Salma Mousa and Lennard Naumann)

The event is part of the WZB Talks series.